Precarious employment in metropolitan areas: a qualitative comparative analysis to identify causal pathways to public policies

Abstract

There is a growth of precarious employment in many global metropolitan areas, as the effects of the gig economy, outsourcing, sub-contracting and other non-traditional and precarious employment practices spread through urban labor markets. Moreover, global cities are growing in population and generating new employment faster than other areas. As a result, cities are generating social costs faster than their ability to generate fiscal revenue, creating dilemmas for metropolitan governments. While some metropolitan governments have created labor policies to address growing precarious employment, others appear to take little or no policy action; and there have rarely or never been studies on the decision-making process to address precarious employment at the level of metropolitan cities, despite their importance in addressing this increasingly significant policy challenge. This study employs a mixed models method in eleven global gateway cities, first using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to look at issues of local agency, political and structural tendencies, and social actors, particularly trade unions, to understand what casual recipes lead to the decision and how the decision unfolds as governments and different models of trade unionism interact. We find that there are two causal pathways to a policy decision to protect workers from precariousness. One, more top-down in process, relies upon the presence of a pro-worker government, local agency over policy-making and a poor labor market; the other, more bottom-up, upon the presence of a pro-worker government, local agency over policy-making and the presence of social movement unionism. The study next does process-tracing for two successful examples where cities chose to develop a policy on precarious employment, in Mexico City and Los Angeles, each of which represents one of the two causal pathways. Finally, the study adds a short reflection on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on precarious employment in each city, as well as the new policies each city has taken to deepen its support of precarious workers during this time.