No abstract

Research has consistently shown that unemployment is a strong predictor for income poverty. So far, most studies have focused on the duration of unemployment to account for differences in income poverty. However, this practice may mistreat trajectories which conform less to the norm of continuous full-time employment before unemployment. In this article, I first develop a generalized framework which contextualizes unemployment sequences according to duration as well as timing and order. Second, I apply a sequence analysis to longitudinal data from five European welfare states—Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden—using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. Thereby, I construct a typology of unemployment sequences which includes some non-standard types of unemployment sequences. These sequences contain inactivity, part-time employment and self-employment spells and have an increased poverty risk. Thus, the sequence-based framework and the sequence analysis are able to contextualize unemployment sequences better than the conventional measure of unemployment duration.

Previous research has established that low-wage earners have on average lower job satisfaction. However, several studies have found personal characteristics, such as gender, age and educational level, moderate this negative impact. This article demonstrates additional factors at the household level, which have not yet been empirically investigated, and which may exacerbate gender differences. The authors analyse the job satisfaction of low-wage earners depending on the contribution of individual earnings to the household income and on household deprivation using the 2013 special wave of the EU-SILC for 18 European countries. The study finds that single earners in low-wage employment report lower job satisfaction whereas low-wage employment does not seem to make a difference for secondary earners. Furthermore, low-wage earners’ job satisfaction is linked with the ability of their household to make ends meet.