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Drawing on data collected as part of a larger study of the experience of restructuring in the nonprofit (voluntary) social services in Canada and Australia, this article explores the responses to four overlapping interview questions regarding what drew nonprofit social service workers to the sector, what were the positive and negative aspects of working in the sector, and, if given the power, what is the one thing they would change. Responses to these questions highlight the way social service workers wish they could work, factors that impede this work, decrease worker autonomy and increase management control over their labour process. These new findings will be compared to findings from an earlier study of restructuring in the public and nonprofit Canadian social services, highlighting the way that changes in the labour process suppress or facilitate the empowerment of workers, including their capacity to dream of a better future.

Drawing on the literature as well as themes emerging from interview data collected as part of a multi-year, three-province (Alberta, Nova Scotia and British Columbia), qualitative study (eighty-three semi-structured interviews) of the restructured social services sector in Canada, this article explores discernible types of caring work delineating seven kinds, only one of which is paid. The social service workers' description of their changing worlds show not only extremely heavy workloads but also that their paid, volunteer, community, and union activist work involve many of the same skills, tasks and mind sets, thus blurring the lines between professional and non-professional identities as well as the lines between work and leisure. Moreover, this work was highly gendered and significantly racialized.

During the era of neoliberalism, the nonprofit services sector has simultaneously been a site of (a) promarket restructuring and collective and individual resistance and (b) alternative forms of service delivery. Drawing on data collected as part of an ethnographic study in the Canadian nonprofit social services sector, this article explores the impacts of some of restructuring on professional, quasi-professional, and managerial employees in eight unionized, nonprofit social services. The data show that the adoption of social unionism has permitted some nonprofit social service workers to initiate new processes through which to have a voice in far-reaching social issues, sometimes in coalition with management and/or clients. The findings of this study point to the irrepressibility of the participatory spirit and its capacity to seek new forms and practices despite the stretched and restructured conditions of today’s nonprofit social services sector.

Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender-neutral violence; gender-specific violence and the juggling of home and work responsibilities. Collective assumptions and expectations about how men and women should perform care work result in men's partial insulation from the more intense forms of exploitation, stress and violence. This article looks at health risks, not merely as compensable occupational health concerns, but as avoidable products of forms of work organization that draw on notions of the endlessly stretchable capacity of women to provide care work in any context, including a context of violence. Indeed, the logic of women's elastic caring appear crucial to the survival of some agencies and the gender order in these workplaces.

Drawing on comparative, qualitative data, this article explores unionization in the Canadian and Australian nonprofit social services. The article shows that the growth of unionization in this sector in Canada had little to do with deliberate strategies for union renewal. Instead, union growth and activism rose organically from the values orientation of the predominantly female workforce and the curtailment of workplace opportunities for social justice struggles. The Australian example reflects the conflux of legal contexts, political parties, managerial approaches, and the servicing model of unionism. The article concludes with a discussion of possibilities for those seeking to revitalize the union movement.

The article reviews the book, "Training the Excluded for Work: Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income," edited by Marjorie Griffin Cohen.

Drawing on data collected as part of a larger qualitative study of the experience of restructuring in the non‐profit social services in Canada and Australia, this article argues that resistance, including social unionism, is often a complex form of emotional labour and a source of deep satisfaction for care workers in the non‐profit social services.

In order to compete in increasingly tight quasi-markets generated by government cutbacks and contracting-out, management in nonprofit agencies have argued that wages and benefits must be reduced or jobs and services will be cut. These arguments have motivated some of the female-majority workers to join and/or organize unions and undertake strike action. Focusing on two case studies exploring restructuring in the highly gendered nonprofit social services in two liberal welfare states (Scotland and Canada), this article explores shifts in industrial relations at the agency level, as well as workforce resistance and union activism. Through the analysis of gendered unpaid work and gendered forms of social and union solidarity, this article extends feminist political economy and mobilization theory. It also suggests convergences at several layers of practice and policy, including private and nonprofit industrial relations cultures, managerialism and the underfunding of contracted-out government services.

In order to advance an argument addressing whether or not ethical and empowering care work is possible within the context of neoliberalism and managerialism, this article draws on international comparative, qualitative case-study data to ask whether processes and practices of radical care and emancipation already exist in nonprofit long-term care and social service work. If so, what do they look like, and what factors hinder or nurture social justice-based care practices? Given that paid and unpaid care continues to be a highly gendered and increasingly racialized realm of feminized struggle, it warrants further theorization and greater centrality within emancipatory projects and strategies.

Since the mid-1980s, the nonprofit social services sector has been promoted as an option for cheaper and more flexible delivery of services. In order to comply with government standards and funding requirements, the sector has been subject to ongoing waves of restructuring and the introduction of new private market-like, outcomes-based management models, such as New Public Management. This article explores ways in which nonprofit social services sector workers experience their work as highly fragmented. Drawing on case studies completed as part of a larger project addressing restructuring in the nonprofit social services sector in Scotland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, we examine three key aspects shaping work in the nonprofit social services sector: 1) workers’ experience of managerialism; 2) gendered strategies drawn on by workers in the agencies studied; and 3) union strategies in the nonprofit social services sector, as well as within individual workplaces. Conclusions focus on contributions to understanding managerialism as a strong but fragmented project in which even weak union presence and the willingness of the predominantly female workforce to sacrifice to provide care for others ensure that some level of social solidarity endures.

