Abstract
Within a qualitative research strategy this article applies the ‘grey zone’ framework, which conceptualises dimensions of unpaid labour tolerated by workers competing for precarious work. The authors present an empirical investigation that foregrounds reproductive labour in the household economy of workers in precarious dependent self-employment. Using abductive analysis and drawing on data from diverse sectors identified with particular age, gender and occupational class positioning they investigate how individuals balance precarious work with family life. And while all participants could navigate the temporal, spatial and financial challenges associated with their work, the study’s findings illustrate that relative freedoms accrued to those in higher skill, higher status jobs. In contrast, for those in lower skill, lower status jobs multiple negative challenges were balanced out by limited (but subjectively important) positive outcomes that meant they could continue with the work. Accordingly, the analysis advances understanding of workers’ strategies for managing the combined challenges of work insecurity and unpaid work in the household.
Introduction
A wide variety of sectors are associated with the newer forms of dependent self-employment making this a highly heterogeneous and variegated type of work (Murgia and Pulignano, 2021). And in the UK, where increasing self-employment is associated with greater deprivation (Henley, 2023) concern has grown about the precariousness, insecurity and relatively poor working conditions associated with this form of work (Bologna, 2018; Conen and Schippers, 2019; Horodnic and Williams, 2020; López-Andreu, 2020). In this context, where self-employment is often combined with other kinds of employment, achieving definitive statistics is harder (Huws, 2019). However, it is likely that economically dependent self-employment (or solo self-employment) accounts for around 10% of all self-employment. This figure is based on 2022 data which show a downward trend and greater numbers of men than women involved in solo self-employment (Eurofound, 2024). And whereas dependent self-employment covers ‘a continuum of employment relationships ranging from pure dependent employment to genuine self-employment’ (Horodnic and Williams, 2020: 327) we focus our analysis on those who are in solo self-employment and who are ‘workers who persistently employ only themselves’ (Cieślik and van Stel, 2024: 759). Solo self-employment is generally considered to have two forms: where the first group are more entrepreneurial and the second group are freelancers who provide knowledge or services to a client or company (Skrzek-Lubasińska and Szaban, 2019). In both cases they enjoy relative levels of independence and access to ‘the means of production’ (Mațcu-Zaharia et al., 2024: 3). In our study, workers fell into the freelance category of precarious dependent self-employment (PDSE) – namely those who ‘identify/register themselves as self-employed and work for companies/clients under a contract that is different from the traditional employment contract, but actually meet most of the criteria for being classified as dependent employees’ (Mațcu-Zaharia et al., 2024: 3).
Despite the recent growth of all non-standard forms of employment across Europe (Hammer and Ness, 2021; Thörnquist, 2015) this sector remains under-researched (Mațcu-Zaharia et al., 2024). And whereas previous studies have provided valuable insights into the regulatory challenges that the PDSE status implies and the difficulties for voice and representation of these workers, relatively little is known about how age, gender and occupational class interact in this context. Rather, prior research has suggested a relatively homogeneous experience, with workers often viewed as disempowered and vulnerable owing to their work precariousness (Majetic et al., 2023) and subject to low income and variable hours, unpaid overtime rates and unpaid working time between tasks (Harvey, 1999; Taylor et al., 2017). Anticipating greater heterogeneity in solo self-employment we set out to test this by reading our empirical data through the ‘grey zone’ framework developed by Pulignano and Morgan (2023). Implicit in this is the idea that resources individuals can draw on to manage households are highly variable such that ‘those with resources and fungible assets are able to build supports that sustain family members in precarious work [whereas] those without such resources and structures become increasingly impoverished and pressurized as they seek to deal with the insecurities facing them’ (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023: 259–260). For example, when a worker is required to travel long distances to participate in precarious work, their commute time may come at the expense of home responsibilities such as childcare. Therefore, greater flexibility is needed and the relative success or failure (to compete for precarious work) may rely on extended family and other social networks (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023).
These factors – alongside the changing aspirations of younger generations – ‘require private domestic labour in the household to adapt to these new circumstances’ (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023: 259). Therefore, to address the neglect of intersectional experience in the literature (James, 2023) our study proceeded as follows. Firstly, we explored how unpaid labour was variously tolerated at the household level by workers competing for precarious forms of work. This involved examining relationships among solo self-employment, gender and occupational skill (Reuschke and Zhang, 2022) which allowed us to determine how differences in experiences connected to household dynamics. Secondly, we compared impacts on wellbeing and work–life articulation (Bozzon and Murgia, 2022; Duijs et al., 2023) within a materialist feminist analysis which allowed us to better understand how workers made sense of their self-employed work, exercised agency over it and managed associated risks and vulnerabilities (Murgia and Pulignano, 2021). Moreover, to explore differences in positioning we sought participants from diverse contexts (i.e. public sector administration, speech and language therapy, railway maintenance, construction, foster care and food delivery) to explore how interactions between their self-employed status (e.g. independent contractor, economically dependent contractor and disguised employment) and household context produced important differences. And by asking the question ‘how do age, gender and occupational class interact to shape the experiences of those holding precarious dependent self-employment?’ we could locate intersectional inequalities originating in structures of capitalism and patriarchy (Huws, 2019; Monroe et al., 2024).
