Alessio Bertolini - Temporary Agency Workers in Italy and the UK: The Comparative Experience of Labour Market Disadvantage

Welfare reform in Europe faces an uncertain future. This series provides the essential data and analysis that scholars need to understand and debate current developments in work and welfare and to evaluate future trajectories of care-work, poverty, activation policies, retirement and work-life balance' - Professor Peter Taylor-Gooby, University of Kent, UK.

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First of all, I would like to thank Daniel Clegg and Jochen Clasen, who assisted me through the whole journey leading to the final book. I would also like to thank Sharla Plant from Palgrave, who guided me through the publication process. Moreover, I would like to thank all the people who have been part of my life through all these years in Edinburgh, as this book wouldnt have happened without their support. Finally, special thanks go to Rossella and Mauro, whose support goes beyond my years in Edinburgh and who have always had faith in me.

In the past few decades, European labour markets have undergone profound transformations as a result of globalisation, deindustrialisation and technological change (Husermann and Palier ).

The disadvantages experienced by atypical workers are argued to be different in every country, as is the divide between standard and atypical workers. Different institutional frameworks are argued to influence the disadvantages experienced by atypical workers and in turn in leading to a divide with standard workers, either by reducing it, fostering it or even creating it from scratch (Barbier ).

Overall, a distinction has been drawn between Liberal regimes, with deregulated labour markets and mostly flat-rate social protection, and Continental countries, which have deregulated their labour markets only at the margins, and rely predominantly on contribution-based systems of social protection (Esping-Andersen and Regini ).

This book explores the disadvantages experienced by one specific category of atypical workers, namely temporary agency ( TA) workers. In order to investigate the role employment-related institutions play in shaping those disadvantages, two countries with very different employment and welfare frameworks, namely Italy and the UK , are compared. The study demonstrates that TA workers in Italy and the UK experience somewhat different disadvantages compared to their standard counterparts and that the different institutional configurations of labour markets, industrial relations and welfare systems do indeed play an important role in explaining those country differences. Nevertheless, there is necessarily no close correspondence between the divides shaped by the institutional framework and experienced disadvantages. Other non-institutional factors are shown to be important in shaping individual disadvantages, as well as the interaction between those and institutional factors.

Disadvantages derived from atypical employment arrangements have been conceptualised in a variety of ways in the academic literature. With some degree of oversimplification, we can say that scholars from two main fields have studied employment-related disadvantages. Within comparative political economy , the literature on dualism has focused on labour market institutions and welfare institutions and how they directly or indirectly engender a differentiated set of rights and entitlements for people with different employment status (Davidsson and Naczyk ).

Within the discipline of sociology, analysts of precariousness have focused on the insecurity and vulnerability derived from employment status and how this is shaped by the interaction between socio-demographic characteristics and labour market institutions, and, more broadly, by the socio-economic system (Barbier ).

Considering the disadvantages from an institutional perspective, the literature on dualism has hitherto largely ignored individual-level issues, assuming that institutional divides in terms of rights, entitlements and resources will automatically translate into individual disadvantages. By contrast, sociological analyses of atypical forms of employment have adopted a more individual perspective, investigating how disadvantages are shaped by the interaction between individual and contextual characteristics and they have been careful to assume that an individual who is not granted a right, an entitlement or a resource will automatically experience a disadvantage. However, they have not necessarily focused on the divides engendered by the institutional settings, not providing a systematic comparative analysis on whether and how different institutional frameworks shape the individuals experience of precariousness in different ways.