We draw on mostly unpublished ABS data to address three related questions: (1) How can we approximate the number of genuinely flexible casual employees? (2) What are the characteristics of work where ...employees are, or are not, likely to be genuinely flexible casuals? and (3) How many employees are compensated for the disutility of casual employment? Only 6 per cent of leave-deprived workers (1.4% of all employees) are ‘narrowly-defined casuals’. The majority of leave-deprived workers have been with their employer for over a year. The majority expect to be with the same employer over a year into the future. Around half have stable hours from one week to the next and are not on standby. The characteristics of leave-deprived employees do not appear to be those of flexible, casual employment relationships. The common feature appears to be low power. Employers may have the ability to deploy them in all sorts of flexible ways, but often do not need to utilise that flexibility. The popular term ‘permanent casual’ is more accurately phrased as ‘permanently insecure’. The high rate of ‘casual’ employment enables Australia to have an internationally low level of leave coverage.
The COVID-19 crisis is a global event that has created and amplified social inequalities, including an already existing and steadily increasing problem of employment and income insecurity and erosion ...of workplace rights, affecting workers globally. The aim of this exploratory study was to review employment-related determinants of health and health protection during the pandemic, or more specifically, to examine several links between non-standard employment, unemployment, economic, health, and safety outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Canada, the United States, and Chile, based on an online survey conducted from November 2020 to June 2021. The study focused on both non-standard workers and unemployed workers and examined worker outcomes in the context of current type and duration of employment arrangements, as well as employment transitions triggered by the COVID-19 crisis. The results suggest that COVID-19-related changes in non-standard worker employment arrangements, or unemployment, are related to changes in work hours, income, and benefits, as well as the self-reported prevalence of suffering from severe to extreme anxiety or depression. The results also suggest a link between worker type, duration of employment arrangements, or unemployment, and the ability to cover regular expenses during the pandemic. Additionally, the findings indicate that the type and duration of employment arrangements are related to the provision of personal protective equipment or other COVID-19 protection measures. This study provides additional evidence that workers in non-standard employment and the unemployed have experienced numerous and complex adverse effects of the pandemic and require additional protection through tailored pandemic responses and recovery strategies.
This article studies the impact of employment law on de facto labour market segmentation for 22 European countries from 1991 to 2014. Applying the concept of legal segmentation, the authors ...distinguish between the standard‐setting (protective), privileging and equalizing functions of employment law and use descriptive and multivariate statistics to indicate their effects on overall employment, and male and female standard and non‐standard employment. High privileging, in combination with high standard‐setting, is found to favour male standard employment and female non‐standard employment, while the equalizing function, aimed at improving the protection of women and other marginalized groups, actually increases male non‐standard employment.
The emergence of dependent contractors challenges the existing institutions regarding social protection and labour regulation. This article aims at identifying the political narratives that explain ...the emergence of New Forms of Employment (NFE) and dependent contracting along with the policy solutions proposed by the social partners at the EU and international level. By analysing policy documents from the social partners through the lens of a qualitative version of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), the authors indentify two distinct narratives – ‘devaluation of work’ and ‘entrepreneurship and flexibility’. The authors show how these rationales lead to various policy solutions and identify oppositions and possible compromise.
The authors define ‘place basing’ as the study of work and employment in a particular place. They are interested in understanding the limitations of work opportunities therein and so focus on workers ...and jobs that are not subject to the threat of off-shoring or relocation elsewhere but which are low paid and insecure. The authors theorize three contributions to new knowledge that flow from a place-based study of work and employment by demonstrating how precarious flexible often zero hour work eschews reciprocity between employer and employees and workers. They focus their research on ordinary working families and the ‘permissive visibility’ of bad work. The research points to an idealized model of individual and family economic functioning that is able to cope with physical and mental challenges individually without burdening the state. As the findings on workers and households demonstrate, this ideal is far from the reality they experience.
The Precarious Concept of Precarity Choonara, Joseph
The Review of radical political economics,
09/2020, Volume:
52, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper traces the roots of precarity as a concept emerging from French sociological discourse, then permeating through networks informed by Italian autonomism, before re-emerging in the writings ...of figures such as Guy Standing and Arne Kalleberg. It is shown that, despite the claims of the literature, precarity in employment is not typical in the United Kingdom. Here, temporary employment remains the exception and employment tenure remains stable. This can best be explained by radical political economy. Capital is not interested simply in engendering precarity; it is also concerned with the retention and reproduction of labor power, leading to contradictory imperatives. The resonance of the narrative of precarity, in spite of this, reflects a long retreat from class within radical theory and the insecurities present in working life.
Individual worker complaints continue to be the core foundation of employment standards enforcement in many Western jurisdictions, including the Canadian province of Ontario. In the contemporary ...labour market context where segments of the labour force may be disproportionately impacted by rights violations, and employment relationships are more diverse and often more tenuous than previously, the continued reliance on individual claims suggests a need to better understand the challenges associated with the investigation and resolution of claims involving ‘vulnerable workers’ in precarious employment situations. Using interviews with front-line Ontario employment standards officers (ESOs), this article examines the extent to which certain worker characteristics and employment situations perceived by officers as ‘vulnerable’ are identified by officers as significant constraints or barriers to investigation processes and outcomes, and documents whether and how officers address these constraints and barriers. The analysis also identifies the perceived influence of policy, resource and legislative requirements in shaping how officers deal with the more difficult and challenging cases, while also considering the extent to which the officers’ actions are understood by them as discretionary and guided by their particular orientations or concerns. In so doing, this article reveals challenges to the resolution of claims in precarious employment situations, the very place where employment standards are often most needed.
The debate on migration has extended the scope of industrial relations research and brought questions of regulation to the centre. We suggest that there is a mutuality to the relationship between the ...debates around migration and regulation within the industrial relations literature: the study of migration has stimulated a new set of debates within industrial relations that allow us to reconsider issues of regulation; in turn, the study of regulation offers a useful perspective on issues relating to migration. The article applies an analytical framework based on the interplay of regulatory spaces and actors to the study of international migration. The framework offers a dynamic approach to mapping the wide range of actors involved in the regulation of migration and the boundaries between regulatory spaces, which may be fluid and contested. Through applying this framework, industrial relations issues relating to migration are located within a wider view of both regulation and the international movement of people.
Current research has shed critical light on the insecurity characterizing temporary agency work. To understand how this insecurity is produced, this article shows that we have to go beyond national ...and industrial regulation and analyse how this regulation shapes workplace practices and access to a collective voice. Thus, connecting the national and workplace levels is crucial in understanding job insecurity for agency workers. Job insecurity is shaped not only by the type of contract; it is primarily formed by how the national regulation, inclusive of collective bargaining and representation structures, shapes the modalities in accordance to which temporary agency workers are used at workplaces. The article is based on a cross-national comparative case study methodology, and compares two similar workplaces in two different institutional settings, those of Sweden and Belgium.
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