| Chapter 2: | The Contingent Work Employment Relationship and Its Implications |
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in 2004 (Daly, 2006). Administrative clerical workers and industrial trades accounted for the largest share of this market (Conference Board of Canada, 2006).
Defining ‘Contingent Work’
Analysts writing about the trend toward contingent employment have invariably pointed to the definitional problems that confound related statistics as well as the understanding of this form of work. Scholte (2005) wrote that definitions fundamentally shape ‘explanations, evaluations, prescriptions, and actions’ (p. 42). He added that they affect researchers’ entire understanding of a problem, and when definitions are problematic, the knowledge that is built on them is likely to be equally troubling. Contingent employment arguably differs from standard employment on several dimensions: duration of work, labour force status, perquisites and benefits, location of work, workplace regulation, and worker representation and engagement (Burgess & Connell, 2004). Contingent work is short-term and unpredictable. It might involve full- or part-time hours, and its short-term nature usually means that workers have reduced or no benefits or entitlements. It might also involve working for multiple and/or different employers in various locations, and it is generally associated with reduced regulations (e.g., of health and safety) and reduced worker representation (e.g., limited or no unionisation) (Burgess & Connell, 2004).
In the mid-1980s, economist Audrey Freedman used the term ‘contingent work’ to refer to the management practice of employing workers on a just-in-time basis or based on the needs of the market. The pith of this definition was the impermanence of employment. Several years later, the term had become a monolith, used to describe all employment arrangements that deviated