Research On The Flexible Employees In New Types Of Business

In recent years,the maturity of mobile communication technology and the popularity of smartphones have driven various industries and internet technology to the full integration,the forms of employment in the global labour market have also undergone wide and profound changes.The emergence of labour-intensive economies,such as the internetbased platform economy,gig economy and on-demand economy,have generated a new group of labour force:they work for task-based projects which are raised by various platforms,such as online car-hailing drivers,food delivery workers and couriers.The scale of emerging professional groups is expanding,which has becoming the main force in the labour market of various countries.The way to work has also becoming an important channel to stabilize the employment situation under the epidemic.In practice,problems such as the ambiguity of the flexible employment relationship,the difficulty in labour relations identification,lack of labour rights protection and the difficulty in measuring workers’employment status have become increasingly urgent to be settled.Protecting workers’ social benefits and working rights in their flexible employment relationship has become an important part of establishing and improving our current employment security related policies and systems.However,for a long period,research on flexible employment has put much more contributions on the specific groups of people,which lack the systematic discussion on the nature of the employment relationship and the behavioral characteristics of flexible employment.In the existing relevant literature,flexible employment has been regarded as an alternative discourse of"informal employment",lacking a deeply investigation of the trend of employment flexibility.In the reality,new forms of employment have developed in novel ways and diversified models,which has profoundly affected workers employment behavior status and generated various consequences.Recently,debates on the definition of new forms of employment,employment characteristics,labour relations and social security policies have becoming more intense.Employment matters the most in people’s lives.The employment issues have never been a single problem of economy development,but the one to increase people’s livelihood and welfare,promoting the quality of economic and social development,maintaining the market-oriented employment mechanism and improving the modern social governance system.In this paper,based on the logic chain of "the nature of employment relationshipchoices of employment behavior-employment behavior status-consequences of employment behavior status",we use the 2016 China Migrants Dynamic Survey Data and the 2016 China Labour-force Dynamics Survey Data to estimate workers who are in flexible employment relations.This article focuses on 4 key issues:First,how to define the nature of the current new employment relationship in new forms of business?Shall we regard them as informal employment or nonstandard employment?What are the specific characteristics of the employment relationship?What kind of challenges that the current labour policies and social security systems are facing to meet the needs of regulating labour market?Second,what are the factors leading workers to choose the flexible employment?How does the internet operate for workers in the process of finding jobs?For workers engaged in flexible employment,are they voluntary or in voluntary to make this decision?Third,how are the workers’ status in the flexible employment?What are the factors influencing workers status?How to evaluate workers’ working circumstances,living conditions,economic conditions and social benefits rewards?Fourth,what are the consequences for workers who are under the new business models with the flexible employment behavior?In the trends of gig economy,how should we view the double-sided effects of the employment flexibility?The systematic answers to the above questions constitute the framework of analysing the contemporary employment flexibility and workers employment behaviors.The detail structure arrangement of this paper is as follows:The first chapter is the introduction of this article,including research background,research questions and purpose,ideas,framework,basic methods and content.The research background is mainly based on a brief review of the history of flexible employment in China and the West,focusing on the formation and development of flexible employment in China,and following flexible employment into a new stage of development,pointing out the inevitable trend and requirements.The research significance is mainly discussed by the theoretical and practical aspects and put forward the basic conclusions of this paper.The research framework draws on the ideas of this article and introduces the specific arrangements of each chapter of the full text.The research content briefly introduces the focus of the research from the three parts:theory,empirical and countermeasures.The second chapter is the review and commentary of the related literature research on flexible employment.Based on the summary of the world research development process of flexible employment,the literature on choices making,employment status and consequences of workers’flexible employment,as well as the influence of internet use on employment and the flexible employment under the new forms of business,we lay a deep theoretical foundation for analysing flexible employment in the new trend.The third chapter is the foundation of theories and framework.In this chapter,labour segmentation theory,healthy