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The successive crises of the 21st century (2008/2009 global recession, COVID-19) have significantly affected the organisation of work and increased the flexibilisation and precarisation of labour, reflecting the changing needs of capital accumulation. Although employment reorganisation is unevenly distributed across space, the link between labour precarisation and cities or regions has not been studied in depth, with most research efforts focusing on the national scale. This article enriches the emerging literature for composite indices of labour market change by constructing an index of labour precarity at the regional scale. It estimates the very Flexible Contractual Arrangements Composite Index in the NUTS2 regions of the European Union from 2008 to 2020 to provide a comparative analysis of the impact of the global recession of 2008/2009 and the initial implications of COVID-19. The findings highlight a persistent division between peripheral and core regions. High precarity is a persistent feature of less developed regions, although it is also increasing significantly in urbanised, economically advanced regions. As found, the degree of labour precarity of a regional labour market is the complex result of national factors as well as regional characteristics such as specialisation, remoteness, path dependency, and local institutional practises and population dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is a global pandemic but has a particular geography to it, differentially affecting people and places. Here we explore its impact upon labour markets in the Mediterranean European Union (EU) countries. Our analysis is part of a collective work-in-progress monitoring the pandemic's effects upon workers since early March 2020. First we note that there is a geographical political economy to pandemics. We then scrutinise the current pandemic's spatiality and impact upon Mediterranean EU workers. Following this, we discuss how workers are responding to the pandemic and how this is remaking the geography of employment. As such, our paper represents a contribution to the ongoing development of the Labour Geography literature. Overall, we stress that workers face a variety of choices in responding to the pandemic, choices which are, of course, shaped by the geographical contexts within which workers find themselves. In deciding whether and how to act, they are playing proactive roles in shaping COVID-19's impact upon the geography of employment and emerging labour landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the 2008/2009 economic crisis in Greece and its impact upon employment precarity. Specifically, we focus upon changing regional patterns of waged part-timerism during three periods: the 2005–2008 pre-crisis period; the 2009–12 deep recession; and the 2013–2016 period of mild stabilization. Our analysis reveals important geographical and sectoral variations in the growth of this type of underemployment. In particular, we find that metropolitan regions have experienced the heaviest losses in full-time waged employment and a significant expansion of underemployment. Moreover, they have struggled to bounce back effectively during the period of stabilization. By way of contrast, island regions orientated towards tourism weathered the crisis to a much better degree, with many avoiding the acute flexibilization felt in more urbanized regions. Our study observes a "downwards convergence" of regional employment figures that is caused by Attica's disproportionate crisis. This contrasts popular accounts that focus upon productive output. Moreover, by documenting distinct sectoral trajectories, such as the substantial flexibilization of tourism-related activities, we shed light upon the specifics of an industry often praised for its adaptiveness. Ultimately, through exploring the changing spatialities and sectoral specificities of growing flexibility during a period of recession and recovery, our study provides a geographically sensitive perspective on the emerging dynamics of the Greek reserve army of labour. In so doing, we further historical geographical materialist understandings of the capitalist crisis in Southern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the regional dimensions of under-employment by analysing the uneven dispersion of part-time jobs in Greece. It understands under-employment as an integral dimension of contemporary flexible labour trends, triggered by devaluation and expanding amid crisis, although in diverse geographical and sectoral terms. It follows a methodology that comparatively analyses statistical data, relevant secondary sources and previous case studies, before moving to a theoretical contextualization of the findings. Based on this framework, NUTS-II level total employment and part-time work data are analysed through location quotients, and a new embellishment of shift-share analysis is implemented for 2005–2008 and 2009–2012 across nine sectors. The findings reveal four distinct, although porous, patterns of under-employment that are distinguished according to different regional productive specializations and the impact of structural or regional effects. The reasons why some regional economies, such as the tourist ones, were more resistant to employment losses, and at the same time the most keen on expanding part-time work, are scrutinized. Concluding, three deeper causal mechanisms, namely productive-technological, organizational and institutional, that determine the under-employment patterns revealed, are discussed and contrasted to relevant literature findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, Mediterranean countries were called on by European Union officials to provide for a “less-rigid” regulatory framework, in order to enhance “flexicurity”. This paper critically examines post-2008 flexibilization trends by focusing on Spanish, Italian and Greek regions. Starting from a contextualization of atypical employment and security, it then moves in a twofold direction; firstly, it presents the Flexible Contractual Arrangements and Active Labour Market Policies composite indicators, calculated for the NUTS-II regions of 12 member states for 2008 and 2011. These indicators reveal the changing ranking, especially of the Greek regions, towards higher labour market flexibility and relatively low levels of employability security; secondly, it focuses on the changing forms of atypical labour in the six regions that host the capital and the most important port city of Greece, Italy and Spain, respectively, by offering data on the expansion of flexible arrangements therein. The uneven flexibilization trends found in the study regions are seen as an outcome of the interaction between the general devaluation trends, different backgrounds and regionally specific patterns of labour market adjustment, while employment is found to be neither “rigid” nor “flexicure”. The paper concludes with some remarks on the relation between post-2008 dismantling of local labour regimes, restructuring and flexicurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]