Precarious Employment and Well-Being: Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

While precarious employment is not a new concept, it has been brought to the center of scholarly and public discourse worldwide by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. This essay delineates how precarious employment shapes well-being and situates that relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay also provides an overview of how the nine articles boldly investigate how these two layers of global risk—precarious employment and the pandemic—interact to shape individuals’ well-being. In addition to advancing theoretical and empirical knowledge by analyzing timely data from diverse sources and populations, these articles call for more efforts on worker protection reforms and government financial support.

In recent decades, a series of political, economic, technological, and cultural factors jointly propelled the rise of precarious employment in both the developed and developing world. Following Kalleberg (2009), we define precarious work as employment arrangements that are uncertain, unpredictable, and risky for workers. Against a backdrop of the shift from the Keynesian model of state intervention to neoliberal economic policies, scholars have attributed the proliferation of precarious work to a variety of factors such as the weakening of labor unions, the financialization of the economy, the digitalization of the workforce, and the rise of the discourse of individualism and personal responsibility (Kalleberg 2009, Kalleberg and Vallas 2017, Mai 2018, Morgan and Nelligan 2018, Vallas and Cummins 2015, Vallas and Schor 2020, Western and Rosenfeld 2011). These structural shifts have allowed employers to maintain a flexible workforce, increase the use of nonstandard workers, benefit from relaxed employment standards, and have great discretion in hiring and firing. The emboldening of business and capital corresponds directly to the weakening of working class power. Workers are exposed to more low-paid and short-term jobs, bear more risks that were previously assumed by governments or businesses, and have less access to collective representation. The advent of the precariat as a social class (Standing 2011) parallels the emergence of the risk society (Beck 2004), in which uncertainty and insecurity become core features of the lived experiences of millions of workers across the globe (Bauman 2013, Hacker 2019).

The surge in precarity and its repercussions have inspired a broad stream of scholarly work, policy discussion, and social activism. Earlier scholarship probing the ramifications of precarious work focused on employment-related elements such as pay, benefits, and job satisfaction (Aletraris 2010, Kalleberg et al. 2000, Ko and Yeh 2013). The literature on the impact of precarious employment has since expanded beyond strictly employment-related outcomes to analyze how nonstandard work influences different aspects of workers’ “precarious lives” (Kalleberg 2018). Emerging scholarship in this line of inquiry has documented how precarious employment generates significant consequences for various measures of well-being such as physical and mental health (Benach et al. 2016, Donnelly 2022, Donnelly et al. Forthcoming, Gevaert et al. 2021, Glavin et al. 2021, Macmillan and Shanahan 2021, Mai et al. 2019), prospects for career advancement and social mobility (Ayala-Hurtado 2022, Mai 2021, Pedulla 2016), ability to balance work and family life (Choper et al. 2022, Lim 2017, Rao 2017, Schneider et al. 2019), and sense of identity (Vallas and Christin 2018). This area of scholarly inquiry continues to flourish and is becoming a key body of literature in sociology, social psychology, industrial relations, management, and health sciences. In this special issue, we consider well-being to encompass mental and physical health, socioeconomic status and mobility, work-life balance, and other factors that contribute to quality of life.

Since late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the employment experiences of billions of employees around the world, threatening their well-being and harming their livelihoods. We argue that the pandemic has changed the experience of work precarity for many workers in different ways. First, some precarious workers suddenly became even more vulnerable. For example, employees’ already insecure working circumstances in restaurants, pubs, and movie theaters became more uncertain because of sudden layoffs and benefit cuts. As a result of their contracts not being renewed, many self-employed workers, independent contractors, gig workers, and freelancers faced further disruption to their income streams. It is also likely that many other workers in positions with limited autonomy and more uncertainty experienced heightened vulnerability during this time. Second, a new class of precarious workers emerged in the form of essential frontline service personnel who had frequent close interactions with customers, often without adequate safety measures. The “essential worker” language emerged largely during the pandemic and includes employees in groceries, retail stores, transportation, healthcare, nursing homes, and delivery services. Workers in essential frontline roles have been especially vulnerable, not only to the COVID-19 virus but also to overworking, lack of schedule control, and minimal benefits. Third, the pandemic placed employees in “good” occupations in a vulnerable position. Millions of highly skilled and highly paid full-time workers suddenly experienced a sense of precarity after being temporarily laid off or compelled to work for fewer hours, often for an undetermined period.

