Does Precarity of Employment Affect All Spheres of Life?

The paper presents the author's analysis of the collective monograph entitled "From Precarious Employment to Precarity of Life." Despite the variety of precarious employment aspects discussed in separate chapters, the authors are united by a methodological principle: singling out the personality of an employee – as an individual, a resident, a worker, and a participant in his/her immediate environment in the context of interpersonal communication – and taking this personality into account in the analysis of social roles. Such an integrated approach allows to see the interconnection between the spheres of production and non-production life of people belonging to different professional groups and having different employment statuses. The main hypothesis of our study is that precarity of employment entails precarity of other spheres of life. This hypothesis is tested primarily by comparing precarious and non-precarious persons in their responses to relevant questions of a survey using the percentage difference method. Our analysis of the monograph content and the summary tables in the appendices allowed to conclude that there is not enough evidence to support this hypothesis. To better understand the differences described for the many aspects covered in the monograph, we have compiled a collective social and demographic profile of a precarious employee. Using this profile as a model for rechecking the authors' empirical generalizations led us to conclude that the influence of a third factor (sex, age, education) is often at the back of detectable differences between precarious and non-precarious persons.