Your search

The Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD) brings together a library of relevant sources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – designed to facilitate research on labour market insecurity in a comparative industrialized context. Users can analyze multidimensional tables to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in thirty-three countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, twenty-seven European Union (EU) member countries and three non-European Union member countries. ...The introduction provides basic information on the CPD’s conceptual approach to precarious employment in a comparative perspective, an explanation of CPD methodology, and an outline of the design principles behind the creation of harmonized variables used in the statistical tables. These principles are further developed and demonstrated in three interactive modules: forms of precarious employment, temporal and spatial dynamics, and health and social care. --Website description

Challenging the Market offers insights from eighteen scholars and activists from around the world. Calling on a tremendous range of experience in different countries, different industries, and with different groups of workers, contributors argue that labour market policy should shift to a more interventionist and compassionate footing. For two decades economic and social policy in most of the world has been guided by the notion that economies function best when they are fully exposed to competitive market forces. In labour market policy, this approach is reflected in the widespread emphasis on "flexibility" - a euphemism for the retrenchment of income support and social security, the relaxation of labour market regulations, and the enhanced power of private actors to determine the terms of the employment relationship. These strategies have had marked effects on labour market outcomes, leading to greater vulnerability and polarization - and not always in ways that enhance worker-centred flexibility. The authors offer a more balanced analysis of the functioning and effects of labour market regulation and deregulation. By questioning the underpinnings of the "flexibility" paradigm, and revealing its often damaging impacts (on different countries, sectors, and constituencies), they challenge the conclusion that unregulated market forces produce optimal labour market outcomes. The authors conclude with several suggestions for how labour policy could be reformulated to promote both efficiency and equity. --Publisher's description

Changing Canada examines political transformations, welfare state restructuring, international boundaries and contexts, the new urban experience, and creative resistance. The authors question dominant ways of thinking and promote alternative ways of understanding and explaining Canadian society and politics that encourage progressive social change. They examine how the evolution of capitalism is producing new types of transformations and new forms of resistance, and show that aspects of the state and the wider society are being contested. They also discuss the often paradoxical or contradictory effects of various social forces, such as the liberating but also constraining features of new communications technologies, new employment norms, and new household forms. --Publisher's description

[F]ocuses on the state as an employer; it is concerned with precarious employment and state employees (and former employees) involved in the delivery of public services, their deteriorating conditions of employoment, and the impact of this declien on public safety. ...[The author] examines the situations of three groups of state workers - court workers, workers in Ontario's Trillium Drug Program, and meat inspectors - whose work is cirtical to maintaining public health and welfare, yet who confront multiple dimensions of precarious employment. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 36.

[A]ddresses Quebec's approach to reforming its Labour Standards Act. ...[E]xamines developments in Quebec in the early 2000s, with attention to efforts by the government to evaluate "atypical workers" in an attempt to mitigate precarious employment in this jurisdiction. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 37.

[Analyzes] existing legislation, law and legal literature on the application of occupational health and safety and on workers' compensation legislation in Quebec. [Argues] there are very few tools available to examine regulatory effectiveness from a legal perspective...[and that] it is crucial for legal researchers to join with researchers determining health effects. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

[The author] critically examines the rationale offered to justify the exclusion of agricultural workers from occupational health and safety legislation [in Ontario] which lasted until 2005. The chapter is a case study of marginalized workers denied the benefit of labour law protections. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

[E]xplores how more widespread collective bargaiing, minimum employment in Nordic countries like Denmark, could have a favourable impact on the ways in which labour markets operate at the micro-level. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

Using gender as its analytic lens, this article examines segmentation in the Canadian labour market by focusing on the standard employment relationship. It illustrates how standard employment was crafted upon a specific gender division of paid and unpaid labour, the male breadwinner norm, and was only available to a narrow segment of workers. To this end, it traces how from the lOSO's the standard employment relationship was supplemented by a growth in jobs associated with, and filled primarily by, women workers and it shows how women's increasing labour market participation in the late 1960s and early 1970s shaped demands for equality in employment policies. Since the 1980s, a deterioration in the standard employment relationship has undermined both demands for and the basis of gender equality strategies and the article concludes by raising the question of the normative basis for regulating employment in order to move towards strategies for reregulation.

This chapter is concerned wtih identifying the many symptoms associated with the inadequacy of workers' protection that the study of precarious employment makes visible. ...[The authors] probe key themes central to regulatory failure in the context of precarious employment, including disparity of treatment between workers in precarious employment and workers with greater security, gaps in legal coverage, the interaction between labour market position and social location, and the lack of compliance and enforcement. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 37.

Employment standards (ES) are legislated standards that set minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. In Canada, the majority of workers rely on ES for basic regulatory protection; however, a significant ‘enforcement gap’ exists. In the province of Ontario, this enforcement gap has been exacerbated in recent years due to the deregulation of ES through inadequate funding, workplace restructuring, legislative reforms that place greater emphasis on individualized complaints processes and voluntary compliance, and a formal separation of unions from ES enforcement. The implications of these developments are that, increasingly, those in precarious jobs, many of whom lack union representation, are left with insufficient regulatory protection from employer non-compliance, further heightening their insecurity. Taking the province of Ontario as our focus, in this article we critically examine alternative proposals for ES enforcement, placing our attention on those that enhance the involvement of unions in addressing ES violations. Through this analysis, we suggest that augmenting unions’ supportive roles in ES enforcement holds the potential to enhance unions’ regulatory function and offers a possible means to support the ongoing efforts of other workers’ organizations to improve employer compliance with ES.

[C]onsiders the effects of contracting-out of public employment services for employment place workers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the workers seeking employment whom they serve. In so doing, [the author] reveals a range of important connections, from linkages at the policy level between changing immigration policy and the provision of employment supports at the provincial level, to connections, by way of a common attachment to precarious employment, between community workers, working largely in serial fixed-term temporary contracts contingent on public funding, and their clients. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 37.

