Mapping early job insecurity impacts of the crisis in Europe

The aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive cross-country analysis of early job insecurity (EJI) in Europe, comparing its present levels in different European countries with those that existed at the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008. Job insecurity at the very beginning of a young person’s professional career has numerous repercussions and a strong impact on the economy and society. It is therefore important to provide methodologies for measuring EJI as a first step towards better understanding the phenomenon and consequently proposing more effective policy responses. When it comes to measuring EJI, different approaches have been proposed in the literature. These differences emanate to a certain extent from diverse definitions of EJI. In Karamessini et al. (2015) and in Dingeldey et al. (2015) an attempt was made to provide a definition of EJI and to connect the phenomenon with school-to-work transitions. Job insecurity relates to the overall concern of employees as to the continued existence of their job in the future. This ‘concern’, however, not only has a quantitative or static dimension pertaining to whether someone is or feels secure about keeping their job; it also includes a qualitative dimension that relates to ‘insecurity about the continued existence of valued characteristics of the job’ (Vander Elst et al., 2014). In fact such anxiety has been identified as one of the most important stressors in working life (De Witte, 1999). There is a discussion in the literature concerning the definition of job insecurity on the basis of its characteristics. Accordingly, job insecurity can be approached as a subjective experience and/or as an objective phenomenon. Subjective perceptions of job insecurity can involve components related to the individual’s assessment of the probability of losing their job in the near future, where the affective component refers to the fear, worry or