Our contribution to critical labour studies is twofold. Firstly, we advance qualitative knowledge of how precarious workers (in solo self-employment) deal with the combined pressure of income insecurity and unpaid work in the household. To improve understanding of the realities of precarious working lives and to explain how workers maintain insecure work we focus on the tensions between a transformed labour market and domestic settings featuring care responsibilities. Accordingly, our data demonstrate how some of the capacities needed to manage PDSE are embedded in the household and connect to individual-level reproductive labour such as childcare (Kampouri, 2022; Stevano et al., 2021). Secondly, we open up new opportunities in the field by demonstrating that inequality structures observable in the wider labour market – such as those that restrict entry to better jobs – are also visible in the context of precarious work. And since precarious work is socially produced (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023) our analysis demonstrates how such barriers can be overcome (differentially) by drawing on resources at the household level. Therefore, by focusing on household dynamics we gain significant insights into precarious workers’ variegated experience; for example, where young people in the UK have been particularly disadvantaged in recent decades in relation to the rising costs of housing and education which have differentially impacted their ability to establish independent family lives (Stone et al., 2011). And as far as we are aware, we are the first to apply the grey zone conceptual framework empirically, which we do with particular attention to gender and socioeconomic position, to investigate how precarious workers ‘prepare themselves to access this work and manage the demands on their time and space’ (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023: 268).
The article is organised as follows. First, challenges associated with precarious (solo) self-employment are contextualised within a social reproduction theories framework. Beginning with a discussion of PDSE (our focus) we then unpack the various issues. Second, we describe the importance of the household and unpaid labour (in relation to the grey zone framework, which makes it possible to differentiate among age, gender and occupational class differences in relation to PDSE) and the intersections in which we are interested. Thereafter, we introduce our research design and methdology, followed by a discussion of the findings emerging from our analysis of the data. Finally, we highlight the implications of our findings and how these findings connect with existing debates on insecure working lives.
Precarious self-employment, social reproduction and intersectional inequality
In prior research, focus on particular sectors such as food delivery has developed significant insights into workers’ dependency on platforms. Moreover, the negative impacts of intense competition on employment relationships and bargaining power (Cockayne, 2016) are well understood (Defossez, 2022). However, prior research has largely neglected the importance of gender, age and occupational class for shaping individual experiences (James, 2023). Accordingly, we develop a holistic approach to better understand how workers differentially manage precarious work by tracing ‘its effects back into the “grey zone” and into the impact on unpaid work in the private sphere of families’ (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023: 260). And therefore we focus on the experiences of workers who are variously positioned in solo self-employment in relation to Pulignano and Morgan’s (2023) ‘grey zone’ concept, which is ‘a third sphere which interfaces the public sphere of paid employment and the private sphere of unpaid domestic labour’ (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023: 259). And while self-employment encompasses a diversity of situations, those in solo self-employment are far from the ‘ideal type’ of autonomous and wealth-creating entrepreneur who owns a business or sells products. Rather, they tend to be economically dependent on one ‘client’ or ‘platform’ to access and maintain work (López-Andreu, 2020) and as we found, they were sometimes hired to replace formally contracted employees to whom employment protections would have been due (Murgia and Pulignano, 2021).
In this context, where labour laws and organisational systems have failed to keep pace with recent changes (Countouris and De Stefano, 2023) most labour protections ‘still revolve around a dichotomy between subordinate/dependent employment, on the one hand, and autonomous/independent self-employment, on the other’ (Murgia et al., 2020: 2). Moreover, these new employment relationships are quite different to the subordination that traditionally defined dependent employment and that led to the development of labour rights and protections (Papadopoulos et al., 2021) where this, first, rebalanced an unequal relationship of power and resources and, second, compensated workers for this unbalanced relationship (see Dukes and Streeck, 2022). When they existed, these protections provided workers with labour stability, access to training, career development and collective workers’ voice and they ensured workers had an adequate income during work and non-work periods (Bosch, 2004). In contrast, workers in precarious self-employment lack the social protection of employment rights and access to benefits such as parental and sick leave, work-related accident insurance, welfare benefits and retirement pension (Horodnic and Williams, 2020; Huws et al., 2019; Rubery et al., 2018). Therefore, PDSE has negative implications for worker wellbeing (Duijs et al., 2023), where employers have divested themselves of the social costs of labour with risks transferred from the state to the individual (Fudge, 2017; Huws, 2021). Consequentially, there is now widespread agreement that social protections should be extended to workers outside of the standard employment relationship (ILO, 2020).
