The Alberta Labour History Institute collects, preserves, and disseminates the stories of Alberta’s working people and their organizations. This website includes full transcripts, podcasts, and profiles of our interviewees. It also includes videos, booklets, themed essays, annual calendars, and a link to a book created by ALHI. To learn more about us, visit About. For help with navigating the site, visit How To Use This Site.

What’s New?

New and updated worker profiles: Evelyn Gilbert; Frank Reaume; Glen Walker
New theme: Precarious Workers in Alberta; Hunger March (1932)
Booknotes: A Fight for Justice: The compelling story of temporary foreign workers & human rights by Joe Barrett

Precarious Workers in Alberta

Interviews with Precarious Workers in Alberta

Webinar: Precarious Workers: Exploitation and Fightback

Booknote: Gigs, Hustles, & Temps by Jason Foster

Booknote: A Fight for Justice: The compelling story of temporary foreign workers & human rights by Joe Barrett

The Rise of Precarious Work

Jason Foster

In 2017, college instructors, counsellors, and librarians from 24 colleges across Ontario with 500,000 students went on strike. Most of the 12,000 strikers were contract workers without any job stability despite their extensive education and experience. Members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), they were on strike for five weeks. A vast expansion of low-wage, part-time and contract teaching positions preceded the strike. Strikers demanded fairness and equal pay for contract faculty and an enlargement of the number of continuing positions. The employers made some concessions during the strike, but post-secondary institutions have continued to make precarious positions with low pay an ever-expanding portion of total teaching positions. Photo courtesy of Gerry Potter.

We all know bad jobs when we see them. Lousy pay, no benefits, irregular hours, unsafe working conditions. And many of us have this gut sense that bad jobs have become more common. The reality is they have. The past three decades have seen a rise in this kind of temporary, contingent, poorly valued work.

There is a term for this kind of bad job. It is called precarious work. Precarious work takes many forms. It includes part-time and temporary work, as well as the aforementioned “lousy jobs”. But it includes more than that. Broadly defined, precarious work is work that lacks the stability and security of regular work. That lack of stability and security create a vulnerability for workers in those jobs. It is that vulnerability that leads to the downward spiral of working conditions for those workers.

Today it is estimated between one-third and one-half of all workers in Canada experience some degree of precariousness. This is up from about one-quarter of workers in the 1980s (although the phenomenon wasn’t well measured back then). While the proportion of workers in precarious work has been stable over the past 20 years, it has become entrenched in our economy, often considered to be the expected type of employment for younger Canadians.

Back to the Future

In many ways, work has always been precarious. At the emergence of capitalism in the 1700s and long after, most work has been precarious. Workers never had job security, benefits or expectations of stability, no state-guaranteed employment rights or protections. There were few avenues for workers to band together to demand better working conditions. In terms of power, it truly was a master-servant relationship.

Regulation of the employment relationship only began to evolve in the first decades of the 20^th century as workers forced governments to (reluctantly) curb the worst excesses of employer mistreatment. The real turning point came after World War II, when returning soldiers and Canadians more broadly began demanding a new kind of economic deal. Through protests, strikes, and voting, Canadians pushed employers and governments to rewrite the employment script. Employers provided stable, well-paying jobs that permitted workers to support their families; governments created a range of employment protections and social programs to ensure basic needs were met; and labour laws were changed to make unions part of the employment landscape. In return for these changes, workers would recognize the employer’s right to manage and cooperate in building a stable economic environment. This has become known as the “Fordist Compromise.” It was also the origins of what we call the Standard Employment Relationship (SER) – permanent, full-time employment with decent pay and benefits in a relatively safe workplace.

The rise of precarious work marks a return to those pre-World War II working conditions. In the past 40 years, the Fordist Compromise has broken down as employers seek to lower labour costs and maximize flexibility. Making workers more vulnerable through instability and insecurity is a crucial part of that strategy.