Living with precarious work: The case of graduates in Denmark

Precarious work is a term often associated with increasingly insecure wage and work conditions for unskilled or lowskilled workers, vulnerable groups and migrant workers working in the private sector. Reasons for that are obvious, since this is where the tendencies are first depicted. However, among graduates there is a increasing amount of employees with temporary work contracts, declining income and generally more insecure work conditions. In fact, numbers show that precariousness is growing faster among graduates than among other groups on the labour market.
In Denmark the labor market is strongly regulated by collective agreements and influential labor market organisations. It is surrounded by the so-called flexicurity model combining a high level of flexibility with a high level of social security. However - during the last decades the balance between flexibility and security has tipped in favor of flexibility and it is becoming increasingly difficult to acces social benefits. On a global level the precariousness must be seen related to the escalation of different forms of flexibility, postfordist deregulation, neoliberal governance and
In this paper, we present selected findings from a Danish research project, exploring how precarious work conditions begin to emerge in the academic part of the labour market. Unlike the majority of current Danish Research on precarious work, this study is mainly qualitative and seeks to explore the subjective dimensions of precariousness. The research questions focus on what precarity is about, when it is comes to graduates. How do the graduates interpret and respond to their conditions and how do they cope with the growing insecurity and unpredictability of their worklife?