Bridge or Trap? Labor Market Structure and the Transitions from Contingent to Permanent Employment
Korean Journal of Management. Jung Dong-Il, Kwon Seeon-Won (2016)
With a burgeoning interest in understanding the nature of contingent work, scholars have begun to tackle such issues as workforce divide and emerging form of labor relations. One critical issue to assess is the extent to which stable permanent jobs are open to contingent works. Focusing on the debate over whether contingent jobs function as a bridge to permanent employment or a trap that keeps workers locked in ongoing contingent work or unemployment, this paper examines the patterns of transition from contingent to permanent employment and the mechanisms involved in such transition. Using the panel data from April 2010 to October 2012, we investigate whether and how the labor market is divided and what kinds of mechanisms are involved in crossing the divide. We found that a contingent job functions as a trap, leading to persistent unstable employment along with intermittent unemployment. Furthermore, we also found that the contingent labor market is not only separated from the internal labor market, but also internally divided. Finally, the results show that the mechanisms involved in intra-firm transition differ from those in inter-firm transition: whereas intra-firm transition is more associated with work conditions, inter-firm transition is more associated with human capital components. This suggests that firms often pre-select qualified contingent workers into the quasi-internal labor market so that they can fill vacancies for permanent jobs or new hiring positions when available. Contingent workers excluded from the quasi-internal labor market can obtain permanent jobs in other firms only if they have qualified human capital.
The Organizational Determinants of Employing Contingent Workers in Korea
Korean Journal of Sociology. Lee Yongsoo (2009)
Since the economic crisis of Korea in 1997, increasing concerns about the contingent employment have led live discussions and researches on the issue. The scope of the research interests are wide enough to include the definition of contingent workers, the ration of them among all wageworkers, the discrimination against them at work, the demographic and organizational determinants of the contingent employment. Although they have produced fruitful outcomes, they are partial and incoherent as a whole and therefore a comprehensive understanding on the major determinants of contingent employment has not been achieved yet.
This thesis aims to examine the organizational determinants of contingent employment and the interacting relationships among those determinants. The analytical strategy of the thesis is as follows. It examines the determinants of the contingent employment which have been deduced from the previous researches and theories, and then it explores the relationships among them with contextual analysis. For the analysis, the Workplace Panel Survey(WPS) of the Korea Labor Institute(KLI) has been utilized.
The major findings are as follows. First, the contextual analysis of the relationships among the determinants of contingent employment helps to explain the problem of contradicting findings of the previous researches on the issue and provides alternative explanations. For instance, it is generally expected that when the level of employment volatility is high the ration of contingent workers is also high. However the research shows that if the factor of employment volatility is intermediated by human asset specificity of the firm, the ratio of contingent workers is tend to be low. Moreover, although it is generally accepted that companies hire contingent workers for cost-efficiency purpose, the indirect correlation between contingent employment and the factor of cost-efficiency negates the expected relationship a priori.