These are the factors motivating our study which sought to understand the dynamic interconnection of work and household organisation and where we explored how ‘workers live in households that will shape their ability to go to work’ (Stevano et al., 2021: 279) – for example, in the case where travelling long distances to participate in precarious work comes at the expense of home responsibilities such as childcare and where relative success in competing for precarious work relies on extended family or other social networks (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023). Therefore, by highlighting the relevance of the household and the unpaid labour that supports precarious work we developed our analysis within a social reproduction theories framework to produce a more fine-grained explanation of the impact of precarious work on the social reproduction of labour, which we outline next.
Developing a grey zone analysis that integrates age, gender and occupational class
Whereas Bari et al. (2021) have explored how flexible work arrangements in precarious self-employment are shaped by gender and household factors, we develop this further by adding age and occupational class into our analysis. Our dataset enabled this approach since five out of six sectors that we examined (speech and language therapy, railway maintenance, construction, foster care and food delivery) were heavily gender segregated. For example, in foster care an estimated 85% of main foster carers are women (Kirk, 2020). Accordingly, to investigate how precarious work affects the social reproduction of labour in these six contexts we draw on theories of social reproduction to contextualise the social relations of unpaid labour within the logic of capitalist accumulation (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2019; Huws, 2019). And to account for causes originating in the structures of capitalist macro-economic and patriarchal social structures (Glucksmann, 1995) we conceptualise household demands situated ‘at the intersection of several powerfully conflicting forces’ (Huws, 2019: 18), where inequalities associated with the unequal distribution of unpaid labour continue to have significantly gendered impacts (Syrda, 2023). For example, in the context of austerity, degraded neoliberal welfare regimes (Horodnic and Williams, 2020) have negatively affected services through sweeping welfare reforms (Beatty and Fothergill, 2018). And social services which were once universally available in the UK, are now available only selectively, with selectivity encoded in the ‘discourse of the welfare state restructuring’ (Karimi, 2009: 272).
In this context and to relate individual experiences to underlying structural conditions and causes, we therefore apply a grey zone framework analysis (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023) to identify workers’ different capacities to manage risks and vulnerabilities in increasingly changing and unstable contexts (Meliou and Mallett, 2022). Pulignano and Morgan set out to illustrate ‘the extent to which precarious work, even relatively well-paid agency work, can impinge on family life’ (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023: 258). In doing so, they question ‘how precarious work necessitates changes in the social reproduction of labour’ (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023: 258). By building on the concept of ‘personalised risk’ introduced by Christensen and Manthorpe (2016) and applying this in relation to domestic care, Pulignano and Morgan (2023) highlight the economic costs of PDSE in contrast to standard employment where, first, workers are made individually responsible and must spend time to access and maintain work, for example, by promoting themselves, updating their availability, creating a sense of trustworthiness, etc. And second, workers become responsible for elements related to ‘doing the work’ where they must compete, negotiate, and sometimes accept lower prices to secure their relationship with the ‘client’. This lens enables us to reveal heterogeneity of experience by understanding how structures of inequality shape experiences differentially. And given that forms of work are historically specific, the likelihood for more exclusive careers to be gender-segregated can be understood in the context of structured inequality regimes (Acker, 2006).
Next, we outline our method wherein we develop a qualitative research strategy to investigate diverse experiences of PDSE.
Method
In our study, which was exploratory, we adopted a qualitative research design since we wished to understand how subjective experiences are shaped by age, gender, occupational class and relative responsibility for domestic work. With the objective of building a stratified sample, we firstly targeted sectors that are under-represented in the literature. Secondly, to facilitate our comparative analysis we recruited participants of different ages, genders and occupational classes. The resulting dataset was achieved through non-probability sampling (Sarantakos, 2013), a multistage method which produces a non-random sample (Neuman, 2006) and which is associated with limitations such as sample bias.
To overcome known recruitment challenges in contexts where workers have fewer organisational ties (Moore and Newsome, 2018) we reached out to participants using professional networks and Facebook, and once contacts were established, word-of-mouth helped to further circulate our call. Thus, we attracted 24 participants from six sectors (public sector administration, speech and language therapy, railway maintenance, construction, foster care and food delivery). The length of time that participants had been self-employed varied from 1 to 18 years. Most participants lived in heterosexual couples with the remainder living in single, or single parent households. Although each of the contexts we examined had relatively homogeneous characteristics (for example, all bike couriers and construction workers were male), taken together the sample is heterogeneous representing a range of gender, age and occupational class positions (see Table 1).
Participant information.
Notes: SOC: Standard Occupational Classification.
