5 https://ijbassnet.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.33642/ijbass.v8n6p3 ©Center for Promoting Education and Research (CPER) USA www.cpernet.org International Journal of Business and Applied Social Science E-ISSN: 2469-6501 VOL: 8, ISSUE: 6 June/2022 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.33642/ijbass.v8n6p3 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Monitoring Early Employment Security in Greece Glykeria Stamatopoulou 1 , Dimitrios Parsanoglou 2 and Maria Symeonaki 1* 1 Department of Social Policy 1 Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece 2 Department of Sociology 2 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece Correspondence Author mail*: msymeon@panteion.gr ABSTRACT In the present paper, the composite indicator of early employment security introduced in Symeonaki et al. (2022) is used to measure and monitor early employment security in Greece. The composite indicator is estimated for the year 2018 using raw data drawn from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and is compared with its values for the years 2008 and 2016 which mark the beginning and the end of the economic crisis given in Symeonaki et al. (2022). More specifically, ten indicators are estimated to refer to three different domains capturing the entire procedure of the school-to-work transition of a young individual. The domains refer to the conditions that young individuals might face when entering the labor market, i.e., the labor market conditions, the quality of jobs that are accessible to them, and the transition smoothness when transferring from education and/or training to the labor market. The composite indicator synopsizes the many facets of school-to-work transition and reveals a very slight improvement for the year 2018 when compared to the year 2016. Nonetheless, the value of the early employment security indicator a decade after the economic crisis is still behind its value in 2008, implying that the country had not fully recovered in 2018 about early job insecurity. Keywords: job insecurity, composite indicators, EU-LFS, labour market, school-to-work transitions 1. Introduction Following Chung and van Oorschot (2011), the term employment security is defined as “the potential of having a secure and continuous employment career, which may entail changing employers or jobs”. It has been linked with the terms of flexibility and precarity in the sense that flexible, non-standard forms of employment may lead to long-term unemployment or unstable employment. One of the most vulnerable groups seems to be the young people who are more at risk of insecure and precarious forms of employment in their first stages of entering the labor market, compared to older and more established workers. A high percentage of people aged 15-29 are facing greater challenges in their search for secure employment after completing their education, and they often end up in casual or undeclared employment, part-time or temporary contracts, insufficiently paid jobs, or jobs without insurance (Kretsos 2010, Eurofound 2014, Eurostat 2022). These forms of employment may accelerate their entry into the labor market, acting as a stepping stone to a regular job for some graduates (Booth et al. 2002, Baranowska et al. 2011). However, many young people are trapped in a system of occasional, non-standard employment, characterized by a higher risk of in-work poverty and job insecurity, and many turnovers between employment, unemployment, and inactivity. According to Quintini et al. (2007), a considerable turnover between labor market states is evident in all OECD countries, while Matsumoto and Elder (2010) examine more than thirty countries between 2012 and 2016 and find out that only one- fourth of young graduates had completed their transition to fixed-term and satisfactory employment. Moreover, De Graaf- Zijl et al. (2011) have shown that temporary jobs do not facilitate young people to move from unemployment to regular employment, and Scherer (2005) concludes that flexible forms of employment may result in greater career instability, especially in countries with low employment protection, such Great Britain and Germany. On the other hand, Gebel (2010) reports that temporary contracts increase the risk of repeated temporary employment for new entrants in Germany, however, these effects are disappearing five years from the initial entry. The prolonged economic recession has worsened even more the employment situation of young individuals in Europe (Broughton et al. 2016). Especially in Greece, a country that has been hit more than the other Member States by the crisis, the austerity measures imposed by the EU and the IMF have caused a dramatic increase in youth unemployment rates and a deterioration of young peoples’ working conditions (European Parliament 2013). Thus, negative trends in the majority of labor market indicators are reported since 2008, and young Greeks seem to be more unsafe regarding their position in the labor market for other countries (Renold et. al 2014, Pusterla 2016, Karamessini et al. 2019). In particular, Karamessini et al. (2016a, 2016b) and Symeonaki et al. (2019) show that the transitions of young individuals from employment to unemployment have increased significantly during the years of the crisis, while in Eurofound (2014), the Mediterranean countries, including Greece, report the lowest transition rates for temporary employees into permanent jobs for the period 2008-2009. Even highly educated workers have struggled to achieve suitable employment after the crisis in Greece (Kazana- McCarthy 2022, Themelis 2017). The unemployment rates seem 13