Given the widespread social and economic upheaval associated with the pandemic, it is critical to explore how the changes in working conditions and the general uncertainties have influenced precarious workers’ well-being, exacerbated existing dimensions of social stratification, and possibly inspired public policy debates and interventions. Several questions are worth asking at this juncture, for example: How do employment-related stress and pandemic-induced uncertainty combine to affect workers’ health? How do variations in implementation of workplace safety protocols impact workers’ physical and mental well-being? What are the roles of management and unions in shaping workers’ response to employment uncertainty caused by the pandemic? How do workers mobilize individual and family resources to cope with the risk of employment precarity and illness? How does the relationship between work and well-being vary cross-nationally and across various dimensions of social stratification (race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, disability status, etc.)? Despite some notable studies, there is a dire need for innovative theoretical and empirical visions on how the pandemic influenced the well-being of precarious workers. This gap in the existing literature is understandable and, in some ways, expected because the pandemic is a relatively recent phenomenon. At the time of writing, we are still in the midst of a public health crisis with rising cases in many parts of the world.

This special issue's primary intention is to push the field forward by filling the gap in research on how the pandemic changed the contours of the relationship between precarious work and well-being. In the remainder of this introductory essay, we provide a brief overview of the state of the literature on the association between precarious work and well-being. We subsequently describe how the pandemic might have complicated that relationship. We then discuss in detail how the innovative articles published in this two-part special issue offer distinctive perspectives on the interplay between work, well-being, and the pandemic.

Precarious Employment and Well-Being

The scholarship on the consequences of precarious work has generated substantial evidence that this mode of employment affects workers’ well-being. In a very comprehensive and forward-looking article, Benach et al. (2016) set the agenda for research on precarious work until 2025. They described several mechanisms through which precarious work might lead to adverse health outcomes and poor life quality. The authors explained that precarious workers experience higher exposure to poor working conditions, psychosocial stressors associated with low work autonomy and powerlessness, and various issues related to managing professional and personal lives. The authors shrewdly called for more research exploring a “detailed understanding of the pathways and mechanisms” (p.233) linking precarious work and health. Since then, scholars have generated further evidence on how these three mechanisms operate to shape the linkage between precarious work and well-being. The following section offers a few examples of such recent evidence. We focus on research published since 2016.

Social marginalization can operate as a key mechanism linking precarious work to poor health. Macmillan and Shanahan (2021) argued that precarious employment undermines self-efficacy, reduces social integration, and decreases social capital more broadly. Precariously employed workers are predicted to lack work autonomy, have a low capacity for social integration at work, and have fragmented social networks beyond the workplace. These factors jointly undermine their mental health. Relatedly, Glavin et al. (2021) demonstrated how freelancing work through an app-based service company fostered a sense of alienation and powerlessness. The high level of algorithmic control embedded in platforms limits worker interaction with employers and customers, obfuscates information about job availability, and intensifies competition through various forms of customer evaluation and gamification. These strategies constrain workers autonomy and generate a sense of isolation, which are detrimental to workers’ mental well-being.

In addition to social marginalization as a mechanism, the uncertainty embedded in precarious work also has important implications for workers’ ability to plan for their personal lives, particularly starting a family and having children. Lim (2017) showed that precarious employment arrangements are “bad jobs” for marriage: all indicators of precarious work decrease the odds of first marriage by up to 40% for men, while having part-time employment delays entry into first marriage for women. The inherent uncertainty in employment makes planning for romantic relationships and potential marriage prospects challenging (Rao 2017). Relatedly, unpredictable schedules—a common feature of nonstandard employment—pose significant challenges to workers’ ability to organize their lives. Relying on data from the Shift Project—an innovative dataset on retail and food service workers—scholars have demonstrated that on-call shifts, shift timing changes, work hour volatility, and short advance notice make workers struggle to arrange childcare and increase work-life conflict (Harknett et al. 2022, Luhr et al. 2022). Given the benefits of marriage for health (Umberson and Karas Montez 2010) and the detriment of work-life conflict (Bianchi and Milkie 2010), social disruption could be a key mechanism linking precarious work to mental and physical health.

