Workers Without Traditional Employment

Mangan (economics, U. of Queensland) analyzes the significant changes in employment relationships that occurred over the last two decades of the 20th century. He explores the incidence, causes, and social and economic implications of non-standard employment and places it within the wider context of modern labor markets seeking to cope with rapid changes in international business practice and the pressures of a globalized economy. He also looks at the impact of employment change for interactions at work and within the family. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Examines the effects of neoliberal economic reforms on middle classes in the Middle East. Based on fieldwork and interviews with members, non-members, and policymakers, this title provides fresh insights into democratization, liberalization, and civil society.

From the end of the Second World War to the early 1980s, the North American norm was that men had full-time jobs, earned a "family wage," and expected to stay with the same employer for life. In households with children, most women were unpaid caregivers. This situation began to change in the mid-1970s as two-earner households became commonplace, with women entering employment through temporary and part-time jobs. Since the 1980s, less permanent precarious employment has increasingly become the norm for all workers. 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.

The shifting nature of employment practice towards the use of more precarious work forms has caused a crisis in classical labour law and engendered a new wave of regulation. This timely book deftly uses this crisis as an opportunity to explore the notion of precariousness or vulnerability in employment relationships. Arguing that the idea of vulnerability has been under-theorised in the labour law literature, Lisa Rodgers illustrates how this extends to the design of regulation for precarious work. The book’s logical structure situates vulnerability in its developmental context before moving on to examine the goals of the regulation of labour law for vulnerability, its current status in the law and case studies of vulnerability such as temporary agency work and domestic work. These threads are astutely drawn together to show the need for a shift in focus towards workers as ‘vulnerable subjects’ in all their complexity in order to better inform labour law policy and practice more generally. Constructively critical, Labour Law, Vulnerability and the Regulation of Precarious Work will prove invaluable to students and scholars of labour and employment law at local, EU and international levels. With its challenge to orthodox thinking and proposals for the improvement of the regulation of labour law, labour law institutions will also find this book of great interest and value.

Examining the occupational variation within non-standard employment, this book combines case studies and comparative writing to illustrate how and why alternative occupational employment patterns are formed. Through expert contributions, a framework is

This book uses the concepts of vulnerability and resilience to analyze the situation of individuals and institutions in the context of the employment relationship. It is based on the premise that both employer and employee are vulnerable to various social, economic, and political forces, although differently so. It demonstrates how in responding to those complementary institutional relationships of employer and employee the state unequally and inequitably favors employers over employees. Several chapters included in this collection also consider how the state shapes, creates and maintains through law the social identities of employer and employee and how that legal regime operates as the allocation of power and privilege. This unique and fundamental role of the state in defining the employment relationship profoundly affects the respective abilities and degree of resiliency of actual employers and employees. Other chapters explore how attention to the respective vulnerability and resilience of those who do and those who direct work in assessing the employment relationship can raise fundamental questions of social justice and suggest new avenues for critical engagement with labor and employment law. Collectively, these pieces articulate a framework for imaging what would constitute an appropriately "Responsive State" in the employment context and how those interested in social justice might begin to use the concepts of vulnerability and resilience in their arguments.