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This chapter initiates the conversation between theory, method, evidence, and practice that is the focus of this book. It conceptualizes precarious employment, probes its dynamics in Canada, and identifies avenues for fostering understanding in the service of positive social change by way of several linked arguments set in the three major sections that follow. --Author's introduction

[S]ynthesizes the central findings of the volume ...[and] explores the implications of precarious employment for workers, households, and communities as well as its larger public costs and identifies several avenues for improving knowledge in an attempt to better workers' conditions of work and qaulity of health. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 39.

...In this lecture, I shall forge an alternative approach.... My aim is to rethink feminization and this requires critiquing dominant interpretations of feminization that emphasize women’s high labour force participation and employment rates to the exclusion of other labour market trends through an analytical framework attentive to developments on both supply- and demand-sides of the labour market (i.e., production and social reproduction). I will argue that by focusing attention on the movement of women into the labour market, these approaches risk obscuring the gendered rise of precarious employment. This restrictive emphasis welds feminization to a narrow set of trends and glosses over key continuities, such as persisting occupational and industrial2 segregation, and discontinuities, such as the convergence towards precariousness, in the contemporary labour market. --From introduction

The article reviews the book, "Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workplace," by Jackie Krasas Rogers.

The article reviews the book, "The Co-Workplace: Teleworking in the Neighbourhood," by Laura C. Johnson.

The first in-depth analysis of temporary work in Canada, this book by Leah F. Vosko examines a number of trends, including the commodification of labour power; the decline of the full-time, full-year job as a norm; and the gendered character of prevailing employment relationships. Spanning the period from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, Temporary Work traces the evolution of the temporary employment relationship in Canada and places it in an international context. It explores how, and to what extent, temporary work is becoming the norm for a diverse group of workers in the labour market, taking gender as the central lens of analysis." "Recent scholarship emphasizes that the nature of work is changing, citing the spread of non-standard forms of employment and the rise in women's participation in the labour force. Vosko confirms that important changes are indeed taking place in the labour market, but argues that these changes are best understood in historical, economic, and political context. This book will be invaluable to academics in a variety of disciplines as well as to policy analysts and practitioners in government, industry, and organized labour. --Publisher's descsription

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

[Examines] forms of self-employment by select dimensions of precarious employment and finds a gendered continuum of precarious self-employment. The chapter also illustrates that many dimensions of precarious employment characterize key forms of self-employment, such as part-time and full-time solo self-employment. The conclusion...supports challenges to contemporary definitions of "entrepreneurship"...yet the adoption of a gender lens allows them to interrogate and challenge the notion of "choice" underpinning prevailing understandings of main reasons for self-employment. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 34).

[A]dvances a new methodological approach to understanding precarious wage work.... This approach considers how race and gender, as they intersect with occupation, shape and, in turn, are shaped by precarious employment. Its main empirical finding is that a "racialized gendering of jobs" characterizes the contemporary Canadian labour market. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 34).

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.

The Gender & Work Database (GWD) is an online research tool designed for both researchers and students with varying levels of expertise. The database is informed by a feminist political economy approach and provides resources that facilitate research on gender and work. The GWD can be used as an interactive classroom tool, to obtain basic information on a topic, or as a research tool to examine complex social relations. ...[Following the introduction to the database,] there are six integrated and interactive modules that represent entry points into the study of gender and work, namely precarious employment, health care, unions, migration, unpaid work, and technology. --Website description

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.