Bemanningsupproret

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the work situation for temporary workers within the field of journalism. During the past decade, influential external forces such as commercialization, new technologies and increased competition have brought great changes within the industry. As a result, employers value flexibility of manpower, not least to reduce cost, where the flexible employee is usually leased by the media company from a manpower company. Today it is a normal practice with manpower companies and this way of hourly paid form of employment. Although the temporary worker can sometimes benefit from this kind of employment, there are also significant setbacks like job insecurity. The insecurity has an impact on leased journalists to work under deficient conditions with incapability to plan their free-time, lower wages compared to permanent employees, lack of competence development. Additionally, the leased journalists are more likely to fail in their social relations at job. Hence, factors like abovementioned causes stress and may affect the employee’s psychological wellbeing negatively. As a consequence, the quality of work produced by future increasingly leased journalists may be negatively impacted, which can have effects of the democracy. Job insecurity is a complex phenomena to measure, however by identifying four main themes this study seeks to provide a pervasive picture on job insecurity for leased journalists. The themes were investigated through the method of conversation analysis, resulting in six semi-structured interviews with temporary workers from staffing companies. The material was then transcribed and interpreted hermeneutically. This study finds a correlation between shorter assignments and stress. The leased journalists are more prone to feel stressed when they are changing work with short intervals of time. Hence, this study contributes to recent research within the same field and consolidates the drawbacks for leased employees.