The EU is committed to policies intended to make Europe a highly competitive, dynamic, knowledge-based economy within a framework of progressive social rights. However, this ambition does not match what trade unions are seeing on the ground. This study shows that instead they are encountering a growing number of workers whose lives are blighted by low pay,
poor prospects and exclusion from credit markets; workers missing out on protections from the state (such as social security, welfare schemes and labour law enforcement) and afraid of talking to trade unions; workers faced with job insecurity that causes them stress and prevents them from planning their lives and futures. This is the world of precarious work and it not only generates misery for the workers doing it, it is also infectious: undermining the hard-won terms and conditions of employment of comparable workers in the same employment markets and destroying decent jobs provided by competitors in the same sectors.
EFFAT commissioned this study because its member trade unions were reporting their concerns about increasing incidences of precarious work in the sectors for which they are European social partners (agriculture, hotels, restaurants, catering, tourism, food, drink and tobacco). Many of these EFFAT sectors are particularly affected by the problem of precarious work.
