| Chapter 2: | The Contingent Work Employment Relationship and Its Implications |
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employment stability has shifted from unions, the state, and employers to the individual worker. Workers are expected to take on the responsibility for designing and managing their own careers as well as their own training, and they are expected to assume the risks and uncertainties of the market (Cappelli, 1999). In fact, according to Moss, Salzman, and Tilly (2000), the only responsibility an employer has is to alert the worker to new skill needs.
Trends in Contingent Work
Contingent forms of work existed alongside the archetypal model of work in most if not all industrialised nations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Quinlan & Bohle, 2004; Strangleman, 2007; Vosko, 2000). Nonetheless, its expansion during the last 2 decades has led many commentators to argue that it has become or is becoming the main way of organising employment (Park & Butler, 2001). Statistics Canada data reveal that in some OECD countries, contingent work tripled and in some cases quadrupled between 1992 and 1999 (de Ruyter, 2004; Quinlan et al., 2001). Employment through labour market intermediaries such as temporary help agencies was and continues to be a key manifestation of contingent work (Vosko, 2000, 2006). The growth of this industry in the last decade is particularly striking. Data suggest that between 1995 and 2001, the number of agencies in the United States grew by approximately 50% (Peck & Theodore, 2004). In 1993, there were a total of 1,191 temporary help agencies in Canada (Hamdani, 1997). According to a Conference Board of Canada report, in 2004 there were approximately 4,269 active employment agencies operating in Canada. Industry revenues grew from $1.5 billion in 2001 to approximately $4 billion