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

Within the contingent labour market, there is a structuring up into good jobs and a structuring down into low-wage, low-status jobs. Thus, a contingent worker might be an executive who has been hired to lead a project or to head start-up operations (Moralis, 2002), or she or he might be an unskilled labourer.

The problems of dissimilar terminology, the attendant disagreements about what exactly constitutes contingent work, the diversity of employment arrangements that fall under the category of contingent work, and the different assumptions that are implicit in these terminologies have led to contradictory perspectives on contingent work. I consider two core and different perspectives⁹ on it—contingent work as a social good and contingent work as a social problem—and discuss how each is treated in the literature.

Perspectives on Contingent Work: A Social Problem or a Social Good

Notwithstanding the different labels, definitions, and assumptions, two main perspectives regarding contingent work can be discerned in the literature—a view that casts contingent work as good and a view that casts it as bad. These conflicting perspectives arise from different standpoints on the changing nature of work and employment relationships: some see these changes as constituting a social problem (Kunda, Barley, & Evans, 2002), and some see them as exemplifying the dynamics of a flexible, productive economy and therefore representative of a social good.¹⁰ For instance, Carre et al. (2000) wrote that the perceptions of contingent forms of employment range from ‘seeing them as free-market innovations that liberate employees and employers from the straitjacket of standardised employment to