Intimately linked with difficulties in managing personal lives is financial hardship. It is hardly surprising that, relative to their full-time counterparts, precarious workers generally receive lower income and higher levels of income volatility. Material hardship associated with precarious employment has implications for workers’ asset accumulation, housing quality, and access to healthcare. These factors in turn erode health and quality of life. Recent studies have added more evidence to document the dire financial picture associated with precarious employment. Schneider and Harknett (2021) documented that workers with schedule uncertainty are more likely to experience hunger, as well as overall hardship including residential, medical, and utility hardship. Using in-depth interviews with freelancing creative workers, Butler and Stoyanova Russell (2018) found that comedians regularly suppress their financially induced anxiety to keep a constant flow of gigs and to maintain relationships with producers even when the pay rate is low and the promptness of payment is questionable. Ferrante et al. (2019) found that for Italian men precarious work impacts mental health primarily through financial strain.

Beyond their personal lives, precarious employment might also threaten workers’ socioeconomic well-being by hindering the progression of their professional careers. Whether histories of nonstandard employment operate as “stepping-stone” or “dead-end” constitutes a significant debate. In their meta-analysis of studies that investigated the impact of temporary job on subsequent labor market performances, Filomena and Picchio (2022) reported that out of 78 observations from 64 articles, 45% provide evidence in favor of the dead-end hypothesis, while 23% report ambiguous or mixed findings. The authors cautiously noted that research in this literature typically compares careers of workers who experienced precarity to careers of the ones who did not using non-randomized observational data. In recent years, studies using experimentally designed randomization also shed light on this topic. Pedulla (2016) that part-time employment history is as scarring for male workers as a year of unemployment. Mai (2021) reported that a freelancing work history reduces workers’ odds of being invited to a job interview for a full-time position by about 30 percent. Altogether, this evidence illustrates the cost in terms of subsequent employment prospects as precarious workers navigate out of precarity to embrace organizational careers.

In sum, existing work shows that precarious employment affects workers’ well-being by exposing them to hazardous working conditions, threatening their sense of self and social relations, obscuring their ability to plan for their personal lives, increasing their financial hardship, and diminishing their career prospects. In the following section, we explore how the pandemic has complicated the relationship between work and well-being.

Work and Well-Being During the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the landscape of work for almost all workers. At the start of the pandemic, unemployment in the United States surged to 14.7% in April 2020 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020) as large sectors of the economy shut down. Even among workers who remained employed, wage loss was endemic. Evidence suggests that 60% of workers who retained their jobs experienced a wage cut or wage freeze in the first months of the pandemic (Cajner et al. 2020). In addition to changes in employment status and wages, the nature of work changed considerably. For example, a new category of worker—essential worker—emerged to describe workers critical to the functioning of society and who continued to work in person (CISA 2020). On the other hand, many workers who had the ability to telework began working remotely; about 40% of working-age Americans worked from home at the start of the pandemic (Pew Research Center, 2020). Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic created a unique landscape of work and many of these changes have endured beyond the initial months of the crisis.

Although most workers have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in some way, the impact of the pandemic could be particularly profound among precariously employed workers. For instance, workers in nonstandard employment arrangements typically have less power, less security, and fewer protections than workers in standard employment relationships (Benach et al. 2016, Hacker 2019). As such, the pandemic likely added uncertainty to already precarious working conditions. Moreover, this heightened vulnerability has occurred at a time when many countries have spent decades rolling back social safety nets. Precarious workers, then, may be a vulnerable population with concerning trajectories of well-being during and after the pandemic.

This special issue focuses on experiences related to work and employment, especially among precariously employed workers, as a key determinant of well-being during the pandemic. Indeed, mental health and well-being worsened considerably, during the COVID-19 pandemic such that rates of depression and anxiety in the United States were approximately four times higher in April–June 2020 compared to a similar period in 2019 (Czeisler et al. 2020, Ettman et al. 2020). Scholars speculated that the unparalleled transformation of work resulted in numerous challenges that likely diminished well-being. Indeed, recent research shows that income loss and financial insecurity increased the risk of depression and anxiety during the pandemic (e.g., Donnelly and Farina (2021); Zheng et al. (2021)). Among workers who remained employed, new challenges emerged that could undermine mental health. Essential workers, for example, experienced more mental health concerns than non-essential workers (e.g., Bell et al. (2021),Mayer et al. (2022)) perhaps due to the increased risk of COVID-19 infection at work, greater exposure to overwork, and minimal benefits. While this initial research suggests that work-related changes have undermined mental health and well-being during the pandemic, much remains to be known about the many aspects of employment, especially precarious employment, that could affect well-being during the pandemic.

