Home Research Projects The Vulnerable Worker Publications Vosko - Confronting the Norm Introduction

Research Projects

The Vulnerable Worker

Publications

Confronting the Norm: Gender and the International Regulation of Precarious Work

Introduction

Precarious work is the subject of growing attention at the sub-national, national, and supranational levels and it has become a central object of international labour regulation in the last few decades.  The character and incidence of precarious work varies considerably from country to country, as do approaches to mitigating it, yet there is widespread agreement that something needs to be done about the problem.

This study examines efforts to regulate precarious work through the International Labour Code (ILC) – the compendium of international labour standards adopted by the International Labour Organization.[1]  In the ILC, as elsewhere, precarious work is defined with reference to the norm of the standard employment relationship and it is regulated accordingly. What follows is an investigation of the implications – especially the gender implications – of adopting the standard employment relationship as a baseline from which to understand and regulate precarious work.  Is it possible that the adoption of the standard employment relationship as a comparator obscures our understanding of precarious work and, furthermore, might the reinforcement of this norm actually be undermining attempts to deal with the problem?

Part One considers the role of employment norms, by examining the development and deployment of the standard employment relationship and analyzing the gender contract upon which it is based.  It describes how early instruments of the ILC contributed to establishing the central elements of the standard employment relationship, and considers the consequences of putting so much weight on a relative definition of precarious work.  The standard employment relationship receives considerable scholarly attention yet its use as a reference point is often taken for granted, to the peril of understanding the dynamics of precarious work.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ILC expanded to include a new constellation of international labour standards aimed at limiting precarious work.  Each new standard addresses deviations from the standard employment relationship.  Part Two explores the manner in which deviations from the standard employment relationship have become a focus of attention in international labour regulation.  It organizes new and emerging international labour standards into three categories – time, place, and status – addressing the issues of ‘normal' working hours, site of work, and the scope of the employment relationship respectively.  Where time is concerned, the earliest standard on Part-Time Work (1994) represents an effort to redraw the temporal boundaries of the employment norm, by stretching the standard employment relationship so that it might encompass shorter normal hours of work.  In the category of place, the standard on Home Work (1996) fosters a worksite-modified employment norm.  Finally, the vexed question of status is addressed in the new Convention on Private Employment Agencies (1997), along with a series of failed attempts to negotiate a standard on Contract Labour (1998), and ongoing discussions on the scope of the employment relationship focusing increasingly on extending labour protections to dependent workers whose employment relationships are either disguised or objectively ambiguous. 

Part Two also considers how international labour standards designed to bolster the standard employment relationship – be they centered on time, place or status – intersect with changing and continuous gender relations.  Consider that the standard employment relationship is a male norm long associated with a particular gender contract.  This contract assumed a ‘male breadwinner,' typically a wage-earner, pursuing employment in the public sphere in receipt of a family wage and a ‘female caregiver' confined to the private sphere, subject to protective measures, and only gaining access to the social wage indirectly.  The terms of this contract were explicit in the early ILC and measures adopted at a mid-point in the 20^th century, and sustained to the present, only modified its basic tenets slightly.  In 1952, the Convention on Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) banned explicitly discriminatory measures yet it maintained the male norm as a benchmark for women's admission into, and participation in, the labour force and upheld ‘special measures' reproducing conceptions of women as primarily reproductive and responsible for the private sphere.  Furthermore, in 1998, the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, otherwise known as the Social Declaration, named the Convention on Discrimination a core convention without alteration.

Given that the standard employment relationship is associated with a male breadwinner/female caregiver contract, is there a link between international labour standards aimed at limiting precarious work and shifts in the gender contract?  Several international labour standards aimed at fostering labour force participation among women recognize the gendered rise of part-time work, the persistence of home work, and the spread of ‘new' forms of dependent work.  The Recommendation on Workers with Family Responsibilities (1981) calls for the regulation of part-time work, temporary work, and home work and the Convention on Maternity (2000a) extends coverage to employed women in “atypical forms of dependent work.”  Yet the modern ILC is still oriented to an equal treatment approach where women must either seek equality by conforming to a male norm or through problematic forms of difference where ‘women' are viewed as a homogeneous group characterized by stereotypical biologistic and/or culturalist assumptions (Fraser 1997; Fredman 1997; Scott 1988).  The gender contract rests increasingly on dual earning and marginalized female care-giving.  Equal treatment means women and men may both be breadwinners, eligible for the statutory benefits and entitlements that remain attached to wage-earning but that do not necessarily provide for minimum standards.  It also entails minimizing protective measures tied to motherhood, promoting part-time work, and regulating home work, as well as extending maternity benefits to a larger group of employed women to take account of expanding deviations from the standard employment relationship.  At the same time, the equal treatment approach applied in measures aimed at limiting precarious work casts the employment norm and its deviations as de-gendered.