To position participants in an occupational hierarchy, we used the UK’s Standard Occupational Classification, which has nine major SOC groups (ONS, 2018), as a guide. While differentiating participants according to SOC was helpful, we also compared workers’ experience according to three sets of indicators that have been applied to assess the sustainability of dependent self-employment, namely financial sustainability, work engagement and health and wellbeing (Eurofound, 2024). Therefore, within- and between-group comparisons facilitated access to differences associated with age, gender and occupational class.
To address our research question ‘how do age, gender and occupational class interact to shape the experiences of those holding precarious dependent self-employment?’ we collected data via depth interviews and group interviews, all of which were recorded and transcribed using a professional service. Interviews, which took place in Scotland and England, were all face-to-face with one exception (which was a telephone interview) and while there were a small number of face-to-face interviews, group interviews were favoured since they allowed participants to contrast their experiences.
In interviews participants were asked about their work history and work trajectory, how they viewed the advantages and disadvantages of working in solo self-employment, how they managed the risks and uncertainties of this alongside family responsibility, and their relative work–life balance. To access the situated interests of workers interview questions were open-ended, and participants were asked to elaborate on their circumstances in, and beyond, work. Notwithstanding the potential limitations of interviews, moreover, we found the flexible nature of interviewing was an advantage (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009) since it allowed us to respond in situ to emerging topics and themes.
Our data analysis relied on abduction, which involved an iterative process of moving between data and the literature and theory that we outlined earlier. Thereafter, thematics (Braun and Clarke, 2006) were influenced by prior and emergent theory whilst maintaining a clear focus on the purpose of the investigation. Analysis of data took place in three stages. Firstly, a set of codes was generated by the authors and thematics were described accordingly. Secondly, we applied the grey zone framework (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023) to evaluate the temporal and spatial dimensions of unpaid labour that was tolerated by workers competing for precarious work. Thus, findings in relation to men in lower skill, lower status sectors and women in higher skill, higher status sectors were drawn via our stratified sample of respondents. These findings are unpacked in Table 2, where factors that were relevant to individual strategies are described in relation to positional outcomes.
Outcomes associated with precarious dependent self-employment.
To complement prior research on the relationship between solo self-employment, gender and occupational class (Reuschke and Zhang, 2022), we next unpack two factors. These are placement in the occupational hierarchy and relative responsibility for caring for others. These factors are important because they shape the differential experience of PDSE.
Findings
Regarding individual entry into PDSE, our interviews revealed specific differences. For example, with construction work, self-employment via a contractor was the norm and this was an integrated labour market trajectory. In contrast, bike couriers generally did this work to complement other jobs. And whereas for the (women) speech and language therapists, household-level demands (having school-age children) motivated their entry to PDSE, for another group (women interim executives) having school-age children typically delayed their entry into self-employment. Regarding income sufficiency, for those higher in the occupational hierarchy, interim executives tended to have a more positive experience while speech and language therapists typically faced significant payment delays. Moreover, those in the lowest skill, lowest status context (bike couriers) faced multiple negative challenges, balanced out by limited (but subjectively significant) positives that meant they continued with the work, as we see next.
Preparation: Managing the risks of entering precarious dependent self-employment
Long hours and income insecurity
First, we consider Emmanuel, who lived in London and was married with three children. Unlike some bike couriers, who were living with parents, Emmanuel had more at stake and managed his work accordingly: ‘I try to hit £500 a week. If I don’t get that, then I know it’s very, very bad for me. Because I have to target myself. If I don’t get what I need, then that means it’s really a very bad day or a very bad week for me. This is how I operate.’ Notably, Emmanuel’s income target was based on working six or seven days each week with very long working hours and in his case, working 70-plus hours a week was feasible because care could be negotiated at the household level (contingent on his partner’s work obligations). As the main earner, Emmanuel’s decision to enter precarious self-employment was based on the income he could earn along with the flexibility the role provided:
So, I’ve seen that doing this job alone . . . I can make more than I’m working in the two job[s] . . . taking this as a full-time job. Then I drop the other job because I do not have to wake up very early in the morning. (Emmanuel, Bike courier, SOC9)
In cases like this, where work and family life can be reconciled (Horodnic and Williams, 2020), solo self-employment is experienced positively (Bari et al., 2021). As Emmanuel highlights: ‘I can pick my little one up from school. I can take my shift after . . . when my wife is available at home’ and ‘time management, you know, it has a great time management’. Therefore, we see that, for a parent of school-age children, precarious self-employment sometimes provided opportunities to integrate childcare into the working day (Bari et al., 2021). However, this suggests a contradiction embedded in the PDSE status since it provides the capacity to balance work and family life, while at the same time, extending insecurity into working lives.
