Precarious employment and stress: Social factors with a biomedical impact

Precarious employment is one of the most important social determinants of health that has a key weight to explain the health and well-being of workers, families and communities. Changes in the labor market in the last decades of the 20th century have led to the erosion of the "standard employment relationship" and the proliferation of flexible and precarious forms of employment. Many authors have studied the precariousness of work through unidimensional variables such as temporality or perceived labor insecurity. However, the precariousness of employment is a generalized phenomenon that affects both temporary and permanent workers, which justifies the use of a multidimensional construct of precariousness and not only the analysis of the type of contract as a uni-dimensional indicator.
Despite growing evidence on the association between precarious employment and health, studies in social epidemiology tend to focus on temporal trends and correlations between precariousness and health according to worker profiles, but not in the mechanisms that explain this relationship, both biomedical and socioeconomic. However, this analysis is essential for designing policies to improve health and well-being, especially for the most vulnerable workers, and to combat health inequalities. This project aims to fill this gap from both sides: biomedical and socioeconomic, which allows to put together the existing evidence on the complex network of consequences of precarious employment and its link with health and well-being.
The objectives of this project are (1) to analyze the association between multidimensional precarious employment and chronic stress in salaried workers in Catalonia, (2) to understand the mechanisms that explain the impact of precarious work on stress, (3) to analyze health inequalities across the two previous objectives.
The proposed research has a mixed quantitative-quantitative-qualitative sequential design. It is a methodological design in which each phase has an N and collects different data. These phrases are chained together so that the partial results of the quantitative phases guide the selection of the sample of subsequent phases. Broadly speaking, in the first place PRESSED proposes to carry out an analysis of secondary survey data with the European Working Conditions Survey for the case of Spain in 2015, with which a social map of labor precariousness in Spain will be drawn up. Secondly, it is proposed to conduct a survey on a small sample about precarious work, social precariousness and health. The population of this sample will also be asked to sample a hair to perform an analysis of cortisol levels - used as a biological marker of chronic stress. In the third place, a sub-sample will be selected for semi-structured qualitative interviews, in which the latter will be explored in order to explain how and why subjective elements (experience of uncertainty), processes of socioeconomic precarization (material deprivation) and relational environments (erosion of informal support networks) accompanying precarious employemnt have an impact on stress.

Precarious employment —those with instability, low wages, and limited rights— can seriously affect people’s health and well-being. Although these jobs have become more common in recent decades, we still know little about how they directly impact the body and mind.
The PRESSED project explores how precarious employment leads to chronic stress and harms health. It combines social science and biomedical tools to do this. Instead of focusing only on temporary contracts, it looks at many dimensions of job quality, such as insecurity, low income, lack of protection, and limited workplace rights.
The research was carried out in three stages:
- First, previous survey data was analyzed to create a “social map” of job precariousness in Spain.
- Next, a survey was conducted with workers in Barcelona about their working conditions and health. Hair samples were also collected to measure cortisol levels, a biological marker of chronic stress.
- Finally, a selected group of participants were part of in-depth interviews to better understand how precarious work is experienced and how it affects health, especially through economic hardship, daily uncertainty, and weak social support networks.
This study aims to inform better labor and public health policies, especially for the most vulnerable workers. Understanding how precarious employment “gets under the skin” is essential to reducing health inequalities.