| Chapter 2: | The Contingent Work Employment Relationship and Its Implications |
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from the traditional or standard model. These arrangements include, but are not limited to, temporary help agency work, fixed-term contracts, seasonal employment, casual/on-call work, self-employment, subcontract, and part-time work. In 1989, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reemphasised the definition of contingent work in terms of transience by defining it as any job that did not have an implicit or explicit contract for long-term employment (Polivka, 1996). Although this definition continues to be widely used, many other definitions and conceptualisations are also employed.
Various labels—‘flexible’, ‘non-standard’, ‘atypical’, ‘temporary’, and ‘precarious’—have been used to refer to contingent employment. There is a multiplicity of (and sometimes conflicting) assumptions embedded in these terms. The notion of flexible employment is suggestive of the firm’s or employer’s perspective because it generally refers to their ability to quickly respond to production/market demands through numerical adjustments to the composition of their workforces. Although flexible employment is often represented as a benefit to workers or as the result of their choices, it is more often the case that employers make determinations about work schedules (e.g., the number of hours and when those hours are worked) based on their own needs rather than on those of their workers (Mills, 2004).
Terms such as ‘non-standard’ and ‘atypical’ refer to employment arrangements that do not meet the conditions of standard employment (Carre, Ferber, Golden, & Herzenberg, 2000; Menendez, Benach, Muntaner, Amable, & O’Campo, 2007; Quinlan et al., 2001). Implicit in these terms is the assumption that such jobs differ on some or all of the dimensions that make up the postwar social compact—for example, they are not full-time and permanent, there is no single employer, and there are no benefits, pensions, job security entitlements, or psychological contracts.