Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Supporting People Living a Temp Life
In a February 9 article in the New York Times, Liz Alderman writes about the stressful lives of many European “permatemps,” people who are stuck working a seemingly endless series of temporary jobs (“’Feeling ‘Pressure All the Time on Europe’s Treadmill of Temporary Work,” www.nytimes.com). Alderman uses case studies to introduce the life experiences of permatemps: “While the region’s economy is finally recovering, more than half of all new jobs created in the European Union since 2010 have been through temporary contracts. This is the legacy of a painful financial crisis that has left employers wary of hiring permanent workers in a tenuous economy where growth is still weak. Under European labor laws, permanent workers are usually more difficult to lay off and require more costly benefit packages, making temporary contracts appealing…Temporary work has become widespread in the United States, too, where the explosion of the so-called gig economy has …
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