The Embodiment of Insecurity: How Precarious Labour Market Trajectories Affect Young Workers’ Health and Wellbeing in Catalonia (Spain)

Power relations, welfare provision, labour rights, and neoliberal regulations and discourses lead to the social production of health inequalities. In this chapter diverse pathways are identified through which the precarization of the labour market affect the physical and mental health of young workers. Longitudinal retrospective data from the 2017 Catalan Youth Survey (n=1,247) are used to obtain typologies of youth labour trajectories. Three ‘types’, representing a continuum of precarity, are proposed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample (n=13) determined according to the typologies. Three pathways emerged through which precarious trajectories affected young workers health and wellbeing: (i) material deprivation; (ii) the limiting of their agency in the construction of future; and (iii) harmful psychosocial working conditions. Precarity and insecurity, understood, after Pierre Bourdieu, as a mode of domination that creates submissive dispositions and constrains workers to the acceptance of exploitation, shape a pathogenic eco-social environment that affects individuals’ health.