FINANCIALISATION AND WORK IN THE EU: INEQUALITY, DEBT AND LABOUR MARKET SEGMENTATION

This article examines the link between financialisation and work in five EU countries representative of different types of financial system and welfare regime: Sweden, Germany, the UK, Portugal and Poland. This is done by way of a cross-country comparative exercise that analyses micro-level survey data on household income, debt, and working conditions. Notwithstanding some differences across the countries, living conditions have worsened after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) for a substantial number of households, as reflected in respondents' reports of declining household income, recourse to debt to cover living expenses and deteriorated employment relations. As the finance-work nexus has been more detrimental to low-income and non-standard workers in Germany and Poland, the article concludes that the impacts of financialisation on well-being cannot be simply inferred from the sizes of national financial systems or the extent of household engagement with finance, nor from extant welfare regime typologies. To better account for these impacts one also needs to consider the more intermediate effects of finance on well-being through labour market segmentation.