This book explores 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 those most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrant workers. Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis drawing on original qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analyzing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management//toc.html
To appease public anxieties and limit exploitation, in recent years Canada has sought to more strictly regulate and reduce temporary migrant work, while expanding opportunities for international ...mobility. This article explores the division between mobility and migration in this settler colonial context by charting developments in two overarching Canadian immigration program streams dedicated to facilitating international migration for employment on a temporary basis - the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP) - focusing on the latter. Through an analysis of underexplored IMP subprograms directed at 'national competitiveness,' it probes the extent to which several fast-growing IMP subprograms entail a departure from temporary migrant work under exploitative conditions. Questioning the validity of the migration/mobility distinction assumed in policy discourse, it argues that far from providing for ideal conditions for 'mobile' workers, Inter-Company Transfer, Postgraduation, and Spousal subprograms are characterised by conditions poised to heighten exploitation. Meanwhile, many participants in these subprograms migrate from source countries with a history of subordination through differential inclusion, illustrating how the application of migration control devices is bound-up with residues of formal barriers to entry forged on the basis of nationality and the institutionalised racism that they engendered and threaten to perpetuate.
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Abstract
In high‐income receiving states, educational visa‐holders are routinely cast as beneficiaries of immigration systems prioritizing well‐trained workers. Promising pathways to permanent ...residency, Canada's Post‐Graduation Work Permit Program (PGWPP), an expanding stream of its new International Mobility Program, is a case in point. Yet there is a dearth of scholarly analysis of program design and its effects on visa‐holders. Addressing this lacuna, this article examines the PGWPP through a multi‐method approach focusing on the interface between program requirements, distinctions between doors of entry with attention to criteria for accessing permanent residency, country of origin, and gender. Underlining the porosity of entry categories, contributing to multiple doors through which educational migrants must pass to secure permanent residency, it reveals that PGWP‐holders experience “probationary precarity” – a concept devised to capture labour market insecurities permit‐holders endure.
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4.
LEGAL BUT DEPORTABLE VOSKO, LEAH F.
Industrial & labor relations review,
08/2018, Volume:
71, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article explores how model temporary migrant worker programs (TMWPs) that permit seasonal return can institutionalize deportability or the possibility of removal among participants with legal ...status. It draws on the cases of two groups of workers who participated in the British Columbia–Mexico Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and who managed to unionize and secure collective agreements (CAs). The author argues that the design and operation of SAWP constrains workers’ capacity to see out fixed-term contracts and to realize the promise of seasonal return. These inherent constraints lead to a form of institutionalized deportability, even among participants covered by CAs crafted to mitigate the possibility of unjust termination and premature repatriation and to address workers’ precarious transnational situation. Focusing on how deportability operates, the article analyzes immigration and labor laws and policies, CAs, key informant interviews, and testimony before British Columbia’s labor relations tribunal along with the decisions of that tribunal.
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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.
For both its empirical and its theoretical content, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of scholars of gender, of work/life balance, and of what the editors prefer to call ‘precariousness in employment. - Anne Junor, Industrial Relations Research Centre, The University of New South Wales, Australia
Leah F. Vosko is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy at the School of Social Sciences (Political Science), York University, Toronto, Canada.
