The aim of this empirical study is to understand the impact of involuntary false self-employment on female educators’ job satisfaction and well-being in the public educational sector in Cyprus and unravel the barriers that mothers with school age children still face. A small but rapidly growing literature has indicated that many workers are being classified as self-employed by employers, although they often have many of the characteristics of dependent employees to evade labour laws (e.g., working time legislation), and reduce employer liabilities that apply to dependent employees (Eurofound, 2016a, b; Gialis et al., 2015; Hatfield, 2015). Researchers report that workers falsely classified as self-employed suffer worse working conditions than the rest of the workforce which has an impact on their personal job satisfaction (ILO, 2016; Thörnqvist, 2014).
Through an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, data were collected from 43 respondents. The current study has utilized Goldberg and Williams’ (1988) General Health Questionnaire (GHQ: 12) and a list of related questions which were used in the semi-structured interviews. It contributes to this literature by analysing the relationship between involuntary bogus self-employment status and four subjective well-being measures in Cyprus. Drawing on the work and family conflict theory, this study reports that female educators still resort to bogus self-employment as the only means to support their families.
Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis reveal that involuntary bogus self-employment has negatively impacted these women’s health, family life and career prospects. 65% of the participants stated that they suffered from mental health issues and 59% reported their dissatisfaction with their life overall. The findings of the current study support the work-family conflict theory. Female educators report that due to the incompatibility of family responsibilities and private work settings for educators in Cyprus, female educators with children have chosen bogus self-employment for the greater flexibility it affords and its compensating mother-friendly nature of self-employment.
This study intends to add to the literature on the impact of involuntary bogus self-employment on female workers’ individual well-being and satisfaction. Feminist scholars argued that the gender dimension of quasi-self-employment needs to be developed (Lewis, 1992). The implication for gender equality is that women are deeply affected by atypical employment in the public educational sector in Cyprus and suffer the consequences of an increasingly precarious labour market. Bogus self-employment is growing among medium and highly skilled women (Maestripieri and León, 2019). In order to gain a deeper understanding of this issue, our analysis of the online survey data and the semi-structured interviews reveals that the impact on well-being can be attributed to their dissatisfaction with job security. This contribution to the literature is particularly relevant from a policy perspective, considering that contemporary labour market policy reforms throughout Europe have focused on the goal of ‘flexicurity’, i.e., the combination of labour market policies and measures that aim to enhance both labour market and organizational flexibility and the employment security of individual employees (Berglund et al., 2014; Chadi and Hetschko, 2013). Implications of the findings will be discussed to unveil the gendered challenges that women with caregiving responsibilities still face in the workplace due to insufficient childcare and caregiving support.