Last week, some news media announced that the General Workers Union or Union Print was making 30 of its own employees redundant.

The news was not denied by GWU or its media but in the height of the summer season and heat, with many of the protagonists of the national life on holiday, the news barely raised a ripple.

It pains to kick a person, or an institution, when it's down, but then this is the biggest union on the island and it is usually very voluble denouncing precarious employment wherever it can be found.

The union insisted until a commitment to tackle precarious employment wherever it can be found was inserted in the Labour Party electoral manifesto. Since then, the government has taken steps to remove precarious employment in some areas.

They call it the "precariat". In a continent known for strong employee protections, more than half of the eurozone's young workers are in temporary jobs, churning from one shortlived contract to the next.

In France, permanent jobs account for just 16 per cent of new contracts, down from a quarter in 2000. In Spain, almost seven in 10 young workers are on temporary contracts. The share of the eurozone's 15 to 24-year-old workers who are temps is the highest on record, at 52.4 per cent.

Now that the eurozone's recovery is at last under way, the question facing policymakers and politicians is whether the painful reforms of the last few years will do anything to address this.

New studies from the OECD show how precarious work is hurting economies and blocking opportunity for an entire generation of young people.

Much of the burden of insecure jobs is falling on youth and they are at greater risk of spending their lives in poverty than the elderly across most developed economies, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Among temporary workers, close to half are under age 30 and almost 40 per cent of young workers in the OECD are in non-standard work, such as contract or temporary work, or involuntary part-time employment.

Opportunity to move out of low-wage, insecure employment as workers get older is becoming increasingly limited, the OECD found.  Fewer than half of people on temporary contracts were able to transition to full-time work within a three-year period, it found.

For those in low-wage, part-time positions, precarious work can be a trap. Their earnings remain low and their poverty limits their housing options, ability to form relationships and ability to start a family,

A deep fracture has emerged in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal over the past 20 years, with an older generation of highly protected permanent employees on one side and a younger generation forced to settle for insecure jobs on the other. That is one reason why youth unemployment surged when the crisis hit.

"The rules for open-ended contracts in Europe are considered too stringent by employers and they sidestep those regulations by creating non-regular jobs," said Marcel Jansen, professor of economics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. "But those jobs . . . lead to a lot of adverse effects."

But if we had to ask the 30 workers shed by GWU, (at least as long as the government does not step in to provide them with alternative employment) would they come down on the side of GWU as it battles precariety?