ABSTRACT
The Polish labour market has undergone deep changes over the past fifteen years related to the development of flexible, and oftentimes precarious, employment. Even though the expansion of atypical employment has also been observed in other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (Kahancová and Martišková, 2014), Poland remains a “frontrunner” in terms of the share of temporary employees. Between 2000 and 2014, it rose from 5.6 per cent to 28.3 per cent for employees aged 15-64, and from 14.2 per cent to 71.2 per cent in the case of young workers (15-24). At the same time (2000-2014), in other Visegrád countries which fall into the same type of embedded neoliberal regimes (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012) or dependent market economies (Nölke and Vliegenthart, 2009), the share of temporary employees (in the age category 15-64) increased considerably less: in Hungary from 5.6 to 10.8 per cent; in the Czech Republic from 7.2 to 9.7 per cent; and in Slovakia from 4 per cent to 8.8 per cent (Eurostat LFS). Moreover, as estimated by the Central Statistical Office of Poland (GUS, 2015), 1.4 million of the temporary employees work solely on what are called ‘civil-law contracts,’1 which are the least secure and stable form of the employment and the among most popular type of employment contract used for hiring young people.
