In recent decades forms of flexible employment have become more common across Europe, and Italy has been no exception. Flexibility was intended to improve workers’ knowledge and skills, and thus their occupational and remuneration levels. This vision, however, is often questioned by studies proving that flexible employment has negative consequences for both occupational prospects and private life, being r associated with greater insecurity and poorer working conditions. Several studies investigated the effects of precarious working conditions on health outcomes. Few, however, focused explicitly on the younger population.

This paper fills this gap by considering a sample of Italian respondents aged 18 to 40. It uses data from the last two editions of the ISTAT Survey on ‘Health conditions and access to health services’ to explore the existence of a relationship between occupational conditions and psychological discomfort. The underlying assumption is that unsettled and unsatisfactory occupational conditions negatively affect youth psychological health. We excluded from the sample respondents with disability or chronic diseases, due to their  worse psychological conditions and employment prospects. The analysis is carried out by gender and separately for the two surveys by means of logistic models on the respondents’ probability of reporting poor psychological health.