[The author] is concerned with the way the mainstream labour movement has historically treated non-white workers in precarious employment and the role of history in shaping contemporary practices. Das Gupta's offers a qualitative analysis of the perceptions and experiences of labour activists of colour and of alternative advocacy strategies for building more inclusive resistance movements. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

Case study of workers in a large Toronto-based hotel and their campaign first to attain just working conditions, and then to retain them in the face of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis of 2003 that disrupted the Toronto hospitality industry.

Case study based on multi-year ethnography of the efforts of a group of workers organizing with Toronto Organizing for Fair Employment (TOFFE), now the Workers' Action Centre of toronto, an active community partner in the Community University Research Alliance on Contingent Work. [The authors] attempt to conceptualize community unionism by locating the efforts of TOFFE in relation to two intersecting continua - a continuum of location that includes constitituency, site, and issue-based organizing, and a continuum of process, defined by hierarchical organizations at one pole, and particpatory organizations at the other pole. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 39.

The Employment Standards Database is a research database for comparing employment standards, awareness and violations across national/regional context. It brings together a library of relevant sources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – designed to facilitate research on labour market insecurity in a comparative industrialized context. Users can analyze multidimensional tables to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. --Website description

[E]xplores the complex ways in which temporariness is being institutionalized as a condition of life for a growing number of people worldwide. The collection emphasizes contemporary developments, but also provides historical context on nation-state membership as the fundamental means for accessing rights in an era of expanding temporariness - in recognition of why pathways to permanence remain so compelling. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, contributors explore various dimensions of temporariness, especially as it relates to the legal status of migrants and refugees, to the spread of precarious employment, and to limitations on social rights. While the focus is on Canada, a number of chapters investigate and contrast developments in Canada with those in Europe as well as Australia and the United States. Together, these essays reveal changing and enduring temporariness at local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels, and in different domains, such as health care, language programs, and security. The question at the heart of this collection is whether temporariness can be liberated from current constraints. While not denying the desirability of permanence for migrants and labourers, "Liberating Temporariness?" presents alternative possibilities of security and liberation. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction: Liberating Temporariness? Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway for Social Inclusion  / Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Melisa Bretón. Part 1: Security, Temporary Status, and Rights. Rethinking Canadian Citizenship: The Politics of Social Exclusion in the Age of Security and Suppression / Yasmeen Abu-Laban -- Permanent Patriots and Temporary Predators? Post-9/11 Institutionalization of the Arab/Orientalized “Other” in the United States and the Contributions of Arendt and Said / Abigail B. Bakan -- Indefinitely Pending: Security Certificates and Permanent Temporariness / Mike Larsen. Part 2: International Organizations and Transnational Dynamics of Temporary Work. Managed Migration and the Temporary Labour Fix / Christina Gabriel -- Institutionalizing Temporary Labour Migration in Europe: Creating an “In-between”’ Migration Status / Tesseltje de Lange and Sarah van Walsu -- The Permanence of Temporary Labour Mobility: Migrant Worker Programs across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand / Emily Gilbert. Part 3: Temporary Status, Social Welfare, and Marginalization. Brain Circulation or Precarious Labour? Conceptualizing Temporariness in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service / Parvati Raghuram -- Language Training and Labour Market Integration for Newcomers to Canada / Eve Haque -- Resituating Temporariness as the Precarity and Conditionality of Non-citizenship / Luin Goldring -- Constructing and “Liberating” Temporariness in the Canadian Non-profit Sector: Neoliberalism and Non-profit Service Providers / John Shields. Part 4: (Re)Framing Temporariness. Mexican Migrant Transnationalism and Imaginaries of Temporary/Permanent Belonging / Marianne H. Marchand -- Temporariness: Other than Permanence, and in the Lives of People - Always… / Deepa Rajkumar -- Temporal Orders, Re-collective Justice, and the Making of Untimely States / Robert Latham.

Although Canada’s migrant labour program is seen by some as a model of best practices, rights shortfalls and exploitation of workers are well documented. Through migration policy, federal authorities determine who can hire migrant workers, and the conditions under which they are employed, through the provision of work permits. Despite its authority over work permits, the federal government has historically had little to do with the regulation of working conditions. In 2015, the federal government introduced a new regulatory enforcement system - unique internationally for its attempt to enforce migrants’ workplace rights through federal migration policy - under which employers must comply with contractual employment terms, uphold provincial workplace standards, and make efforts to maintain a workplace free of abuse. Drawing on enforcement data, and frontline law and policy documents, we critically assess the new enforcement system, concluding that it holds both promise and peril for migrant workers.

[P]ortrays precarious employment in the increasingly privatized Canadian health-care industry. In the face of dramatic restructing in this industry, [the authors] reveal that a growing number of women health-care workers, especially those performing what is deemed to be "ancillary work," are subject to conditions of work that make not only ancillary health-care workers but patients too at greater risk of ill-health. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 35).

Precarious employment presents a monumental challenge to the social, economic, and political stability of labour markets in industrialized societies and there is widespread consensus that its growth is contributing to a series of common social inequalities, especially along the lines of gender and citizenship. The editors argue that these inequalities are evident at the national level across industrialized countries, as well as at the regional level within federal societies, such as Canada, Germany, the United States, and Australia and in the European Union. This book brings together contributions addressing this issue which include case studies exploring the size, nature, and dynamics of precarious employment in different industrialized countries and chapters examining conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of precarious employment in comparative perspective. The collection aims to yield new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, measuring, and responding, via public policy and other means - such as new forms of union organization and community organizing at multiple scales - to the forces driving labour market insecurity. --Publisher's description