Prekäre Beschäftigung und unsichere Haushaltslagen im Lebensverlauf: Gibt es in Deutschland ein verfestigtes Prekariat ?

Precarious employment and insecure household situations: Is there consolidated precarity in Germany? Precariousness and the precariat remain issues in the current discourses on the structural change of employment. Precarious employment, although still socially problematic, seems to be relatively widespread in today’s Germany. However, it is still an unsolved empirical question whether there actually is a precariat, understood as a social group or class living and working under precarious conditions, with little prospects to improve their life chances over time – and if so, how large the group is. So far, there is a lack of longitudinal studies, and most of the present studies investigate either precarious employment or precarious living ­circumstances of households. In this paper both employment and household contexts are considered in order to answer the question whether there actually exists a stable precarized social group in Germany. The empirical analysis is based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (G-SOEP) using data for two decades from 1993 to 2012. Indices capture the complex facets and extent of precarious employment and precarious life situations in the household for a sample of about 10 000 employed individuals. Results show that about one eighth of the surveyed employed individuals in Germany are constantly in a state of precariousness, where precarious employment and precarious life situations in the household are cumulating.