For the foster carers we spoke to (two women and one man) the transition to precarious self-employment resulted from a disruption in their labour market trajectory, which was the case for Arlene (who was married with two children). After being made redundant at 45 years old Arlene decided she ‘didn’t want to work in an office anymore’. However, there were often times when she had no placements, and absolutely no income since foster care workers routinely receive only allowances (Kirk, 2020). Like the other foster carers in our sample, Arlene had borrowed money from family members, and she characterised how she and her husband had initially been ‘quite naïve’ since ‘we didn’t know about the financial hit that we would take’. Moreover, as she could not afford a private pension since becoming a foster care worker Arlene had sacrificed ten years of pension contributions. And in the UK, where almost three-quarters of all children in care are fostered (DfE, 2021) there is a gendered lack of value attached to foster care since ‘the foster care system has historically been premised upon a (male) breadwinner model, with a (female) partner staying at home to look after children’ (Kirk, 2020: 536).
Caring responsibility: Household conditions and gendered social relations
All of the speech and language therapists we spoke to (who were all women) had been dissatisfied with conditions in the NHS before opting for self-employment, and all but one had school-age children, thus their ability to transition to self-employment was determined by the age of their children. Most had entered self-employment to reconcile work with domestic responsibilities (Bari et al., 2021; Milkman et al., 2021) and despite their high skill and high status, doing their occupation via solo self-employment relied on their ability to draw on household income. All five emphasised their reliance on shared household income: ‘my husband, he’s the main earner and I earn the extra, the holidays and the other things that we do’ (Karen).
Karen had worked in the NHS for 11 years (and had been self-employed for almost eight years). After having two children she had remained in the NHS part-time but found it difficult to manage. Since Karen’s husband was ‘the main breadwinner’ they had agreed that they could manage on one wage while she set up her self-employed practice: ‘he covers all the bills, mortgage, everything. So, I knew that even if everything just bombed completely, we would be okay, we’d have everything covered that needed covering.’
Cashflow was a particular challenge for the speech and language therapists as Karen explained: ‘I’m waiting on a payment now. And it’s a big payment for some training. And if I don’t get it before the summer, I’m going to be hard up all summer.’ Margot, who had been self-employed for five years, characterised their situation:
I think we’ve all taken a pay cut to do the [self-employed] work that we’re doing. So, we haven’t done it for financial reasons in that respect. I couldn’t have sustained myself initially without being married and having a husband’s income as well. (Margot, speech and language therapist, SOC2)
Our sample also included participants from the top of the occupational hierarchy (in SOC1 jobs), who were executive ‘interims’ who mainly worked in the public sector. In some cases, the interim executives had originally been formally employed (before outsourcing was implemented as a means to reduce staff numbers and costs) and drawing on established networks they became self-employed, sometimes for the same organisation. With the interims, we could make in-group comparisons and our data illustrated an interaction between age, gender, occupational class, household conditions and public sector austerity measures with outcomes connected to gendered household relations. For example, work–life challenges were mentioned by Lucy, who had been self-employed for 18 years: ‘being self-employed before austerity was totally different to being self-employed after austerity’. However, for Lucy (whose children were older) the transition to self-employment was prompted by disaffection with voluntary sector work ‘and so I thought, right, what am I going to do next. And I just thought, let’s see if there’s any work in the London boroughs’, a move which prompted separate living arrangements during the working week: ‘it was really difficult to start off with and it’s not so easy for him. So, there are issues around that. But none that can’t be overcome.’
Gregor, who had been self-employed for nine years, described how he started out: ‘I got bored being an [assistant director] and I wanted to do more flexible stuff.’ In Gregor’s case, self-employment also represented an opportunity to advance his career: ‘[I] thought it would be a good way of working with a few more [local] authorities before thinking about whether I wanted to be an executive director type person.’ Gregor acknowledged the role of gender differences on their career progression ‘for women [interims] more than men, I think’ and he suggested that (if his and his wife’s positions had been reversed) his entry to self-employment might have been delayed by about six years: ‘if I’d have been a mother in our family, I think now would be about the time . . . when the kids are 18 and 20 . . . that I could have done it’.
For the interim executives we spoke to, temporal and spatial adaptations (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023) were necessary to manage lengthy commutes, and working away from home during the working week. These adaptations typically meant they sacrificed time at home, and they were less available to share domestic work. This was the case for Constance, who was married with two adult children. At the time of interview, she was doing her first ‘interim role’ which coincided with having to rent away from the family home – ‘that’s why I did it, freedom!’ Aged 60, Constance was surprised by the strength of reactions she encountered within her family and social network: ‘seriously, I could not believe it, and it caused massive tension because I was really angry. I’d worked all my life bringing up the kids and suddenly I wasn’t allowed to have this choice.’ And even though her husband had taken early redundancy from his job, she said, ‘I couldn’t rejuvenate my career which I’d put on hold’. It is therefore unsurprising that the combined pressures of precarious work, whether or not this is relatively well-rewarded, can cause negative impacts for household relationships (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023).
