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.

The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between migrant and citizen/permanent resident workers in receiving and sending states worldwide. In contexts such as Canada, it also underscored that many workers in occupations and sectors deemed "essential" enough to be exempt from stay-at-home orders and other public safety measures are migrants, a sizeable number of whom sustain Canada's food supply through their work in its agricultural industry.This book explores the dynamics behind the pandemic's deleterious outcomes for this vital group of workers, highlighting migrant farmworkers importance to the Canadian economy, society, and the world of work alongside the conditions they endured before and during the global health pandemic through policy and media analysis and open-ended interviews with workers enrolled in two streams of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as well as migrants without legal status employed in agriculture located in Ontario and Quebec. Advancing the notion of transnational employment strain, the authors derive insight from the employment strain model, a framework for understanding risks to the physical and psychological well-being of workers, and expand it to account for migrants' relationships across transnational space.

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.

This book explores the precarious margins of contemporary labor 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 workers most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrants, using illustrations from Australia, the United States, and Canada, as well as member states of the European Union.
Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis of national and international regulatory approaches, drawing on original and extensive qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analyzing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries.

In an original and striking study of migration management in operation, Disrupting Deportability highlights obstacles confronting temporary migrant workers in Canada seeking to exercise their labor rights. Leah F. Vosko explores the effects of deportability on Mexican nationals participating in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Vosko follows the decade-long legal and political struggle of a group of Mexican SAWP migrants in British Columbia to establish and maintain meaningful collective representation. Her case study reveals how modalities of deportability—such as termination without cause, blacklisting, and attrition—destabilize legally authorized temporary migrant agricultural workers. Through this detailed exposé, Disrupting Deportability concludes that despite the formal commitments to human, social, and civil rights to which migration management ostensibly aspires, the design and administration of this "model" temporary migrant work program produces conditions of deportability, making the threat possibility of removal ever-present.

This book explores the precarious margins of contemporary labor 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 workers most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrants, using illustrations from Australia, the United States, and Canada, as well as member states of the European Union.
Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis of national and international regulatory approaches, drawing on original and extensive qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analyzing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries.

In an original and striking study of migration management in operation, Disrupting Deportability highlights obstacles confronting temporary migrant workers in Canada seeking to exercise their labor rights. Leah F. Vosko explores the effects of deportability on Mexican nationals participating in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Vosko follows the decade-long legal and political struggle of a group of Mexican SAWP migrants in British Columbia to establish and maintain meaningful collective representation. Her case study reveals how modalities of deportability—such as termination without cause, blacklisting, and attrition—destabilize legally authorized temporary migrant agricultural workers. Through this detailed exposé, Disrupting Deportability concludes that despite the formal commitments to human, social, and civil rights to which migration management ostensibly aspires, the design and administration of this "model" temporary migrant work program produces conditions of deportability, making the threat possibility of removal ever-present.