1 Introduction
Gender and the concept of precarious employment
Leah F. Vosko, Martha MacDonald and Iain Campbell
Industrialized societies have experienced dramatic labour market transformations over the last few decades â and gender relations are at the centre of such changes. The key changes have proceeded through periods of economic growth and periods of recession. For example, womenâs labour force participation rates have risen or stabilized at relatively high levels as a result of developments ranging from womenâs collective struggle for formal equality, governmentsâ promotion of the employment of women as means of raising employment rates, changing household structures, and technological change. At the same time, the jobs taken by men and women have been restructured, resulting in more service sector jobs, higher skill requirements but also higher demands. Yet industrial and occupational sex segregation persist in the labour markets of countries as diverse as Sweden, still characterized by social democratic institutions, and the United States, defined by a prototypically neo-liberal regime. Earnings differences also remain between women and men, and they are evident among the sexes along the lines of âraceâ, ethnicity and immigrant status as well. In most industrialized societies, moreover, Keynesian strategies of demand-management have been in disfavour, prompting the reconfiguration of labour and social policies through which women and men access labour security. The current period is thus often characterized as an era of both gendered labour market change and concern about persistent inequality and precariousness.
The relationship between gender and precarious employment is the focus of this book. What is called precarious employment or perhaps more exactly precariousness in employment is sometimes regarded as shadowy and contested (see below). However, it would be wrong to overlook the potential of these concepts. We use them in this book because we are convinced that they can be helpful in understanding the messy underlying reality of changing employment systems and changing gender relations in contemporary industrialized societies. As a general term, precariousness suggests a risky or hazardous lack of security or stability. When applied to the sphere of employment, it highlights the pivotal issue of labour insecurity, which rightly stands at the centre of much current research and much current public policy (for example, in policies of âflexicurityâ). The concepts of precariousness and precarious employment encourage us to analyse the way in which employment systems and modes of life consolidated in the middle of the twentieth century in many industrialized countries are being transformed in the current period. In the course of this transformation, the main forms of labour security are being reconfigured and redistributed, generating new social fractures and inequalities and posing significant challenges for many workers, households and communities. The current global recession builds on this pre-existing process, threatening to extend insecurity to new levels and new domains.
Understanding the transformation of employment systems is a major challenge. Processes of change are by no means linear or universal. In seeking to understand these processes, scholars have invoked numerous, often overlapping, concepts â for example, quality of work, flexibility, good jobs and bad jobs, and contingent work. Many of these related concepts are also useful. However, we believe that the concept of precarious employment offers something powerful. Correctly developed, it offers a conceptual tool that can help to identify the extent of change, the forms of change and the varied paths of change.
To realize the potential of the concept of precarious employment, we need to resolve at least some of the current uncertainty and conflict over definitions. We discuss definitions more fully below, but for now it is sufficient to say that we favour a definition that equates precariousness in employment first of all with job characteristics rather than with worker characteristics or with subjective experiences (or feelings). Moreover, we see these job characteristics as multidimensional. In addition, we incorporate a relative component in the definition. In broad terms, we understand precarious employment as âemployment that lacks standard forms of labour securityâ. Conversely, it can be seen as âemployment characterized by heightened labour insecurityâ. One common definition, alluded to in many of the essays in this book, suggests that precarious employment can be identified as âpaid work characterized by limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages, and high risks of ill-healthâ (Vosko 2006a: 4). This is a definition that we see as scientific rather than rhetorical and one that is well suited as an instrument for empirical research.
The fundamental concern of this book is to assemble empirical research that uses a notion of âprecarious employmentâ in order to explore contemporary changes in employment systems and gender relations in industrialized societies. We aim to take a few steps forward in the program of research that is implicit in the concept of precarious employment. In particular, we want to look at the contours or the nature and shape of precarious employment in different places and at different scales â that is, the diverse forms and their distribution amongst differently located workers (that is, socially, spatially, occupationally and industrially). In charting these contours, we adopt a gender perspective. We are interested in the way in which men and women participate differently in precarious employment, to differing extents, in differing forms and with different consequences in both the short and the long term. This entails a perspective that focuses on employment but that reaches out to encompass broader social, political and economic life, including social welfare, tax systems, labour regulation, household relations, ideologies, and indeed gender regimes in general.
The book brings together fifteen essays from scholars with common expertise in the analysis of changing employment systems and gender relations but with otherwise diverse views and diverse disciplinary backgrounds (embracing not only economics but also sociology, political science, and legal studies). It comprises national case studies from eleven industrialized countries, together with four supplementary studies that offer cross-cutting reflections on how to develop research on precarious employment. The national case studies cover industrialized countries in North America, the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. In showcasing this group we are not suggesting that precarious employment is confined to industrialized countries.1 However, there are advantages in limiting the scope in this way. As noted earlier, we see the notion of precarious employment as relative, gesturing towards a deficit in comparison with standard forms of labour security. This aspect of the analysis is expressed most easily within the framework of industrialized countries, which generally share a common institutional and historical background, for example in the development of a standard employment relationship (see below).
The national level is an important level for analysis, because of the influence of national institutions, including systems of regulation and government policies, in structuring specific forms of precarious employment and the course of their development. However, it is essential to be able to go on to compare across nations. Moreover, it is important to uncover some aspects that may be neglected in national analysis, such as other spatial levels, including the regional and local, and the impact of common patterns of industry development. In order to capture some of these considerations and to point the way forward for research, the national studies are supplemented by four essays that offer cross-cutting reflections. These move beyond a purely national focus. They examine conceptual and methodological challenges to improving understandings of precarious employment, especially those arising from its social, spatial, and temporal dynamics.
