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

market or globalised capitalism. The latter was characterised by a networked or integrated worldwide economy wherein the core activities of production, consumption, and their associated components (e.g., capital, labour, raw materials, management, information technology, and markets) were organised on a global scale (Castells, 2000; Scholte, 2005). Globalised capitalism emerged in the context of new and more powerful technological innovations, increased global competition, rapidly changing product and service markets, increased demands for productivity gains, and the deregulation and liberalisation of trade and investments (Benach et al., 2000; Castells, 2000; Rifkin, 1995; Ross & Trachte, 1990).

Firms responded to these structural changes with strategic and cost-cutting measures such as downsizing (euphemistically called ‘right-sizing’), organisational restructuring, opting for numerical rather than functional flexibility, and promoting capital and production mobility (e.g., moving production to low-wage sectors and vulnerable labour markets) (Beck, 2000; Cooke & Zeytinoglu, 2004; Ross & Trachte, 1990). These strategies were buttressed by a dominant market or business rhetoric and ideology (Carnoy, 2000; Feldman, 1995; Kalleberg, 2000; Quinlan et al., 2001) whereby ‘the market’ was advanced as the key mechanism for meeting public interests—for example, achieving and sustaining a healthy economy and attracting investment and jobs (Ross, 1990). Furthermore, the business sector promulgated the claim that in order for employers and corporations to compete internationally, state welfare measures had to be retrenched.

The dismantling of the postwar social contract was a corollary to these changes, and in its wake, contingent employment reemerged. This type of employment relationship is marked by loose ties between employers and employees (Garsten, 1999;