human capital theory,employment security theory and precarity theory are included.We conceptualize the definitions of the key words,comparing the differences between related concepts and synonyms,which would be helpful to do the further research.The fourth chapter is to give a summary of the current new trend and characteristics of flexible employment in the new forms of industry,clarifying the types of workers in the new flexible employment,analyzing the difficulties and challenges faced by workers,and put forward corresponding strategies to solve the problems.The fifth chapter conducts an empirical analysis on the factors influencing workers’behaviors of making choices of flexible employment.In this chapter,we focus on the impact of internet use and job characteristics on workers’ choices making.To divide types of flexible employment into informal employment and self-employed,we use Logistic regression model to estimate workers demographic characteristics,working characteristics,choices of intentions,and predicting the possibilities of entering into flexible employment relations.By replacing variables of internet use and using PSM propensity score matching methods,we conclude with the net impact of internet use on engaged into flexible employment.The sixth chapter is to build an evaluation system of employment stability index.In this chapter,based on the 2016 China labour-force Dynamic Survey Data,we use factor analysis to build an employment stability index,which includes 7 first-level indicators and 22 second-level indicators from both subjective and objective aspects.We also use it to evaluates the current employment flexibility in the new forms of business.The seventh chapter is an empirical analysis of the impact of employment stability on the mental health among young workers.In this chapter,we use the employment stability index built in Chapter 6 to calculated predictors of employment status among the young people.By using OLS regression model,we estimate the relationship between the employment stability of young workers and their mental health.Specifically,we measure young workers’mental health in two aspects:depression tendency and life satisfaction.We also use ordered logit regression model to test the robustness of the above results.Finally,by using the mediation effect model,we add social trust variable to investigate the internal mechanism of the relationship between young workers’ employment stability and their mental health.The eighth chapter is the conclusions,employment and social security policies outlook and further research prospects.On the basis of the summary and conclusion of this article,we put forward the future labour policies for protecting workers in flexible employment relationship and strengthening the social protection system.It also points out the short comings of the research of this article,and the future research prospects of flexible employment.Based on the existing literature and theoretical research,this paper deepens the understanding of the concepts of flexible employment,informal employment and nonstandard employment,and enriches the discussion of labourer’s employment choices,employment status and employment consequences.The main innovations are reflected in four aspects:First,this paper focuses on the characteristics of the employment relationship of flexible employment,examining the differences in the factors affecting the flexible employment of different employment relationship characteristics selected by workers,and distinguish and define flexible employment in terms of the purpose of employment and the nature of the employment relationship,and provides theoretical references for subsequent research on flexible employment.Nonstandard employment is mainly divided into informally employed and self-employed for inspection,analyzing the differences in the employment willingness of flexible employees engaged in different types of employment,which provides a useful idea for a more objective and rigorous view of flexible employment in the urban labour market.Second,this article constructs an employment stability index evaluation system that includes subjective and objective dimensions,which can comprehensively and in-depth summarize the two-sided impact of employment flexibility on workers.This article starts from the employment relationship characteristics of workers engaged in nonstandard employment and takes into account the positive and negative effects of employment flexibility on workers.The employment stability index system not only incorporates the short-term employment characteristics and employment status of workers,but also incorporates the upward mobility difficulties,social exclusion,and social equity caused by long-term employment instability and poor employment conditions.Factors such as insensitivity can provide a more in-depth measurement of the employment status of workers in the process of flexible employment.Third,using national micro-survey data to empirically test the relationship between employment stability and health,and try to provide empirical evidence for the service and management of flexible employees from the perspective of workers’ health,which can test the effect between the flexible employment status of workers and the employment consequences more objectively.This article puts forward the suggestion that the mental health of workers should be included in the basic social medical insurance,thereby strengthening the attention to the mental health of working group.This is a useful supplement and expansion to the promotion and development of nonstandard employment of workers in the new business.