Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship

Abstract

In these 278 pages, Leah F. Vosko describes and analyses the political economy of temporary work in Canada and its remarkable growth over the past three decades as part of the increasing non-standardization of processes to achieve flexible and just-in-time production and service delivery. What is particularly valuable in this study is the intertwining of a feminist analysis of this process as the protagonists in this story overwhelmingly emerge as women, although it is acknowledged that there is growing gender parity in some industries marked by a race to the bottom.In order to lay bare the inner workings of contemporary work relationships, Vosko has chosen to conduct a detailed case study of the temporary help industry (THI) in the twentieth century, beginning from 1897, when the first legislation on private employment agencies was adopted, to 1997 when the ILO abandoned its traditional support of the standard employment relationship (SER) and its bias against market intermediaries. This revealed its apparent tolerance for temporary employment relationships (TER) thus creating the appropriate context within which various types of non-standard processes, including temporary work relationships, could proliferate.At a theoretical level, the author argues that with the preponderance of temporary employment relationships (TER), workers more and more become like commodities. Of course, from a Marxist perspective, all power is commodified under capitalism. However, the slogan labour is not a commodity endorsed by the ILO had provided a discursive space for several decades to promote workers' rights and to regulate temporary employment agencies nationally and internationally. With the granting of legitimacy to such agencies in 1997, the illusory nature of such slogans, the classed nature of organizations such as the ILO and states/governments and the fragility of workers' rights became crystal clear. The discursive shift announced the acceptance by states and some organizations of the need to not hinder, if not encourage, the expansion of what has come to be known as precarious employment.The book furthers feminist research, in particular extending the concept of feminization of the market, ironically in an industry which has a growing number of men working in it. Vosko argues that despite the latter trend, the varieties of jobs available for temporary workers are clearly gendered in terms of the division of labour, i.e., who gets to do what kind of job, the kinds of the salary and working conditions each has and the overall feminized character of all temporary work relationships which is based on the old image of the Kelly Girl. She demonstrates that there is also a racialized division of as immigrant women and men and women of colour are also concentrated at the lower end. However, she does not elaborate on whether this represents a racialization of temporary work relationships to the same extent as she develops the feminization thesis. The racialization thesis could be further developed since she presents the material to argue that viewpoint. …