"A multidimensional phenomenon encompassing income inadequacy, employment insecurity and lack of workplace rights," is how Eurofound defines employment vulnerability for living and working conditions.
In its latest report, the tripartite EU agency providing knowledge to assist in the development of better social, employment and work-related policies, found that 18.8% of jobs across the EU, close to one in five, fell below the bar on at least one of those definitional dimensions in 2021, the most recent year with comparable income data.
However, the direction of the trend is encouraging.
Vulnerability climbed from 21.4% in 2009 to 23.8% in 2014 in the wake of the financial crisis, driven by a surge in involuntary temporary and part-time work, before declining steadily from 2016 onwards to below its pre-crisis level.
That chimes with the agency's overview of its 2024 working conditions survey, published in April, which reported gradually improving job quality in Europe alongside persistent divides.
A very uneven map
Spain has the highest vulnerability rate at 29%, followed by Portugal and Luxembourg at 25% and Italy at 24%, while Hungary (17%), Malta and Bulgaria (both 18%) record the lowest levels.
Data from 2021 is unavailable for Cyprus, Czechia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Sweden, therefore those countries were excluded from the study.
The nature of the problem differs as much as its scale.
In continental countries such as Germany and Austria, and across central and eastern Europe, low pay is the dominant driver, accounting for nearly three quarters of vulnerability in Bulgaria in the report's 2019 breakdown.
Elsewhere the culprit is insecurity as involuntary temporary and part-time work dominates in Mediterranean and Nordic states, and contributes 56% of the total in Ireland, the highest share in the EU.
Luxembourg's surprising position near the top reflects the fact that pay is measured against each country's own median income.
Who carries the risk
Women, young workers, migrants, Roma, people with disabilities and LGBT+ individuals are all disproportionately likely to hold vulnerable jobs, held back by discrimination, care responsibilities and, for migrants, legal hurdles and unrecognised qualifications.
Education offers powerful protection.
For example, in Hungary, 58% of workers with low levels of education are vulnerable against just 6% of graduates.
So does time, as each additional year in the labour market cuts the risk by one percentage point, roughly 20% over a 20-year career.
Youth vulnerability can be striking, with 59% of young Danish workers vulnerable in 2015 against 11% of adults, although in Nordic countries it is largely a transitory phase on the way to stable jobs.
The cost of stacking disadvantages
Vulnerability in a single dimension is not a sentence to a bad working life, and such employees sometimes report better outcomes than their secure colleagues, on work intensity for instance.
"It is the accumulation of multiple vulnerabilities that consistently leads to negative outcomes," the report finds, listing poorer prospects, limited access to training, less autonomy and unpredictable earnings.
The toll is mental rather than physical as highly vulnerable workers show higher rates of anxiety and depression, even though they are less likely to report work-related stress.
Although that reads counterintuitively, it is precisely what the survey data show, and the report presents both findings without attempting to reconcile them as the causes for that increase in anxiety and depression are evidently not work-related.
With the European Commission's Quality Jobs Act under consultation, Eurofound argues that flexibility must be preserved without letting atypical work erode standards, and that rules are only as good as the labour inspectorates enforcing them.
