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Union renewal research calls for moving beyond broad terms, like community unionism, to specify how social relations of work shape renewal for different workers, sectors and contexts. Analysis of interviews with union officials and union members in publicly funded, in-home personal support reveal two community dimensions: both caring and racialized relations between workers and service recipients. Scholarship on care workers emphasizes empathy and coalition with service recipients as a key aspect of union renewal, yet says little about racialized tensions. Studies of domestic workers emphasize organizing in response to racialization, but provide little insight into caring social relations at work. This article develops arguments that both positive and negative worker–recipient relations shape union organizing and representation in the service sector by specifying the ways in which racialization contributes to this dynamic. It suggests that anti-racist organizing at work, alongside coalition building and collective bargaining, are important renewal strategies for this sector.
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This article examines workers’ experiences with a union characterized by a social unionist framing and repertoire in the political realm and bureaucratic servicing of problems in the workplace realm. It analyzes interviews with members and officials about union strategies within privatized homecare predominately provided by immigrant women in Toronto. Workers report both consensual and tense relations with clients prompting them to praise their union’s political strategies yet criticize its limited workplace support. Findings indicate the importance of framing and repertoire that connect quality work with quality care, yet indicate a complex labor process that requires more conceptual and strategic attention.
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This article examines the relationship between gender, forms of employment and dimensions of precarious employment in Canada, using data from the Labour Force Survey and the General Social Survey. Full-time permanent wage work decreased for both women and men between 1989 and 2001, but women remain more likely to be employed in part-time and temporary wage work as compared to men. Layering forms of wage work with indicators of regulatory protection, control and income results in a continuum with full-time permanent employees as the least precarious followed by full-time temporary, part-time permanent and then part-time temporary employees as the most precarious. The continuum is gendered through both inequalities between full-time permanent women and men and convergence in precariousness among part-time and temporary women and men. These findings reflect a feminization of employment norms characterized by both continuity and change in the social relations of gender. (English)
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'Precarious employment' is a better concept for understanding labour market insecurity than the dominant concept in Canada, 'non-standard work.' We examine dimensions of precariousness between and within mutually exclusive forms of employment. The growth of 'non-standard work' is fuelled by increases in forms of employment that lack regulatory protection, such as own- account self-employment. Wage work falls along a continuum of precariousness measured as regulatory protection, control and income. Finally, employment in precarious forms is shaped by social location. White men are concentrated in the least precarious forms of employment, while white women, women of colour and youth are concentrated in the more precarious forms.