The possible mechanisms linking precarious work to well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely numerous and multifaceted. One possibility is that the well-documented mechanisms outlined above (i.e., psychosocial stressors, difficulty managing work and nonwork life, financial hardship) would still be relevant but may, in fact, be more salient during this time. For example, financial hardship among the precariously employed could be more consequential if workers had to miss work due to COVID-19 exposure and illness within their household and/or had additional expenses related to protective equipment or food for children when schools were closed. Another possibility is that new mechanisms linking precarious work and well-being emerged during the pandemic. For instance, precarious workers may have less ability to protect themselves and their family members from COVID-19 exposure at work and/or have less power to advocate for a safe working environment. Together, these mechanisms could diminish well-being among workers. However, existing studies have not yet tested specific mechanisms linking precarious work and well-being during the pandemic.

An important consideration is that work experiences have been marked by inequity during the pandemic. Racially minoritized adults, women, and adults with less education were more likely to lose their jobs in the initial months of the pandemic (Kochhar 2021, Moen et al. 2020). Moreover, many workers, primarily women, were forced to leave the labor force or reduce their work hours in the absence of childcare and in-person schooling (Collins et al. 2021a, Collins et al. 2021b). Compared to non-essential workers, essential workers are more likely to be racially minoritized adults with lower educational attainment and wages (Blau et al. 2021). Thus, while the pandemic has affected most workers, the burden of adverse work experiences likely falls largely on marginalized populations.

Inequities in work and stressful work-related experiences have dire consequences for well-being. Indeed, prior research posits that inequities in work, stress, and adverse experiences contribute to inequities in mental health and well-being (see Pearlin et al. (2005) Notably, inequities in work-related experiences by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status have occurred alongside other pandemic-related inequities such as higher rates of COVID-19 cases and mortality and more instances of discrimination and harassment among racially minoritized individuals (Andrasfay and Goldman 2021, Garcia et al. 2021, Laurencin and Walker 2020). The unequal landscape of work and other stressors during the pandemic could fuel inequities in mental health and well-being—a possibility that must be explored.

Given the changes in work occurring alongside a rise in depression, anxiety, and other mental health concerns, it is necessary to advance scholarship on work and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the literature on work and well-being is robust and spans countless disciplines, the pandemic offers an opportunity to test and refine existing theories during a unique historical period and to shed light on the experiences of marginalized workers. Thus, in this special issue, we aim to understand linkages between work and well-being across the world during the pandemic in ways that can inform existing theories and future research.

Insights on Two Layers of Global Risk: Precarious Employment in the COVID-19 Crisis

This two-part special issue centers on the coexistence of two layers of global risk: the risk of precarious employment in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. This special issue grew out of a virtual international conference, “Precarious Employment and Well-Being During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which was co-sponsored by Rutgers and Vanderbilt Universities and held on January 21, 2022. The issue organizes nine papers thematically into two parts. Part I comprises four quantitative articles related to “Market Conditions, Employment Quality, and Workplace Politics” and appears in the February 2023 issue of this journal. Part II includes three quantitative and two mixed-method papers tackling the theme of “The Experience and Perception of Employment Precarity” and is scheduled for publication in the May 2023 issue of Work and Occupations. Part I begins with Alon's challenge to the conceptualization and operationalization of precarious work (Alon 2023), followed by two articles on job quality (Reynolds and Kincaid 2023, Rho et al. 2023) and one article on workplace politics (Woods et al. 2023). As Alon points out, while being useful and popular for its simultaneous consideration of employment instability and employment-contingent outcomes, a comprehensive definition of precarious work limits research to only employed individuals. This limitation can create two issues (sample selection bias and truncated heterogeneity of employment instability), which overlook labor force dynamics and lead to biased estimates of precarious work and its consequences. Considering that recessions aggravate these two issues, Alon identifies the pandemic as a unique opportunity for the appraisal of the two issues via the comparison of two market conditions (pre-COVID-19 near full employment era and COVID-19 recession era) among the entire working-age population. Her analysis of multiple years of cross-sectional survey data in Israel demonstrates the presence of these two issues. Employment instability is higher in the COVID-19 recession era than the pre-COVID-19 era. During the COVID-19 recession era, employment instability is negatively associated with the probability of employment, and employment status is in turn negatively associated with economic insecurity at all levels of employment instability, whereas these patterns do not appear during the pre-COVID-19 era. Alon ends her article with a call for a conceptual shift from precarious work to a more inclusive construct, precarious employment, and more effective estimates of “the true scope of employment precarity.”

