Introduction

The first dimension that we will focus on is that of employment security, operationalised through employment continuity, that is, continuity in the condition of being employed, also with different jobs and different employers. Other conditions being equal, non-standard workers – those with fixed-term contracts in particular – run a higher risk of precariousness, vis-à-vis standard workers, if the higher contract discontinuity they are subject to, due to contract expiration, translates into higher employment discontinuity.

Contract discontinuity and employment discontinuity are indeed not the same thing. First of all, the fact that a contract has an expiration date does not necessarily mean that the contract will actually last for a shorter period of time. Moreover, the duration of a contract does not coincide with the duration of an employment relationship: fixed-term contracts might be used as probationary periods, at the end of which the selected workers are kept on by the firm. Lastly, employment relationships with a shorter duration are also compatible with essentially uninterrupted careers if the transitions from one job to the next – the so-called job-to-job transitions – are sufficiently frequent and the periods of non-employment sufficiently short. Hence, working with fixed-term contracts does not necessarily mean having more discontinuous careers.

Verifying if this is actually the case is an empirical issue, which is precisely what we will do in this chapter. We will prove that although open-ended contracts are far from being ‘permanent’, fixed-term contracts are even shorter. This greater contract discontinuity is generally not offset by more frequent transitions to a new job or by sufficiently shorter non-employment periods. As a consequence, workers whose careers are exclusively or almost exclusively made up of fixed-term contracts are exposed to high employment discontinuity, which leads to low employment security. It is therefore understandable that most fixed-term workers wish to have open-ended contracts. We will nonetheless argue that, in Italy, non-standard contracts hardly act as ports of entry into standard employment. The last section of this chapter will place the empirical evidence from the Italian situation within the context provided by Germany, Japan and Spain.

A descriptive analysis of work careers

Careers analysed in this chapter have been pieced together using data from the Work Histories Italian Panel (WHIP: see Appendix A).