Precarious Work

Globalisation, the shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment, and the spread of information-based systems and technologies have given birth to a new economy, which emphasises flexibility in the labour market and in employment relations. These changes have led to the erosion of the standard (industrial) employment relationship and an increase in precarious work - work which is poorly paid and insecure. Women perform a disproportionate amount of precarious work. This collection of original essays by leading scholars on labour law and women's work explores the relationship between precarious work and gender, and evaluates the extent to which the growth and spread of precarious work challenges traditional norms of labour law and conventional forms of legal regulation.The book provides a comparative perspective by furnishing case studies from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and the US, as well as the international and supranational context through essays that focus on the IMF, the ILO, and the EU. Common themes and concepts thread throughout the essays, which grapple with the legal and public policy challenges posed by women's precarious work.

This edited collection introduces and explores the causes and consequences of precarious employment in Canada and across the world. After contextualizing employment precarity and its root causes, the authors illustrate how precarious employment is created amongst different populations and describe the accompanying social impacts on racialized immigrant women, those in the non-profit sector, temporary foreign workers and the children of Filipino immigrants.

Since the 1970s the long term decline in self-employment has slowed – and even reversed in some countries – and the prospect of ‘being your own boss’ is increasingly topical in the discourse of both the general public and within academia. Traditionally, self-employment has been associated with independent entrepreneurship, but increasingly it has become a form of precarious work. This book utilises evidence-based information to address both the current and future challenges of this trend as the nature of self-employment changes, as well as to demonstrate where, when and why self-employment has emerged as precarious work in Europe.

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.

This discerning book provides a wide-ranging comparative analysis of the legal and social policy challenges posed by the spread of different forms of precarious work in Europe, with various social models in force and a growing ‘gig economy’ workforce. It not only considers the theoretical foundations of the concept of precarious work, but also offers invaluable insight into the potential methods of addressing this phenomenon through labour regulation and case law at EU and national level.

This volume presents original theory and research on precarious work in various parts of the world, identifying its social, political and economic origins, its manifestations in the USA, Europe, Asia, and the Global South, and its consequences for personal and family life.

Working Without Commitments offers a new understanding of the social and health impacts of this change in the modern workplace, where outsourcing, limited term contracts, and the elimination of pensions and health benefits have become the new standard. Using information from interviews and surveys with workers in less permanent employment, the authors show how precarious employment affects the health of workers, labour productivity, and the sustainability of the traditional family model. A timely and relevant work for uncertain economic times, Working Without Commitments provides helpful information for understanding the present workplace and securing better futures for today's workforce.

Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work: Transformational Approaches to Music Careers Education promotes career counselling-informed techniques that encourage and guide musicians to drive their careers in necessary new directions. In exposing the ‘dark side’ of precarious work in the arts sector, these approaches acknowledge the high levels of risk many musicians face and focus on the fundamental and urgent skills they need to navigate uncertainty and hardship. The author calls for a greater recognition of the psychological magnitude of managing such work, drawing upon training as a career counsellor and the lived experience of a career musician to advance transformative learning principles as pathways for artists, students, and educators alike. Representing a radical shift from the content-knowledge approach to career development, a counselling-informed method is fortified by a broad range of ideas from vocational psychology and narrative therapy, emphasising the importance of change readiness and flexible identities while identifying the need for a post-portfolio paradigm. Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work proposes a new model for musicians’ career learning – the CHOICE model – in a timely and practical guide for 21st-century musicians looking to future-proof their careers.