Precarious work comes in diverse forms. One of the relatively new but increasingly prevalent forms is gig work mediated by digital platform technologies. Theoretically speaking, gig work has both advantages and disadvantages and scholars debate whether its benefits can offset its drawbacks. The COVID-19 crisis adds another puzzling layer to this debate. Competing perspectives are possible on whether the pandemic pushes gig workers toward or away from gig work and whether increased gig working hours increase financial returns. Reynolds and Kincaid examine these competing perspectives with their focus on one specific type of gig work, microtask work. As their analysis of panel data from U.S. workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform shows, one third of existing workers increased their microtask hours, especially for those who lost household income or wage/salary hours. However, supporting the platform-dependence and precarity perspectives, increased working hours generated little financial returns, especially for those without other sources of income. Reynolds and Kincaid echo the warning that “gig work is not a viable substitute for the social safety net” and the necessity for worker protection reforms.

One major characteristic of precarious work is job insecurity. Job insecurity is harmful and unarguably exacerbated by the pandemic. It is unclear, however, how job insecurity is associated with workers’ response during the COVID-19 recession and how workplace factors affect that association. Rho and colleagues address these research gaps and center their focus on workers’ voice and three workplace factors (unions, managers, and employment arrangements). Results from a sample of Illinois and Michigan workers do not support the job insecurity as a stressor perspective such that job insecurity is not associated with voice. Despite their positive associations with voice, unions and managerial receptiveness do not serve as a stress buffer. That is, insecure workers remain less likely to exercise voice than secure workers as confidence in organized labor or perception of managerial receptiveness increases. Consistent with the less investment perspective, insecure nonstandard workers are less likely to speak up than their secure counterparts, whereas this pattern does not appear among standard workers.

Precarious work and the pandemic do not exist in a political vacuum. Instead, they co-exist in a world with intense political polarization. Among others, issues on science and COVID-19 are highly politically polarized. Woods, Schneider, and Harknett investigate the unanswered question of how political polarization shapes the relationship between COVID-19 workplace safety measures and individual workers’ well-being. They use an underexamined measure of political polarization (support for political leaders) and analyze a sample of U.S. frontline service sector workers, who are more proximate to the risks of COVID-19 in their workplaces. They find that Biden voters react more to workplace risks than Trump voters. The positive associations between COVID-19 workplace safety measures and workers’ feeling of safety and mental well-being apply only to Biden voters.

In Part II, five articles center on the experiences and perception of employment precarity during the pandemic. Three quantitative studies show stressful dark sides of precarity during the pandemic (Brown and Ciciurkaite Forthcoming, Grace Forthcoming, Wu Forthcoming) whereas two mixed-method papers suggest possible temporary bright sides(Ravenelle and Kowalski Forthcoming, Schieman et al. Forthcoming). As for the harmful dark sides, some populations bear multiple sources of stress and their high stress levels are further exacerbated by the pandemic. Brown and Ciciurkaite explore simultaneously three sources of stress (employment precarity, disability, and discrimination) and their main and interactive effects on depressive symptoms. They use community survey data in the United States and measure employment precarity as one single factor based on ten items, which include employment challenges and three aspects of uncertainty (contract, development, and income). Consistent with the minority stress framework and the stress process model, each source of stress is positively associated with depressive symptoms, and the dual stressful effects of employment precarity and discrimination are stronger for those with disabilities. Brown and Ciciurkaite encourage more policy and research efforts on the marginalized disabled working population.

Different from Brown and Ciciurkaite, who treat employment precarity as one single construct, Wu emphasizes the distinction between its objective and subjective dimensions. Employing survey data on workers from 27 E.U. member states, Wu captures the objective dimension of precarity as contractual instability and the subjective dimension using job insecurity and emotional precariousness. She also measures an additional stressor, the COVID-19 risk at work. In line with the stress process model, overall employment precarity is negatively associated with mental and subjective well-being. After it is decomposed into its two dimensions, only the subjective dimension plays a significant role. Between the two subjective indicators, emotional precariousness exerts a stronger impact. Contrary to the stress process model, the COVID-19 risk at work is protective of well-being outcomes net of indicators of employment precarity. Wu speculates possible explanations such as increased social integration.

