Self-employment, Women, and Precarious Work: The Scope of Labour Protection

This paper begins by examining the stereotype of self-employment and how it is distinguished from employment in order to develop a more complex and accurate typology of subordination and autonomy in employment relationships. The next section turns to the ILO, and traces its approach to self-employment. Since 1990, the ILO has attempted to fashion an entente between employees' representatives, employers' representatives, and governments around the scope of employment protection and the coverage of self-employed workers. The next section begins the case study and presents some of the recent Canadian data on self-employment, and examines it along the dimensions of subordination and dependency identified in the typology. It also explores the extent to which women's self-employment is precarious, and how women's self-employment is shaped by their responsibility for domestic labour. The scope of employment in labour-related law and legislation in the common-law jurisdictions in Canada is mapped in the next section, and it is compared to the reality of women's self-employment. A key question is whether the scope of legal protection of employment contributes to the precarious nature of self-employment for women. The paper concludes by considering what effect the ILO's approach is likely to have on access to labour and social protection for self-employed women in Canada. Women's self-employment demonstrates the need to go beyond employment to consider self-employment and unpaid caring labour in order to develop policies and laws that promote women's equality.