Negotiating Parity for Precarious Workers

KEYWORDS precarious employment, social dialogue, collective bargaining, collective agreement, equal pay, trade union role, good practiceBy viewing labour as a commodity, we at once get rid of the moral basis on which the relation of employer and employed should stand, and make the market the sole regulator ofthat action.1John Kells IngramAmong the founding propositions of the International Labour Organization are that universal and lasting peace must be founded on social justice and that labour is not a commodity.2 These propositions seek to advance social justice and protect workers from the vagaries of market forces through, for example, the regulation of hours of work, freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining. The intention of these regulations is to protect workers and enable them to secure a fair and reasonable wage - labour standards that would not exist had their determination been left to the usual and unequal, system of individual bargaining between workers and employers.Technological advances, global economic integration and changes in business organization transformed what was once considered the employment - developed and supported by legislation or collective agreement and implying full-time, indefinite and direct employment with one employer. The contractualization of the employment relationship had two central aspects: the placing of limits on the employers' powers of command; and the use of the employment relationship as a means to provide protection against social and economic risk (Deakin, 2002). The labour norms associated with such an employment contract included social policies such as pensions, unemployment insurance and medical coverage, a degree of regularity in the employment relationship and protection from unacceptable working conditions. These provided the foundations for the social stability to underpin economic growth (Rodgers and Rodgers, 1989).While atypical working arrangements have always existed alongside the standard employment relationship, the demand for greater flexibility in the organization of work resulted in an increase in these non-standard and contingent forms of work in many industrialized economies and the expansion of the informal economy and subcontracted labour in a number of developing economies (Fudge, 2006). Vertically integrated enterprises increasingly subcontracted intermediate inputs and outsourced non-core activities such as accounting and customer services. The fragmentation of the vertically integrated firm was accompanied by an increasingly diverse set of employment relationships: part-time, fixed-term, temporary agency and contract workers, many of which only partially fulfilled the requirements of employment under the relevant labour law (Casale, 2011). As the employment relationship evolved Negotiating parity over time, many of the labour norms that had been associated with the standard workers3^5 employment contract were diluted (Deakin, 2002). At the same time, the increased use of economically dependent or pseudo self employed workers also led to a blurring of the binary divide between employees and the self employed.3The decoupling of work from employment presents a significant challenge in terms of ensuring adequate protection for those in atypical, non-standard and contingent work arrangements. Presenting these work arrangements as part of the new economy, modern, flexible work solutions that meet the interests of enterprises and workers belies the involuntary condition of precarity which characterizes many of these forms of work. Indeed, in a survey of temporary agency workers in the European Union, workers re- -f plied that the main reason they engaged in this form of work was to find permanent employment (Eurofound, 2007).We use the term precarious work in this paper to focus on the involuntary state of uncertainty that sets these workers apart from those who voluntarily engage in part-time work to supplement their primary activity or ensure a better work-life balance. …