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

Garsten & Jacobsson, 2003). Its reappearance was accompanied by a change in the social (power) relations between labour and capital. Where firms once worked to achieve harmony with labour through long-term investments such as social security systems and internal labour markets, they now leveraged their position via the threat and reality of moving jobs elsewhere, generally to low-wage markets (Ross & Trachte, 1990). These New Economy firms, according to Rifkin (1995), are temporal rather than spatial, are not grounded in any community or locale, and exercise enormous power over people, places, and the commercial agendas of countries by virtue of their agility, flexibility, and mobility. Such threats of capital flight have also effectively weakened the bargaining power of labour (Osterman, 2002). Rifkin (1995) observed, for example, that ‘employers are increasingly using the threat of temp hiring and outsourcing to win wage and benefit concessions from unions’ (p. 194).

Economist Richard Belous (as cited in Rifkin, 1995) has likened contingent employment to a one-night stand. Similarly, Cappelli (1999) wrote that if the ‘traditional, lifetime employment relationship was like a marriage then this new employment relationship is like a lifetime of divorces and remarriages’ (pp. 2–3)—an uneasy dance between labour and capital. In other words, it is ephemeral and lacks commitment. Accompanying employers’ unwillingness to offer secure employment conditions was the push, implicit or explicit, to disabuse workers of their psychological contracts. Expunging the conception of the worker as an ‘organisation man’⁶ (Whyte, 1956) and inculcating the ‘flexibility mindset’ were key components of the strategy of promoting global capitalism. In a contingent employment relationship, then, workers’ expectations are lowered and at the same time, new demands, expectations, and heightened personal responsibility are placed on them. For instance, the responsibility for