Assessing the performance of a novel Finnish register-based measure of precarious employment: affected employee groups and subjective and objective employment outcomes

TL;DR

This study introduces a new register-based measure of precarious employment in Finland and evaluates its performance using sociodemographic and employment data.

Contribution

A novel register-based measure of precarious employment is developed and validated using Finnish data.

Findings

Approximately 5% of the population had precarious employment, more common among women, younger individuals, and manual workers.

Precarious employment was associated with increased risk of unemployment but not consistently with subjective job insecurity.

The measure identifies high-precarity occupations like waiters and drivers and performs well for future research.

Abstract

As an important driver of inequality in the labor market, it is crucial to develop measures to assess precarious employment. Most previous measures have been survey-based.

We used register data on wage-earners aged 20–64 residing in Finland in 2013 (N = 1 873 210) to develop a novel measure of precarious employment, including items on job discontinuity, multijob holding, agency employment, underemployment, and employment income. We assessed the performance of the measure by examining the distribution of precarious employment by sociodemographic factors and occupation as well as exploring its associations with subjective (job insecurity with survey information from the same year 2013 linked to the register data at an occupational-group-level) and objective (unemployment over a 5-year follow-up) employment outcomes using linear regression.

In the total study population, approximately 5% had precarious employment. It was more prevalent among women, younger age groups, individuals with a foreign background, those with lower education, manual workers, and private sector employees. Large-size occupations with more than 10% of precariously employed individuals included teachers’ aides, waiters, food service counter attendants, car, taxi and van drivers, security guards, kitchen helpers, and cooks. Precarious employment was not consistently associated with subjective job insecurity. It was nevertheless associated with objective occurrence and duration of unemployment.

Precarious employment, as captured by the novel Finnish register-based measure, has similar background factors as recognized in previous literature and identifies occupations expected to be characterized by precarious employment. Those classified as precariously employed based on objective characteristics of their employment relationships do not necessarily perceive their job as insecure, although they have a clearly increased risk of subsequent unemployment. The measure can be considered to perform well for use in further studies applying Finnish register data.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-026-26520-3.

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