Martha MacDonald is Professor in the Economics department at Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Iain Campbell is a Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
1. Introduction: Gender and the Concept of Precarious Employment Leah F. Vosko, Martha Macdonald and Iain Campbell 2. Canada: Gendered Precariousness and Social Reproduction Leah F. Vosko and Lisa Clark 3. The United States: Different Sources of Precariousness in a Mosaic of Employment Arrangements Francoise Carré and James Heintz 4. Australia: Casual Employment, Part-Time Employment and the Resilience of the Male-Breadwinner Model Iain Campbell, Gillian Whitehouse and Janeen Baxter 5. Japan: The Reproductive Bargain and the Making of Precarious Employment Heidi Gottfried 6. Ireland: Precarious Employment in the Context of the European Employment Strategy Julia S. O’Connor 7. The United Kingdom: From Flexible Employment to Vulnerable Workers Jacqueline O’Reilly, John Macinnes, Tiziana Nazio and Jose Roche 8. The Netherlands: Precarious Employment in a Context of Flexicurity Susanne D. Burri 9. France: Precariousness, Gender and the Challenges for Labour Market Policy Jeanne Fagnani and Marie-Thérèse Letablier 10. Spain: Continuity and Change in Precarious Employment John Macinnes 11. Germany: Precarious Employment and the Rise of Mini-Jobs Claudia Weinkopf 12. Sweden: Precarious Work and Precarious Unemployment Inger Jonsson and Anita Nyberg 13. Spatial Dimensions of Gendered Precariousness: Challenges for Comparative Analysis Martha Macdonald 14. Investigating Longitudinal Dimensions of Precarious Employment: Conceptual And Practical Issues Sylvia Fuller 15. Precarious Lives in the New Economy: Comparative Intersectional Analysis Wallace Clement, Sophie Mathieu, Steven Prus and Emre Uckardesler 16. Precarious Employment in the Health Care Sector
In Australia and Canada, working holidaymaking is rationalized on the basis of encouraging cultural exchange among youth. Yet, in both countries, there is mounting evidence that working holiday ...programs are operating as back-door migrant work programs to help fill demands for labor in occupations and industries characterized by precarious jobs undesirable to locals. As scholarship on working holidaymakers’ labor market participation is more developed in Australia than in Canada, and administrative data available are also more extensive therein, this article sheds new light on the Canadian case vis-à-vis the Australian example. In exploring regulatory strategies adopted by these two settler states and their effects, comparative analysis of administrative data and historical and contemporary immigration and labor and employment laws and policies reveals how nationally specific program design can foster similar ends: precariousness among participants in the industries in which working holidaymakers are concentrated, including agriculture, tourism, and accommodation and food services. It also shows that stratification between working holidaymakers more closely approximating the image of the “cultural sojourner” and those who are effectively migrating for work purposes takes shape principally along the lines of source country in both countries.
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This article illustrates how blacklisting can function as a modality of deportability among temporary migrant workers participating in a programme touted as a model of ordered migration ...internationally, with attention to sending state action. In 2010, Local 1518 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union applied successfully to British Columbia's Labour Relations Board to represent a group of circular migrants engaged under Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme. Yet less than a year later, the union complained of unfair labour practices on the part of not only the host state employer and certain employees but sending state officials who select and assign workers to Canadian employers, contending that they blocked the visa reapplications of union members eligible for recall and improperly interfered in a decertification application. On account of the unique empirics available through this case, its analysis offers a window into practices which are routinely obscured but nevertheless central to how deportability operates.
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This article analyses contemporary developments in top source countries of Canada's temporary migrant worker programmes, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and International Mobility Program ...(IMP). An analysis of administrative data and policy suggests that most temporary migrant workers from key source countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are present in Canada under highly restrictive conditions of the TFWP, largely as agricultural workers. Simultaneously, most temporary migrant workers from key source countries in Europe and Asia migrate to Canada under the growing IMP, comprised of a diverse set of subprogrammes which, in some cases, have the potential to perpetuate conditions associated with exploitation identified historically with the TFWP. At the same time, unprecedented levels of temporary migrant workers from India and China are being granted open work permits in Canada, raising questions about how racialization and colonial pasts intertwine with this fast‐growing and under‐studied side of temporary labour migration.
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In 2020, migrant farmworkers in Canada, cast as essential to sustaining the national food supply, experienced relatively high COVID-19 infection rates. Taking Southern Ontario as its focus, this ...article reveals how the federal government response to COVID-19 in agriculture perpetuated the effects of longstanding laws and policies requiring migrant farmworkers, circumscribed in their ability to politically mobilize on account of their institutionalized deportability, to shoulder disproportionate amounts of economic, social, and health risks. Centering the transnational character of migrant farmworkers’ renewal, it identifies meaningful interventions to limit the structural disempowerment of migrant farmworkers and the externalization of their social reproduction.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada imposed certain international travel bans and work-from-home orders, yet migrant farmworkers, declared essential to national food security, were exempt from such ...measures. In this context, farm worksites proved to be particularly prone to COVID-19 outbreaks. To apprehend this trend, we engaged an expanded and transnational employment strain framework that identified the employment demands and resources understood from a transnational perspective, as well as the immigration, labour, and public health policies and practices contributing to and/or buffering employment demands during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We applied mixed methods to analyze administrative data, immigration, labour, and public health policy, as well as qualitative interviews with thirty migrant farmworkers employed in Ontario and Quebec. We concluded that the deleterious outcomes of the pandemic for this group were rooted in the deplorable pre-pandemic conditions they endured. Consequently, the band-aid solutions adopted by federal and provincial governments to address these conditions before and during the pandemic were limited in their efficacy because they failed to account for the transnational employment strains among precarious status workers labouring on temporary employer-tied work permits. Such findings underscore the need for transformative policies to better support health equity among migrant farmworkers in Canada.
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