Contingent Employment, Workforce Health, and Citizenship By Marc ...

was assured either through the state or the state in cooperation with capital (Lane, 1989).

Individuals who were hardworking and loyal could expect to be rewarded with benefits such as private pensions, secure long-term jobs, and career advancement (Osterman et al., 2001). The provision of such benefits and perquisites—some in the form of incremental rewards such as retirement pensions and internal career ladders—effectively forged and ensured workers’ long-term commitment to their employers (Grimshaw, Ward, Rubery, & Beynon, 2001). In other words, firms would provide job and economic security through permanent employment, training, career advancement, and incremental increases in wages and benefits sufficient to afford workers the ability to ‘live with dignity and to participate fully in society’ (Osterman et al., 2001, p. 12). In return, employers could be assured of a stable, reliable, loyal, and productive labour force (Cappelli et al., 1997; Grimshaw et al., 2001). Such stability would ensure uninterrupted production, increased productivity, and profits (Lane, 1989), from which both parties would benefit. Under this model of employment, the worker was seen as the archetypal ‘organisation man’ (Whyte, 1956) who, according to Osterman (1999), ‘lived his (and sometimes her) life within one organisation’ (p. 26). Couched in this employment relationship was a psychological contract—one that was defined by factors such as workers’ judgements about fairness, their trust in management, and their beliefs about employers’ promises regarding matters such as job security and career advancement opportunities (Guest, 2000).

But, in his book The New Deal at Work, Cappelli (1999) declared that ‘the old employment system of secure lifetime jobs with predictable advancement and stable pay is dead’ (p. 17). The erosion of this social contract between labour and capital began in the mid-1970s with the emergence of free