In these examples, we can see how constraining and enabling factors related to gender and age interact to explain the experiences of older self-employed women (Meliou and Mallett, 2022) in relation to patriarchal structures (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2019; Huws, 2019) even where workers occupied high skill, high status positions at the top of the occupational hierarchy. Nonetheless, compared to those in lower skill, lower status jobs, the speech and language therapists and the interim executives experienced opportunities for career advancement. And in the case of the interim executives, they were able to enter self-employment at different stages in life, albeit with a potential risk to family relationships. However, it also became clear that the interim executives and the speech and language therapists were differentially impacted by changes in the UK economic context. For example, increasing self-employment in public sector administration was driven by public sector austerity (as were the payment delays encountered by the speech and language therapists).
In the analysis that follows, we compare participants in each of the six sectors we investigated (public sector administration, speech and language therapy, railway maintenance, construction, foster care and food delivery) in terms of how they managed income variability. Here, our analysis illustrates the effects of precarity on low skill, low status workers in male-dominated sectors, who reported dependence on benefits to manage economic insecurity. However, in many cases managing was not possible, and different strategies were reported to cope with irregular income. For example, the use of pay-as-you go for phone and utilities and, in some cases, completely limiting electricity use. Moreover, the extreme insecurity of the job was revealed in relation to differential capacity to manage taking leave from work.
Adaptation: Managing the risks of being in precarious dependent self-employment
Occupational positioning, insufficient income and debt
Among the bike couriers in our sample, differential levels of material resources were visible, and some routinely relied on credit: ‘there are some weeks that are so bad, I had to rely on the credit card. And unfortunately, that puts you into more debt, but the thing is you have no option’ (Nicholas, bike courier, SOC9). Like Nicholas, other bike couriers reported difficulty accessing welfare benefits to manage non-working days and days off due to work injuries. Moreover, gaps in income resulted when the platform log-in failed: ‘you feel that sense of panic, you need something else to happen, otherwise you just have to wait and wait and wait. It’s kind of intolerable’ (Nicholas, bike courier, SOC9). However, for couriers without family responsibilities, their income targets were lower, and they were better able to deal with irregular income. For example, some described personal strategies for obtaining the maximum income in a shorter space of time: ‘if I’m going to meet some friends and it starts raining, I will get on my bike and work. You just make so much money, you know, and then you’ve got the free time afterwards’ (Tom, bike courier, SOC9). Unsurprisingly, for the bike couriers, taking holidays required careful evaluation since they needed to work extra afterwards. However, for bike couriers this was especially problematic since the platform algorithm demoted them if they did not log in for a few days. As Emmanuel explained: ‘Yeah, that’s the problem, it’s like if you go on holiday your statistics drop. It drop[s] dramatically, it drop[s], you know? So, you have to keep working, working, working to be able to be able to build that statistic.’
For the foster carers we spoke to, holidays were infrequent, partly because of their foster caring commitments, but also owing to financial restrictions. Moreover, their capacity to care for their own family was affected by the 24/7 nature of their work. One such worker worried about the future: ‘I cannot get sick, you know? Because that’s what I think, I just couldn’t get sick because I have two at home that I’m looking after. Yeah, I think . . . who the heck’s going to look after me?’ (Arlene, foster carer, SOC6). In fact, prior research suggests that foster care workers are especially vulnerable financially since they can be deregistered ‘akin to dismissal or “de-activation” in the world of apps, with associated loss of work and income’ (Kirk, 2020: 535). Moreover, they have no recourse to independent representation if a child in their care makes a complaint. With respite foster carers (whose work assignments varied significantly), particular risks were revealed. For example, Bridget and Chris were a married couple who fostered together. More recently they had become short-term foster carers (providing emergency care and enabling full-time foster carers to take holidays) for which they were paid £50 per child per overnight stay. Initially, they had been attracted to the flexibility associated with respite fostering:
So, in effect, you can say you know, we’re not going to have children then and you can go on holiday or do whatever. That was one of the reasons why our preference was respite foster care, because you have the flexibility. But then, as we’ve found out, you don’t have the safety net of any income. So, it has its pluses, and it has its minuses. (Chris, foster carer, SOC6)
In this context, unpaid caring responsibilities at the household level dramatically affected income generation. For example, one participant reported they had to stop taking respite placements when their youngest child unexpectedly moved back into the family home. Furthermore, to cover shallow periods some foster care workers borrowed from relatives. For example, Bridget’s sister had recently given them £1000 during a tough patch when they could not do any foster care work. Yet, the major challenge facing foster care workers (FCWs) is gaining recognition that foster caring is in fact economic work ‘as FCWs’ allowances are paid from local authorities, the challenge is directly to the state for misclassifying them’ (Kirk, 2020: 532).
