Unemployment and Precarious Occupational Integration: The Unequal Distribution of Risk. the Case of Switzerland

Labor relations have undergone significant changes over the last decades. Job precariousness and work precariousness weaken assured and stable occupational integrations. These changes challenge rigid, continuous and foreseeable conception of occupational career (the choice of a profession, training, labor market integration, promotion and retirement), and question both material and symbolic recognition that are linked to professional activities. Facing this rise of uncertainties, we first analyze how unemployment periods impact job recovery in terms of 1) level of individual and household income 2) job quality (job and work precariousness) 3) social mobility (using social stratification schemas: CAMSIS and CSP-CH), in order to determine if people know stability, improvement or deterioration of their situation. We then identify how particular groups of people are unequally exposed to these three potential forms of changes, and particularly in terms of nationality, sex, education, age and presence of children in the household. The relation between these variables and the observed effects are analyzed with a logistic regression that includes interactions between the dependent variables.

We use longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) between 1999 and 2012. The SHP is a yearly conducted centralized CATI panel survey which started in 1999 with slightly more than 5,000 households, representative for the Swiss resident population.