Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant
Project: Working at the margin: the consequences of non-standard employment
Chief Investigator: Prof Mark Wooden
Duration: 2016-2018
About the project:
The broad aim of this project is to improve understanding of the nature and impacts of non-standard forms of employment in Australia. Non-standard employment is defined here to include:
- casual work, where employment can be terminated with limited or no notice
- arrangements specifying employment of some pre-determined fixed duration
- labour hire, where employment is outsourced to agency workers, often on a short-term and/or casual basis
- among the self-employed, independent contractors, who sell their services to clients on a fixed-term basis.
The project will address the following over-arching research questions:
- What are the labour market pathways followed by workers, and especially by those that experience non-standard employment, and who follows which pathway?
- How does non-standard employment affect worker outcomes, including: earnings, job satisfaction, mental health, and other measures of material and emotional well-being?
- How do these effects vary across workers with different characteristics, or across different kinds of non-standard employment?
Two key hypotheses underlying much of the proposed research are:
- work outcomes will be less a function of a job’s contractual status and more a function of how work is organised in the workplace within contractual employment types
- impacts of non-standard employment are likely to vary across workers according to their job and personal characteristics.