The approach to regulating precarious work in the ILC represents an effort to stretch the standard employment relationship by expanding its conception of ‘normal' working hours, adapting traditional assumptions surrounding place of work, and reestablishing the centrality of the employment relationship.  Are these efforts in sync with the realities of precarious work in liberal industrialized economies?  To answer this question, Part Three provides a statistical portrait of precarious work in three countries with similar political, economic, and legal institutions and traditions – Australia, Canada, and the United States. 

Manifestations of precarious work are similar across these countries:  they include job insecurity, low wages, limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, and a lack of control over the labour process.  In each case, precarious work is also gendered.  At the same time, there are important differences.  In Australia, precarious work takes sharpest expression within the category of part-time ongoing casual employment, where there are disproportionate numbers of women, especially married women and women with young children.  In Canada, self-employment grew dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s.  And although self-employment is not as sizeable as in Australia, a large segment of full-time solo self-employment – a highly dominant form – is precarious.  Furthermore, a significant proportion of women in this group – more of whom pursue self-employment to fulfill care-giving responsibilities than their male counterparts – have low-incomes and lack benefits and/or independent access to benefits.  In contrast to the Australian and Canadian cases, it is the erosion of the standard employment relationship that is most pronounced in the United States.  Among full-time permanent employees, conditions of work have deteriorated since the early 1970s and many women, especially single women with young children, experience precariousness on multiple dimensions.

A statistical portrait of precarious work in these three countries illustrates the shortcomings of an approach to regulating precarious work that uses the standard employment relationship as a baseline.  Efforts to limit precarious work on the basis of time, place, and status deviations from the standard employment relationship fail to account for precarious forms of part-time work that do not neatly conform to a shorter-hours employment norm (as with the Australia case).  Nor do they address precarious

forms of self-employment, where the employment relationship is neither technically disguised nor objectively ambiguous (as with the Canadian case).  Equally, they fail to respond to mounting insecurity in full-time permanent employment (as with the American case).  Yet country-level responses to precarious work are also inadequate.  In Australia, there is a movement towards a shorter-hours employment norm directed at curbing precarious work among women with family responsibilities akin to that proposed under the Convention on Part-time Work – and the pitfalls are analogous.  In Canada, the main priority is to curb disguised and objectively ambiguous situations while simultaneously promoting entrepreneurship, mimicking the delicate balance emerging in the ILC between preserving ‘genuine commercial contracting' and eliminating employment relationships that are falsely given the appearance of a different legal nature.  Finally, in the United States, because of the continued significance of full-time permanent employment, there is scant attention to precarious work per se, although analysts increasingly recognize the growth of poor quality full-time jobs and the social consequences of excessively long hours of work are gaining attention at the policy table. 

After synthesizing regulatory responses in Australia, Canada, and the United States, Part Four maps the terrain of ‘new' employment norms by developing a typology of approaches to regulating labour and social protection and the gender contracts upon which they rest.  Using this typology, it classifies regulatory approaches prevailing in the three liberal industrialized countries, as well as two competing prototypes for re-regulation, before situating the ILC model.  In 2000, a Committee of Experts on Workers in Situations Needing Protection made a correlation between instability in the “conditions governing the method, time and place of the performance of services” and gender inequality; similarly, Conclusions to a General Discussion on the Scope of the Employment Relationship (2003) make an unprecedented link between the rise of precarious work and women's high representation in certain forms of employment (ILO 2000b, 3.19; see also ILO 2003b).  Still, there is a disjuncture between, on the one hand, the growing recognition that precarious work is gendered and mounting efforts to regulate it through the ILC and, on the other hand, the sustained emphasis on equal treatment.  The study concludes by exposing this disjuncture. 

1. The ILC is a product of cumulative interactions between national and supranational regulatory schemes.  It derives its influence from constructing normative principles and frameworks that individual countries may translate into substantive laws and policies (Murray 2001; Vosko 2004).