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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.

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).

[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.

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.

[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.

[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).

[E]xamines the degree to which unionization, a key indicator of control over the labour process...limits precarious employment among workers. it also explores, how, and in what ways, union coverage mitigates precarious employment for workers in distinct social locations....Although unionization mitigates precariousness for some workers, [the authors] contend that inequalities based on race still prevail. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

The authors explore the contemporary employment-related experiences of people with disabilities with reference to the rise of precarious employment since the mid-1970s. ...[The] chapter offers an analysis of labour market trends; it consideres how the movement in and out of employment among people with disabilities relates to their experience of precariousness. The authors pay considerable attention to remedial legislation, such as federal and provincial pay and employment equity legislation, designed to facilitate access to employment and how, and in what ways, it influences (or fails to influence) conditions of work. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 35).

[C]ontributes to an understanding of the nature of precarious employment and its broader social implications, with an emphasis on its impact on health. It reports findings of a survey exploring connections between the employment relationship, the organization of work, and workers' health. ...[The authors] develop a new concept - "employment strain" - to examine how precarious employment relationships affect workers' health.

[Discusses] the concept and practice of community unionism and demonstrates the potential for building a union-community alliance for labour movement renewal through an analysis...of the Workers' Action Centre (WAC) in Toronto. --Editors' introduction