Your search

This article reviews "Liberating Temporariness?: Migration, Work, and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity," edited by Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham, "When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work," edited by Mary Romero, Valerie Preston, and Wenona Giles, and "Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada," edited by Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt.

The rise of the ‘gig economy’ and on-demand work using online platforms like Uber and Skip the Dishes has ignited public debate about precarious work and what makes a “good job.” Precarious work is not a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to the gig economy—but we don’t know just how widespread a problem it has become, mainly because Statistics Canada does not collect timely data on many of its dimensions. As part of the Understanding Precarity in BC project we conducted a pilot BC Precarity Survey—the first of its kind in BC—to address this gap and collect new evidence on the scale and unequal impacts of precarious work in our province. The survey, conducted in late 2019, reveals a polarized labour market in which precarious work is far more pervasive than many assume and includes much more than “gig work.” It also shows that the burden of precarious work falls more heavily on racialized and immigrant communities, Indigenous peoples, women and lower-income groups. --Website description

Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor. --Publisher's description

This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction - defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate - and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse economies. --Publisher's description

Feminist theories of social reproduction are theories of the gendered nature of power and domination. This seems axiomatic, and the recent upsurge of interest in social reproduction in human geography (Casolo and Doshi, 2013; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2016; Hopkins, 2015; Jackson and Neely, 2015; Kofman, 2012; Pimlott-Wilson, 2015; Rioux, 2015) in part relates to the continuing urgency of the need to understand the relationship between social difference and the exercise of power in the contemporary space economy. The elision of reproductive relations and the gendered norms that undergird them from accounts of economic and political crisis, despite decades of feminist research and activism, continues almost unabated. This elision reveals as much as it obscures, shining a light on the politics of knowledge production inside and outside of the academy and bolstering the sense among proponents of the upsurge of feminist theory and social reproduction – myself included – that ‘theory as usual’ is not an option. The conjunctural crisis affecting political economic and ecological foundations of contemporary societies does not sit above the epiphenomena of social relations and related social infrastructures, although there is little to acknowledge their fundamental interrelationship in many accounts of crisis. At the same time, however, the landscape of what we might broadly characterize as ‘feminist theory’ is highly variegated, with ongoing tensions among those who identify with post-structuralist, radical and political economic traditions. Nancy Fraser has famously characterized these tensions as struggles over redistribution versus recognition, where the latter is identified with (oft-conflated) post-structuralism and identity politics. JK Gibson-Graham, on the other hand, has associated Marxian political economic approaches (including the concept of social reproduction) with capital-centrism and deep-seated androcentrism. Feminism is itself a house divided. These divisions are perhaps inevitable on a terrain as broad and uneven as feminism. Nor is a unified, monolithic feminism necessarily desirable. The conceptualization of power is itself a key site of differentiation within feminist theory and research. Fraser, a feminist theorist and political philosopher of the Critical Theory school, has received relatively little attention in human geography – far less than one of her main sparring partners and interlocutors, Judith Butler. But, as I argue in this chapter, her body of work is a rich, if not unproblematic, resource not only for feminist geographers but for all of us who are, or should be, interested in how power, inequality and justice are interrelated with reproduction of and through difference.

Understanding the ways in which people save for their retirement is an urgent issue. So much has changed in the last 10 to 15 years, especially in the area of the provision of pensions and retirement income. Around the world, greater and greater responsibility is being allocated to individuals while governments discount their contributions to social security and employers retreat from the provision of supplementary retirement income. This book explores the behavioral revolution and its implications for understanding financial decision-making and saving for the future. Recognizing the profound implications of this research program, it goes beyond issues of risk aversion, framing, and decision-making to consider how social identity and the resources due to people by virtue of their place in society figure in savings behavior. It gives considerable attention to the context of the environment in which people make financial decisions, arguing that this allows a better understanding of the coexistence of sophistication and naivety apparent in patterns of retirement saving. Utilizing databases from the UK, the book provides an empirical foundation to its theoretical arguments, demonstrating how an integrated approach to individual financial decision-making is necessary if we are to address the apparent shortfall in many people's planning for the future. The book concludes by setting the agenda for the design, governance, and regulation of pension savings schemes consistent with delivering cost-effective solutions to pension adequacy. In these ways, it sets forth a strategy for rethinking individual behavior as well as the design of retirement income systems. --Publisher's description

Trafficking, forced labour and related phenomena have been documented time and again in recent years by advocacy groups, the media and government agencies. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 20.9 million people in some form of forced labour worldwide. The estimate is broken down regionally and sectorally: 11.7 million of these are thought to be in the Asia and Pacific region; and 18.7 million are believed to be in the private economy, among whom 14.2 million are involved in economic activities not related to sexual exploitation. Debt bondage appears to be the most common mechanism of forced labour (cf. ILO 2005; 2012; Andrees and Belser 2009). The prevalence of labour relations characterized by various forms of unfreedom raises critical questions about how the phenomenon fits into the contemporary economy, and therefore about how to address the issue(s) in ways that advance the interests of all exploited workers. --Chapter abstract at Durham Research Online

Considers the current regulatory environment for temporary employment workers in Quebec. Concludes that the legislative failure to regulate has resulted in abusive practices that undermine labour law.

Compares the legal regimes of British Columbia and Manitoba for employment agencies that recruit women from the Philippines to work as caregivers in Canadian homes. Concludes that the Manitoba regulatory framework is much more effective in protecting caregivers from the abusive practices of these agencies.

This chapter examines the concept of precariousness in work in relation to income and labour market polarization. Although there is growing interest in the separate but related notion of precarity in human geography, economic and labour geographers have engaged less with the literature on precarious work and the decline of the standard employment relation. This chapter provides a brief overview of how precarious employment is understood, before turning to focus on two particular dimensions: the role of labour market intermediaries, and the challenges of regulation in an era of flexible work.