Each national chapter follows a loose template. The assignment is to examine the dominant debates around labour insecurity and precarious employment in the country of choice, the main trends and forces, and the implications of the changes. Concern for gender relations is an underlying theme, and each chapter seeks to identify consequences of precarious employment for men and women, and for inherited forms of employment protection, household structures, social security systems, and gender regimes. The aim of the national studies is not, however, to produce definitive reports on precarious employment. Instead, the main objectives are to thicken the description and to toss up issues for discussion and debate, both at national and at cross-national levels. We are encouraging a fluid, more open discussion, appropriate to the fact that national experiences are diverse and that our conceptual framework is still embryonic.
Selected themes that emerge from the chapters are reviewed below. Here, however, we mention that the national case studies successfully demonstrate the diversity of forms of precarious employment. The character and incidence of precarious employment vary from country to country and region to region. In some contexts, such as in Spain, Canada, and France, temporary employment is a significant phenomenon exhibiting multiple dimensions of labour market insecurity. In others, for example Japan and the UK, part-time employment is prevalent and characterized by precariousness. Still other countries confront the growth of solo or own-account self-employment featured by low wages, for example, the US and Ireland, or new forms of employment deprived of full regulatory protections, such as mini-jobs in Germany. To probe these overarching trends, the chapters in this book talk of different types of temporary and part-time employment, for example, fixed-term work in Spain, temporary agency work in Japan and the US and part-time casual employment in Australia. They also explore under-examined phenomena linked to precarious forms of employment, such as part-time unemployment, which attracts concern in Sweden, underemployment in economic regions characterized by seasonal work, such as in Newfoundland, Canada, and the situation of groups of workers engaged in work reminiscent of the labour contracting prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century; for example, the cockle collectors hired by labour brokers subject to new Gangmasters legislation in the UK. Despite these differences, common elements affect the workers involved â job uncertainty, low income, lack of control over working conditions, and limited regulatory protection.
This chapter offers some introductory remarks on the potential and significance of the concept of precarious employment for contemporary research, with the aim of helping to set the scene for the following fifteen essays. The first section looks at the concepts of precariousness and precarious employment. We aim to review the history of the terms, to summarize the way they have been used in empirical social science, to introduce some debates and critiques, and to clear up some common misconceptions. The second section presents our preferred understanding of precarious employment and draws the connection with the institutional context, including what can be called the standard employment relationship. This leads into a discussion of the value of typologies of standard and non-standard employment for research. The third section draws out and discusses some themes that emerge from the essays, including the merits of alternative concepts, such as quality of work and flexibility, the place of part-time employment as a site of precariousness (and, in some cases, a site of solutions), the importance of considering social reproduction, and the role of both public policy (including employment protection, family and social security, and gender equality policies more broadly), and family and household structures (and relations of distribution within them) in shaping precarious employment.
What is precarious employment?
âPrecariousnessâ? âPrecarious employmentâ? The terms have strong resonance in some countries, but in other countries they are faint or indeed completely absent. In their review of five European countries, Laparra et al. (2004: 6) note that the terms are prominent in political and social science debates in France, Italy and Spain, but they play only a minor part in the social science debates in Germany and are almost completely absent in the UK. Our national chapters add further evidence of this uneven usage, pointing to the presence of the terms in Canada and Australia but their relative absence from discussion in the US, Ireland, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Japan.
In reviewing the history of the terms, we are primarily interested in their use within empirical social science. There is of course a broader field of politics and social life in which the terms are used, and this may stimulate academic work (Bourdieu 1998: 95â100). Thus âprecariousnessâ and âprecarious employmentâ are terms extensively used by activist groups in Europe, in general from the left, in efforts to mobilize particular groups of workers outside of normal trade union action. In analogy to the proletariat, activists and scholars speak freely of the emergence of a prĂ©cariat (Castel 2006). This attention is expressed in several struggles and networks, especially in France and Italy, for example the network âStop PrĂ©caritĂ©â in France (Perrin 2007). The initiatives have often reached across national borders in Europe and have extended beyond small activist groupings. Thus, the International Metalworkersâ Federation (IMF 2006; Blum and Balke 2006) mixes research and action with a survey and a current campaign against precarious work. Similarly, in 2008 the European Left launched a âCampaign against Precarityâ (European Left 2008). Many of these campaigns have thrown up innovative and colourful ideas, for example, in parts of Italy the elevation of a new saint, San Precario, whose relics and images are used to sanction and promote protests against precariousness (Tari and Vanni n.d.). In this activist discourse, âprecariousnessâ may be given a blunt meaning with a strong normative overlay.
Our main concern is with the use of the terms in social science. The lengthiest and richest history is in France, where the terms have been widespread since the late 1970s, often linked to the discussion of social exclusion (Barbier 2004, 2005). Numerous distinctions have been and are applied. Cingolani (2005), for example, distinguishes âprecarious workâ, âprecarious workersâ and then a more general âsocial and economic precariousnessâ connected with poverty. As Fagnani and Letablier point out (this book), the term precariousness (prĂ©caritĂ©) was initially applied very broadly, but it soon came to be attached most strongly to the sphere of employment, and in particular to the distinctions amongst waged jobs in terms of type of contract (status). In this latter case, precarious employment is often directly identified with forms of employment that stand outside of the standard, full-time, open-ended contract for French employees. These distinct forms appear in the national statistics as âles formes particuliĂšres dâemploiâ â comprising fixed-term contracts, temporary agency work, and traineeships and publicly subsidized work. This link to forms of temporary work, such as temporary agency and fixed-term work, remains dominant in French debates; though some scholars seek to broaden the discussion, for example by taking up the verb, prĂ©carisation, and focusing attention on the processes of labour restructuring and public policy implementation that are reshaping wage-labour in general (Appay 2005).
In the English-speaking world the ...
