Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada

This interdisciplinary volume offers a multifaceted picture of precarious employment and the ways in which its principal features are reinforced or challenged by laws, policies, and labour market institutions, including trade unions and community organizations. Contributors develop more fully the concept of precarious employment and critique outmoded notions of standard and nonstandard employment. The product of a five-year Community-University Research Alliance, the volume aims to foster new social, statistical, legal, political, and economic understandings of precarious employment and to advance strategies for improving the quality and conditions of work and health. --Publisher's description. Contents: Pt. 1. Mapping precarious employment in Canada: new statistical insights. Conceptualizing precarious employment: Mapping wage work across social location and occupational context / Cynthia J. Cranford and Leah F. Vosko -- Precarious by choice? Gender and self-employment / Leah F. Vosko and Nancy Zukewich -- Precarious employment and people with disabilities / Emile Tompa, Heather Scott, Scott Trevithick, and Sudipa Bhattacharyya -- Precarious work, privatization, and the health-care industry: The case of ancillary workers / Pat Armstrong and Kate Laxer. Pt. 2. Precarious health at work and precarious work in an unhealthy sector. The hidden costs of precarious employment: Health and the employment relationship / Wayne Lewchuk, Alice de Wolff, Andrew King, and Michael Polanyi -- Essential but precarious: Changing employment relationships and resistance in the Ontario public service / Jan Borowy -- Privatizing public employment assistance and precarious employment in Toronto / Alice de Wolff. Pt. 3. Regulating precarious employment: institutions, law, and policy. Precarious employment and the law's flaws: identifying regulatory failure and securing effective protection for workers / Stephanie Bernstein, Katherine Lippel, Eric Tucker, and Leah F. Vosko -- Mitigating precarious employment in Quebec: The role of minimum employment standards legislation / Stephanie Bernstein -- Precarious employment and occupational health and safety regulation in Quebec / Katherine Lippel -- Will the vicious circle of precariousness be unbroken? The exclusion of Ontario farm workers from the Occupational Health and Safety Act / Eric Tucker -- Regulating precarious labour markets: What can we learn from new European models? / Andrew Jackson. Pt. 4. Unions, unionisms, and precarious employment. The union dimension: Mitigating precarious employment? / John Anderson, James Beaton, and Kate Laxer -- Racism/anti-racism, precarious employment, and unions / Tania Das Gupta -- Union renewal and precarious employment: A case study of hotel workers / Chris Schenk -- Thinking through community unionism / Cynthia J. Cranford, Tania Das Gupta, Deena Ladd, and Leah F. Vosko -- Conclusion: What is to be done? Harnessing knowledge to mitigate precarious employment / Leah F. Vosko.