Book Description

This report examines the causes as well as the symptoms of non-standard employment. Its principal wide-angled finding is that non-standard employment has always been part of the labour market but now it has become a predominant feature. The two features of non-standard work are little or no job security and highly flexible hours and conditions of work set by employers for their specific needs. A second major empirical finding is that for many experts, job tenure for mid-career men is in decline in all OECD countries with the exception of France . Thirdly, Researchers such as Standing have discovered that there is a wide range of different kinds of precarious forms of employment arising out of non-standard employment. So what is the difference between precarity and non-standard employment? The simple answer is that precarity is non-standard work that is linked to poverty and insecurity. The two are often used interchangeably and are in fact interdependent. A fourth principal conclusion is that labour is at the low point of the collective bargaining cycle and it must relearn the fundamentals of its craft to find its way back to the bargaining table. The lesson learned in the past was to win the economic war, it had to fight politically. The idea of a living wage is the leading candidate to become the high standard for government and the labour movement because it forcefully identifies the causal link between quality of life and the means to obtain it.