Highly Skilled Workers and Employment Risks

Abstract

This paper analyses the construction of risk and its effects on three groups of highly skilled professionals doing project work (video game designers, freelance journalists and performing artists). Our results reveal that high qualifications are not a universal protective factor in the risk society. They suggest, rather, that the political economy of the various markets in which knowledge workers offer their services, as well as the institutions that structure these markets-or do not-is at least as important in determining the fate that awaits them when they are old or sick, and that these other factors help create, among these highly skilled workers, a variety of risk societies.Key words: employment risk, risk society, knowledge workers, non-standard workers, project work In his foresighted book, Ulrich Beck (1992) speaks of the 'destandardization of work,' and more specifically of the creation of a risk-fraught system of flexible, pluralized underemployment, in which both risk and the responsibility for protecting against it are being 2 shifted to workers. A similar logic operates in many sectors of the economy, in which atypical forms of work are multiplying. To understand contemporary transformations of work, the concepts of risk and insecurity are more relevant for analysing workers' experiences than the concept of flexibility, which reflects changes from the employers' point of view (Allen and Henry 1997).Critics decry the homogeneous view of the risk society, pointing out that social class and gender have an influence, especially on the nature and degree of risk and on workers' resources to protect themselves. 'Risk divides,' creating winners and losers (Allen and Henry 1997) or, in other words, 'Individuals live in different types of risk societies' (Cooper 2008).As a contribution to the effort to understand the variety of risk societies, we will concentrate here on so-called winners: knowledge workers, highly skilled professionals who work on projects that bring together short-lived teams rather than provide their services as part of a continuous-flow model. This new form of production makes it easier to shift the risk to workers and gives rise to new risks, such as the rapid obsolescence of knowledge (loss of employability) and exclusion from useful job-placement networks, which coexist with traditional social risks (illness, injury, motherhood, age).We have not, as is too easily done, taken it for granted that highly skilled workers are automatically winners, but rather hypothesize that there are a variety of different risk situations within the knowledge economy. Based on a comparative study of three groups of knowledge workers (video game designers, freelance journalists and performing artists) in Quebec, we examine the relative share of the risk of losing income that falls to workers and employers/clients and the effects or this distribution in terms of workers' insecurity, as well as the resources they have available to deal with risk. 3The first three sections of this paper set out the ...

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“…Generally, the trend of shifting patterns of risk supported previous work that project-based employment and weakened protective institutions created new risks different from strategic risks (Kristensen and Rocha, 2012). Strategic risk appears more relevant to the mixed interpretation finding for workers, including loss of employability and exclusive social networks (D'Amoursand Legault, 2013).…”

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“…Additionally, film and TV unions have experienced the similar marketplace forces as other unions recently. Even though they still adopt collective-bargaining practices, film and TV unions have a business rather than a traditional employer–employee relationship with studio owners (D'Amours and Legault, 2013). Researchers have focused on union leaders' interpretation of common concerns at the workplace around issues; however, in the film and TV industry, such research is limited.…”

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