Prevalence of poor self-rated health and common mental disorder among persistently precarious employed adults.

BACKGROUND

The aftermath of the 2008 recession created conditions in which precarious employment may have become more common in the UK. We characterized two distinct periods: high unemployment/lower income (2011-5) and lower unemployment/stagnant income (2015-9).

AIMS: We aimed to describe the prevalence and persistence of these dimensions of precarious employment over two time periods (2011-5 and 2015-9) and investigate the prevalence of precarious employment patterns, poor self-rated health and common mental disorder.

METHODS

We used the UK Longitudinal Household Study to create employment history sequences for three dimensions of precarious employment using two four-wave samples. We applied latent class analysis to sequenced data to identify people persistently exposed to each dimension of precarious employment. We calculated age-sex standardized prevalence of poor self-rated health and common mental disorder by latent class for each precarious employment dimension.

RESULTS

Our analysis included 16 161 (2011-15) and 12 963 (2015-19) individuals. We found a latent class representing persistent exposure to each of the three precarity dimensions, but little overlap between these classes. Latent classes were very similar for both study periods. Prevalence of poor self-rated health and common mental disorder increased for most latent classes between 2011-15 and 2015-19. Employment discontinuity had the highest prevalence out of the precariously employed latent classes for both outcomes.

CONCLUSIONS

A minority of workers in the UK were in a state of chronic precarity, which did not change substantially between the two time periods. Experiencing persistent employment discontinuity was the dimension of precarity with the highest levels of poor health.