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

Some scholars consider these labels to be inaccurate or erroneous. They argue that they are a historical because what is thought to be standard employment was largely restricted to the period of extraordinary growth and stability in Western economies from the late 1940s into the 1970s—the post–World War II period (Carre et al., 2000; Quinlan et al., 2001; Strangleman, 2007). The terms are also considered inaccurate because some jobs might be atypical but might not be contingent. For instance, shift work can be considered nonstandard (vis-à-vis the timing of the work), but it might still be full-time and permanent. In addition, these terms are particularly misleading with regard to women and minorities, who have historically engaged in these forms of work mostly because of labour market disadvantage (Boyd 1999, 2000).

Some scholars also consider these terms benign in that they do not reflect the more problematic nature of contingent employment. For instance, De Cuyper et al. (2005) defineda temporary job simply as one whose termination is ‘determined by objective conditions such as reaching a certain date, completion of an assignment, or return of another employee who has been temporarily replaced’ (p. 15). To highlight the problematic aspects of contingent work, many researchers have chosen to use terms such as ‘precarious’, ‘marginal’, and ‘disposable’ (Carre et al., 2000; Quinlan et al., 2001). Precarious, which is French in origin, is a multidimensional concept that encapsulates notions such as job and income insecurity, low wages, transience, powerlessness, high risks of ill health, and limited benefits and statutory entitlements⁷,⁸ (Menendez et al., 2007; Quinlan et al., 2001; Vosko, 2006). Nonetheless, although these terms reflect a specific set of assumptions about contingent work, they obfuscate others. They do not, for example, reflect the full complement of workers’ labour market experiences (Carre et al., 2000).