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

The relationship between race/ethnicity and disadvantaged work is also demonstrated by trend and demographic reports, which show, for example, that Mexican nationals constitute the majority of the migrant and seasonal farm workers in the United States (Mehta et al., 2000; Quandt, Preisser, & Arcury, 2002; Walter et al., 2002); that most subcontract taxi drivers in Australia are migrants (Mayhew, 1999); and that in Canada, support workers in the home care sector are largely ethnic minority women (Denton & Zeytinoglu, 1996; Denton, Zeytinoglu, Webb, & Lian, 1998). Age is also increasingly becoming a factor in employment disadvantage as younger workers become concentrated in the growing service sector and in temporary employment (Mayhew & Quinlan, 2002; Rodgers, 1989).

This view of contingent work as a social problem is common among its detractors, such as labour unions and worker advocates, who consider it a breach of the postwar labour-capital accord. Proponents of the social problem perspective believe that the erosion of this social contract is a forerunner of greater levels of disadvantage (Arcury, Quandt, Rao, & Russell, 2001; Osterman, 1999; Tassie, 1997). These critics focus their attention on organising and advocacy as ways to ameliorate the potentially harmful effects of contingent work. For instance, they recommend that governments implement policies to ensure the equality and security of contingent workers (Osterman, 1999; Zeytinoglu, Moruz, Seaton, & Lillevik, 2003). They also call for the restructuring of institutional protections, such as encouraging the rehabilitation of unions so that they can accommodate contingent forms of work (Clawson & Clawson, 1999; Heery, 2004). Some observers have suggested, for instance, that unions organise workers by trade rather than by individual employers (Cobble, 1991) or by network-based unionism, such as the garment workers’ justice centres that are