For the solo self-employed workers we spoke to ‘holidays’ were not typically perceived as a break from work (Bari et al., 2021). Rather, in some cases, these were occasions when children who were not in school needed care, which was the case for Scott:
Holidays . . . for myself it’s been really difficult. At times I’ve even had to ask customers if it’s okay for my children to go sit in the back garden while I’m carrying out work. You know, because if it weren’t . . . if it weren’t for that fact, I wouldn’t be able to feed [the children]. And people . . . some people are really understanding, you know, when you explain it in that way to them, like ‘look, I’ve got to do this, I have no choice’. You know, it’s a case of I’ll feed myself and my children or I stay at home with my kids if you don’t let them be here, you know. (Scott, construction worker, SOC5)
With Scott’s example, we see the uncomfortable outcome for someone who does not earn enough to access childcare, or to build up the savings that would make taking unpaid leave possible (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023). Moreover, for Scott, taking his children on holiday was not an option and life was reduced to a bare minimum when his total resources were exhausted on a daily basis due to the contingent and precarious nature of his work (Ba’, 2020; Thörnquist, 2015). However, there were yet other reasons for the precariously self-employed to avoid taking leave as Matthew, a railway worker, explained: ‘say you take a couple of weeks off work. And you can afford to go on holiday. Somebody else will step into your shoes to do the job that you’ve left.’
Taking leave and insulation from the effects of precarious self-employment
Two of the sectors in our sample were high skill/high status. One of these (interim executives) are placed at the top of Standard Occupational Classification and the other (speech, and language therapists) placed second. However, in spite of their relatively high occupational positioning, interim executives (in SOC1) and speech and language therapists (in SOC2) nonetheless shared some of the challenges of those in lower skill, lower status work contexts and it was notable that members of both groups described their reliance on household resources to enter and remain in their chosen occupation (Murgia and Pulignano, 2021; Syrda, 2023). For example, Miranda – who had three children – and previously worked in the NHS (for 14 years) said, ‘I just wanted to be with my children in the holidays, I don’t want to send them off to childcare for me to go to work to only earn enough money to put them into childcare.’ Karen described her own experience:
I was trying to juggle, ‘well what do I do in the holidays’, all of that not being able to take term time off. And I just thought, this is not what I want to do anymore. Changing the actual role almost. So, it was much more about assessments and consulting, rather than actually doing therapy. So, I made a decision in 2012 and set up on my own. (Karen, speech and language therapist, SOC6)
It was therefore typical for women speech and language therapists to leave the NHS altogether, transitioning to work they could fit around their children’s schedules (Milkman et al., 2021). And since their new clients tended to be schools and colleges, they were less likely to be offered work during school holidays. While this meant they had significant gaps in income, most could manage the variability since they were the secondary earners in the household (Bari et al., 2021). And in the case where they were unable to work for whatever reason, all of the speech and language therapists agreed that their household would cope with the regular income of their partner (or ex-partner). Other gaps in income stemmed from the financial problems facing colleges: ‘so what they do is hold invoices back until people make a fuss. So, I’ve just had my April invoice paid and I’m regularly two or three months in arrears’ (Margot, speech and language therapist, SOC2). When Margot was asked about holidays, she said: ‘it would be nice to take holidays when it wasn’t so expensive. But, of course, all my work’s in schools and colleges . . . So, I’m sort of stuck with the school holiday times really.’
Whereas the speech and language therapists (who were all women, as noted) typically managed income variability by drawing on household financial support, interim executives (male and female) typically relied on (in-family) childcare. Effectively, this meant that entry to these better rewarded sectors was restricted to individuals who could reliably access household-level support over the longer term. Moreover, both the interim executives and the speech and language therapists highlighted the importance of savings:
You need to be a good financial planner in terms of managing pension risks for the longer term. Secondly . . . is you need to have a little bit of a shelter to the risk of your employment because it’s not always seamless. . . . you need to get your financial planning right so you can manage the storm if you do have a gap of three . . . four months between gigs or you suddenly find you take a hit because the [interim] market is going silly. (Nathaniel, interim executive, SOC1)
Although, for the interim executives, taking holidays was feasible (they had enough savings) they tended not to take holidays in case this impacted continuity of work and the client relationship. In this respect Lucy was an outlier: ‘yeah, I’m having one this year for the first time in about four years, you know, a proper holiday. Two weeks away. Because you’re frightened to do it because you’re thinking, well I don’t know how long this contract’s going to last.’
Discussion and conclusion
To reduce costs associated with dependent or salaried employment (Cini, 2023; Florin and Pichault, 2020; Frade and Darmon, 2005; Schippers, 2019) precarious self-employment removes the ‘unproductive’ time costs of labour (Moore and Newsome, 2018) by negating the employer’s responsibilities towards workers (Fudge, 2017; Huws, 2021). This transformation of work organisation is the broader context of our findings in which we described a dynamic interplay between age, gender, occupational class and household conditions and where we built on Pulignano and Morgan’s (2023) grey zone concept to determine how temporal and spatial conditions interact with unpaid work at the household level. Moreover, by foregrounding the social positioning of actors we distinguish how vulnerabilities extend from work to family life and how existing inequalities are reproduced (Armano et al., 2022). Furthermore, since aspects of social reproduction are often neglected in critical labour studies (Ba’, 2020; Stevano et al., 2021) this article deepens understanding of workers’ potential to manage insecurities related to precarious self-employment by describing additional costs that are borne by precarious households. With a particular focus on men in lower skill, lower status sectors and women in higher skill, higher status sectors our findings complement prior research on the relationship between solo self-employment, gender and occupational class (James, 2023; Meliou and Mallett, 2022; Reuschke and Zhang, 2022).
