La precariedad laboral y los nuevos espacios de exclusión social

Abstract

The main goal of this research, presented here as a thesis dissertation, is to analyze the relationship between job insecurity and both social exclusion and vulnerability. This aim was tackled by means of quantitative and qualitative techniques. Secondary sources of statistical information (Labour Force Survey and Living Conditions Survey) were used together with interviews to experts of the institutional sphere and to individuals currently undergoing processes of job insecurity, vulnerability and social exclusion. This research must be contextualized in a time where more than one fifth of the labour force is unemployed, nearly a fourth has a short-term job, 15% of the occupied labour force has a part-time job and nearly 30% of the people are in situation of social exclusion risk. This seems to indicate that job insecurity is a reality in the context of a labour market deeply segmented and social exclusion is a fact for many social groups. In the last years job insecurity has experimented a process of extension and intensification resulting in a displacement of an increasing number of social groups from the central segment of the labour market to the periphery. Work, although still keeping its main role over the rest of social exclusion dimensions, has lost its social inclusive capacity. On the contrary, it has emerged as a triggering factor for the vulnerability and social exclusion processes after intensifying the rest of exclusion variables such as economy, health, dwelling and citizen participation. Only education and mainly social and familiar network counteract the centrifugal force produced by job insecurity since both are able to avoid the vulnerability and social exclusion processes. This fact has become more powerful from the institutional sphere by means of the latter labour reforms that have been used as a tool to destabilize the balance between employers and employees in favour of the formers and to remove the labour rights protection. Employees’ submission has been intensified by the new policies developed by public institutions, making job insecurity a new bio-policy instrument. The process of expansion and intensification of job insecurity has had social consequences which have crystallized in an identical process for social exclusion and in the increase of the social inequalities as well. Therefore, job insecurity and social exclusion affect to a significant ratio of the general population. The social speeches linked to these social facts shape individual’s lives, redefining the new social and labour spaces of the social exclusion. There are four identified spaces in the labour market that define the situation of workers in terms of job insecurity and social exclusion. These are the unstable center, the semi-center, the semi-periphery and the periphery. Into these new spaces are included social groups chronically affected by social exclusion, although the irruption of emerging social groups is observed: firstly, people older than 50 in long-term unemployment situation or self employed as a consequence of the unemployment (semi-periphery and periphery); secondly, low and high-skilled young people unemployed or working in temporary jobs (semi-periphery and semi-center); and finally, workers between 35 and 45 years old who are self-employed or working in temporary jobs (unstable center). The adaptation strategies are different for each case: strategies from younger are active whereas for the rest are passive –request of non-contributory allowances or consolidation of their labour status–. The changes happened in the last decades have generated a new social cohesion model characterized by larger and deeper vulnerability and social exclusion spaces which have undergone changes in their social valuation; even social inclusion has been devalued after considering as inclusive situations that in the former model would have been considered as typical situations of vulnerability or even social exclusion. In addition, the new social cohesion model is based on social inequality, lack of protection and individualization of the social relationships, involving an important attack to wage-labour society.