Unpaid work has long been used in nonprofit/voluntary social services to extend paid work. Drawing on three case studies of nonprofit social services in Canada, this article argues that due to austerity policies, the conditions for ‘pure’ gift relationships in unpaid social service work are increasingly rare. Instead, employers have found various ways to ‘fill the gaps’ in funding through the extraction of unpaid work in various forms. Precarious workers are highly vulnerable to expectations that they will ‘volunteer’ at their places of employment, while expectations that students will undertake unpaid internships is increasing the norm for degree completion and procurement of employment, and full-time workers often use unpaid work as a form of resistance. This article contributes to theory by advancing a spectrum of unpaid nonprofit social service work as compelled and coerced to varying degrees in the context of austerity policies and funding cutbacks., Unpaid work has long been used in nonprofit/voluntary social services to extend paid work. Drawing on three case studies of nonprofit social services in Canada, this article argues that due to austerity policies, the conditions for ‘pure’ gift relationships in unpaid social service work are increasingly rare. Instead, employers have found various ways to ‘fill the gaps’ in funding through the extraction of unpaid work in various forms. Precarious workers are highly vulnerable to expectations that they will ‘volunteer’ at their places of employment, while expectations that students will undertake unpaid internships is increasing the norm for degree completion and procurement of employment, and full-time workers often use unpaid work as a form of resistance. This article contributes to theory by advancing a spectrum of unpaid nonprofit social service work as compelled and coerced to varying degrees in the context of austerity policies and funding cutbacks.

Portrays nonprofit social services as a largely female, increasingly diverse workforce with a strong care ethic. Concludes that values of social justice and social unionism are integral both to worker engagement and resistance of state austerity and managerialism.

Though not monolithic, the non-profit social services sector has been an arena where workers and management participated in various forms of shared planning, service development and organizing the labour process. This included: 1- formal participation processes such as collective bargaining with union representation, and 2- practice-profession or task participation. Drawing on 34 qualitative interviews undertaken with a variety of actors (Chief Executive/Senior Directors, senior operational management, Human Resource Managers, frontline staff, and, where available, union representatives) in two non-profit social service agencies in Ontario (Canada), the article traces how these forms of participation have changed as a result of government austerity policies alongside the expansion of precarious employment and funding in the non-profit sector.Using exemplar quotes and qualitative analysis, the article shows that worker’s participation in each form has declined, while management simultaneously has extended greater control over the labour process and removed or reduced forums and opportunities for input from staff. In terms of task participation, measurement and governance structure of New Public Management (NPM) and austerity have led to less autonomy and choice, especially in the area of working time. The study also found that unitarist approaches, intolerant of staff voice and possible dissent, have displaced earlier representative participatory approaches that either utilized the management chain, or embraced and worked constructively with unions. Though these pressures existed prior to the introduction of austerity policies, the data show that decreased worker’s participation coincides and is further undermined by the financial and governance processes associated with NPM and austerity-linked cuts in government and other forms of funding. Overall, the data and analysis suggest that participation in the Non-profit Social Services (NPSS) may be another casualty of this current wave of neoliberalism.

This paper examines the impact of precarity on the nonprofit service providing sector (NPSS). Using in depth qualitative interviews, recent empirically-based surveys of the Ontario nonprofit sector and key academic and grey literature, we explore the deeper meaning of precarity in this sector. We contend that the NPSS is a unique, and in many respects, an ideal location in which to explore the workings and impact of precarity. Looking at the nonprofit sector reveals that precarity operates at various levels, the: 1) nonprofit labour force; 2) organization structure and operation of nonprofit agencies; and, 3) clients and communities serviced by these nonprofit organizations. By observing the workings of precarity in this sector, precarity is revealed to be far more than an employment based phenomenon but also a force that negatively impacts organizational structures as well as vulnerable communities.

Drawing on qualitative interview data from case studies in Scotland and Canada in the post 2008 era, this article explores the impact of austerity policies on the conditions and experience of employment in two nonprofit social service agencies and their shifting labour process. Despite differences in context, the article finds a similarity of experience of austerity-compelled precarity at several levels in the agency. This precarity increased management control and evoked little resistance from employees. These findings contribute to our understanding of austerity as articulated differently in different contexts, but experienced similarly at the front lines of care work.

This report compares work organization and workload at three [Ontario] developmental service agencies in order to identify factors that precipitate and contribute to injuries, stress and health problems in the social services. The restructuring of services in this sector has resulted in reduced funding and therefore workloads and health risks associated with overwork and burnout appear to have increased dramatically in all three sites studied. Restructuring has also exposed workers and clients to higher levels of stress and violence. This study also uncovered serious incidents of workplace bullying and traumatic work cultures. While workplace bullying certainly predates restructuring, some studies show that it is a phenomena that has seen rapid growth within the context of restructured public sector and non profit workplaces. Given the serious under funding of this sector it may appear that there is little that can be done to improve health and safety in the short term. However, this report recommends several measures including an immediate increase in government funding, the incorporation of worker’s knowledge into how work is to be organized and planned, guarantees to part-time workers of enough hours of work to support themselves, an end to the use of split shifts, a cap on overtime and subsequent hiring additional fulltime staff in order to ensure workplace stability and the introduction of immediate, assertive, transparent measures to improve workplace morale and eradicate traumatic workplace cultures. --Executive Summary