By identifying workers’ different capacities to manage risks and vulnerabilities, our findings provide an empirical substantiation of the grey zone framework (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023). Specifically, our findings illustrate that while all participants navigated the temporal, spatial and financial challenges associated with precarious self-employment (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023) relative freedoms accrued unequally to those in higher SOC contexts. For example, since the (women) speech and language therapists could reliably access household-level support over the longer term, they could enter and remain in a better rewarded sector. Moreover, having school-age children motivated their self-employment. However, for another group (women interim executives) having school-age children typically delayed their entry into self-employment. In contrast, those in the lower SOC contexts faced multiple negative challenges, balanced out by limited (but subjectively important) positives that meant they continued with the work. Focusing first on orientations towards income unpredictability, those in lower skill, lower status jobs faced significant challenges, for example when the bike couriers had gaps in work or unexpected expenses which included insurance that could be prohibitively expensive (Couve et al., 2023) and which could lead to a protracted loss of income. Foster care workers also experienced negative cash flow which impacted their household income. However, even the speech and language therapists, who had high skill, high status jobs, reported difficulties in being paid on time. From these findings, it became clear that individual choices were enabled or constrained in a way that was directly relevant (mainly) to occupational class and (to a lesser extent) to gender. The implications of our findings are discussed next.
Age, gender and occupational class in the experience of precarious dependent self-employment
By adopting a systematic approach, we identified how certain structural factors necessitated individual strategies, which produced outcomes that were variously shaped by gender, age and occupational class (see Table 2).
Gendered social relations and care responsibility
In our study, we found PDSE to be more varied than prior literature suggests. In particular, our findings illustrate how some of the resources needed to manage precarious self-employment are embedded in the household, with strong evidence of constraints associated with individual-level responsibility for reproductive (unpaid) labour. Moreover, outcomes revealed its relatively negative and positive impacts on wellbeing and work–life articulation (Bozzon and Murgia, 2022; Duijs et al., 2023). In case where it was possible to take children to work this made it possible to combine childcare and work. Notably, several of the speech and language therapists used the term ‘breadwinner’ to describe their husband’s income contribution. Although all were able to achieve a positive work–life balance, it was striking how this came at the expense of their ability to contribute equally to household income. Therefore, household social relations were negatively shaped by solo self-employment since their income was subordinate to their (male) partners’ income, which has problematic implications for in-family gender equality. And, in one case, a speech and language therapist remained financially dependent on her former partner. Moreover, some participants (women interim executives) described a negative impact on household relationships. Finally, our analysis also allowed us to better understand how those in precarious self-employment made sense of their work and exercised agency over it.
Temporal flexibility and material conditions
Those in the lowest skill, lowest status self-employment sectors were the most exposed to income insecurity (Kampouri, 2022). However, those working very long hours were able to integrate the risks associated with it depending on their relative responsibility for reproductive labour. And regardless of positioning in the occupational hierarchy, participants did not take leave – with the exception of the speech and language therapists, most of whom had young children (in our sample). Moreover, those in high skill, high status work contexts sometimes chose solo self-employment as a rejection of subordinate employment.
In the case of PDSE contexts associated with lower and less secure incomes, we have illustrated a more contingent arrangement to income that was insufficient and irregular, where differential inequalities could be traced to interactions between age, gender and the relative availability of household-level resources. Moreover, being the main household earner and having children strongly affected workers’ capacities, in contrast with those who had fewer caring responsibilities. In this case, workers could integrate risks in order to precariously reconcile paid and unpaid labour. However, for some in the lowest skill, lowest status contexts solo self-employment was unsustainable in the long term (Eurofound, 2024). Therefore, our findings suggest a contradiction embedded in the PDSE status since it provides capacity to balance work and family life, but at the same time, it extends insecurity into working lives.
These findings suggest that future research might usefully draw on larger datasets, to reflect greater diversity and to broaden the investigation of inequalities within PDSE. Moreover, future policy work should focus on gender since, as we have found and earlier research suggests (Reuschke and Zhang, 2022), there is a correlation between precariousness, gender and solo self-employment. Furthermore, we hope that future research will continue to develop dimensions of the grey zone framework to further illuminate how precarious work is lived in a changing regulatory context and amidst increasing levels of public protest.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
