Precarious Work, Women, and the New Economy: The Challenge to Legal Norms

(Paperback)

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Globalisation, the shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment, and the spread of information-based systems and technologies have given birth to a new economy, which emphasises flexibility in the labour market and in employment relations. These changes have led to the erosion of the standard (industrial) employment relationship and an increase in precarious work - work which is poorly paid and insecure. Women perform a disproportionate amount of precarious work. This collection of original essays by leading scholars on labour law and women's work explores the relationship between precarious work and gender, and evaluates the extent to which the growth and spread of precarious work challenges traditional norms of labour law and conventional forms of legal regulation.The book provides a comparative perspective by furnishing case studies from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and the US, as well as the international and supranational context through essays that focus on the IMF, the ILO, and the EU. Common themes and concepts thread throughout the essays, which grapple with the legal and public policy challenges posed by women's precarious work.

Reviews

an informative and thought-provoking collection of papers...This volume makes a valuable contribution to the feminist literature. By placing laws and policies in their social contexts, it provides a comparative analysis of the challenges precarious employment growth and feminization of labour present to labour law...The book will be of interest to a broad international audience of economists, sociologists, and industrial relations and human resource management specialists, as well as legal scholars...I would strongly recommend this book to any Feminist Economics reader who is interested in flexibility, workplace changes, and gender and precarious work issues. -- Isik Urla Zeytinoglu * Feminist Economics 14 (3), July 2008 *

Author Bio

Judy Fudge is currently Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in Toronto, where she teaches employment and labour law. Beginning January 2007, she will be the Lansdowne Chair at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. Rosemary Owens is a Reader in Law at the University of Adelaide, where she researches and teaches in the areas of labour and industrial relations law, Australian constitutional law, and feminist legal theory.