According to the stress process model, stress is a process involving stress proliferation (from primary to secondary stressors) and coping resources. Grace applies this model fully to the relationship between a primary stressor (job displacement due to COVID-19) and mental well-being, using national survey data on U.S. adults. Furlough or job loss due to the pandemic (versus stable employment and job loss due to other reasons) is positively associated with depressive symptoms and anger partly via three pathways: two secondary stressors (financial strains and anticipatory stress about economic security) and coping resources. Among the three pathways, anticipatory worry about economic security is most salient. Grace urges more research on future-oriented stressors and the enforcement of worker protection policies.

The two mixed-method articles illustrate how the unique pandemic context manifests possible temporary bright sides through changing perceptions of employment precarity and time. In contrast to the stress process model, Schieman and colleagues propose the forced vacation perspective. This perspective argues that being temporarily laid off (versus continuous employment) early into the pandemic is buffered by the countervailing conditions of the earlier pandemic context and leads to a temporary, unforeseen, and forced vacation. They employ data from a national longitudinal survey of working adults and in-depth interviews in Canada. Their quantitative findings support the forced vacation perspective such that the association between temporary job disruption and psychological distress is initially negative and then becomes null. Their qualitative results suggest three possible explanations: temporary exemption from work stress, reduced internal attribution, and mitigated financial strain. Schieman and colleagues do warn us about the temporary quality of vacations and the generalizability of their findings. Temporary job disruption can become harmful as it turns chronic or in societies with fewer government supports.

The Great Resignation, as described by Ravenelle and Kowalski, exemplifies the dramatic impacts of the pandemic on the labor market. Its causes remain under heated debate. Among others, the work passion ideology explanation argues that work passion can inspire workers to leave their jobs and actively pursue more fulfilling and lucrative careers. Going beyond prior work that limited this ideology primarily to creative professionals, Ravenelle and Kowalski demonstrate its adoption among low-wage precarious workers during the pandemic. In their mixed-method panel study of precarious and gig-based service workers in the New York metropolitan area, they document these workers’ self-reflection process from the pandemic's earlier period to its second surge. Under the condition of relative financial security generated by unprecedented government financial assistance, workers shift their experiences of time from “spending time” instrumentally for money to “investing time” in themselves for personal growth. They change their conceptualization of time from a “use-mindset” to an “investment-mindset.” They move their goal beyond employability to prioritize work passion. With the ending of government financial supports, Ravenelle and Kowalski are concerned about the continuity and realization of the work passion logic and emphasize the need for future long-term research.

While precarious work is as old as capitalism, it is brought to the center of scholarly and public discourse worldwide by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. It is an unfortunate but unique and urgent research opportunity for us to understand how these two layers of global risk—precarious work and the pandemic—interplay with each other to shape people's well-being. The nine cutting-edge articles in this special issue boldly pursue this research opportunity. As a whole, they employ unique timely data—quantitative and/or qualitative—from diverse sources, populations, and regions or societies. They advance our theoretical and empirical knowledge. In brief, as they suggest, we should adopt the more inclusive concept of precarious employment, compare the costs and benefits of different forms of precarious work, listen to precarious workers’ voice within different workplaces, analyze the role of politics and political polarization, pay more attention to marginalized working populations facing multiple sources of stress, distinguish the objective and subjective dimensions of employment precarity, lay out the stress proliferation process, and identify the temporary bright or beneficial consequences. The policy implications are clear and consistent. More efforts are needed for worker protection reforms and government financial supports.

Author Biographies

Quan D. Mai is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. His research explores the interplay of work, race, and space in shaping patterns of social stratification. His work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social Science & Medicine.

Lijun Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Her major research interests include social networks, medical sociology, and social stratification. Her work has appeared in Social Forces, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Society and Mental Health, Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, and Social Networks.

Rachel Donnelly is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on determinants of health across the life course, with an emphasis on stress, work, and family. With support from the National Institutes of Health, she examines how stressors and state-level policies jointly shape inequities in mental health.