Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship, and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment

[E]xplores the precarious margins of contemporary labour markets. Over the last few decades, there has been much discussion of a shift from full-time permanent jobs to higher levels of part-time and temporary employment and self-employment. Despite such attention, regulatory approaches have not adapted accordingly. Instead, in the absence of genuine alternatives, old regulatory models are applied to new labour market realities, leaving the most precarious forms of employment intact. The book places this disjuncture in historical context and focuses on its implications for workers most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrants, using illustrations from Australia, the United States, and Canada, as well as member states of the European Union. Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis of national and international regulatory approaches, drawing on original qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analysing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries. --Publisher's description.     Contents: Precarious employment -- An integrated analysis -- Regulations at different scales -- A multi-method approach -- The book in brief -- Forging a gender contract in early national and international labour regulation: Select national developments, 1830s-1930s; International developments, 1870s-1919; Preparing the ground for the SER -- Constructing and consolidating the standard employment relationship (SER) in international labour regulation: Constructing the pillars of the SER : the interwar and immediate postwar years; Stripping the SER of its exclusions: the era of formal equality; The resilience of the baseline -- The partial eclipse of the SER and the dynamics of SER-centrism in International Labour Regulations: A portrait of the SER in Australia, Canada, the EU 15, and the United States, 1980s-2006; SER-Centrism at the margins of late-capitalist labour markets; Regulating part-time, fixed-term, temporary agency work, and self employment -- Regulating part-time employment: Equal treatment and its limits: The deterioration of standardized working time; SER-centric responses to precariousness in part-time employment: The ILO Convention on part-time work (1994); Regulating part-time employment in Australia; Lessons from Australia and alternative possibilities -- Regulating temporary employment: Equal treatment, qualified: The erosion of the open-ended employment relationship; SER-centric responses to precariousness in temporary employment in the EU; Regulating temporary agency work in the EU 15; Lessons from the EU 15 and alternative possibilities -- Self-employment and the regulation of the employment relationship: From equal treatment to effective protection: The destabilization of the employment relationship at the crux of the SER; SER-centric responses to precariousness in work for renumeration at cusp of the employment relationship: ILO actions, 1990-2006; Approaches to regulating self-employment in industrialized market economy countries; Lessons from industrialized market economy countries and alternative possibilities -- Alternatives to the SER: Why there is no returning to the SER; A tiered SER; A 'flexible SER'; 'Beyond employment'; Towards an alternative imaginary.