Intermittent Work and Well-Being

Abstract

In a society in which stable employment remains the reference, one might presume that an insecure job situation would represent a threat to a person's well-being. In this qualitative empirical research based on the narrative method, the authors documented the career paths of 22 men and 30 women. Their goal was to understand how intermittent work is experienced by people and how it affects life and perceived health. At the time the authors met with them, the intermittent workers had no continuous employment ties with an employer and 60 percent of them had worked, off and on, for six months or more during the year preceding the interview. The people interviewed considered themselves to be available and able to work. Almost a third of them had once held a stable full-time job for many years. The results confirmed the importance of paid work and the central role that it plays in terms of social recognition and self-esteem. The participants assigned great value to having status as workers and to being integrated into a workplace on a regular basis. Some of these intermittent workers said that their poor working conditions and the investment required by the constant search for work as well as the repeated adaptation to a new working environment decreased their motivation at work, eventually causing them to distance themselves from the paid labour market. Others, however, are increasingly willing to accept compromises in order to secure a stable position in the labour market. They concede that this puts them in conflict with their own values in terms of what work means to them and they have difficulty accepting this contradiction. The effects of intermittent work on well-being are as damaging as those of unemployment due to a range of factors that are not restricted to the financial difficulties it creates. When employment fails to allow an individual to achieve self-fulfilment, develop his or her capacities and enter into relationships with others, it becomes, in some respects, `non-work'.