Establishing Rights in the Disposable Jobs Regime

KEYWORDS employment, employment, work agency, workers rights, role of ILO, role of OECD, multinational enterpriseHow elastic is the concept of work? Elastic enough in some hands for the Employer spokesperson at the ILO s October 2011 Global Dialogue Forum on the Role of Private Employment Agencies in Promoting Decent Work and Improving the Functioning of Labour Markets in Private Services Sectors to introduce his presentation by asserting that agency work was neither nor atypical.1Unions, for whom combating the spread of work has emerged as a major priority, would strongly reject the first of these assertions and insist on probing the meaning of the second. Agency work is by nature. And its rapid expansion and invasive presence in virtually all economic sectors have overturned received notions of what is typical.The ILO's core Conventions defining trade union organizing, representation and bargaining rights are built on the assumption of direct, open-ended employment - the employment against which all other contractual relations are atypical. It is of course true that at no time in history has even close to a majority of the world's workers enjoyed permanent employment status. Agriculture, with the world's largest labour force, has always been dominated by Work in the rapidly expanding hotel and tourism sectors remains predominantly precarious. In manufacturing, even high union-density sectors often sit atop a wider pyramid built on long chains of outsourced, labour. Now even these nodules of permanent direct employment are succumbing to growing casualization.The labour movement has historically been based on organized workers in a standard employment relationship. In the public and private sectors, in wealthy countries and in poor ones, trade union organization among these workers has been a driving force for social progress, including the elaboration of the rights set out in ILO Conventions and their development through ILO jurisprudence. These rights have in turn served as a lever for further union advances. It is precisely these rights, along with living standards and social security, which are being corroded by the growth of work.In today's disposable jobs regime, the assumption of direct, open-ended employment has been undermined by the expansion of all forms of work relationships, including agency staffing, in all sectors of economic activity. Precarious work can no longer be seen as a deviation from the norm as it (again) becomes increasingly widespread, even typical, leaving workers again searching for a platform of rights for protecting workplace organizing and bargaining.Do we all mean the same thing by precarious work?We might begin to answer the Employer spokesperson at the ILO's Global Dialogue Forum by enquiring whether we all mean the same thing by precarious work. For trade unionists, work encompasses the range of employment relationships which deny workers essential job security, embody unequal treatment with respect to the wages and benefits of permanent workers and deny them the same protection permanent workers have through their collective bargaining agreements.Precarious work relationships include direct temporary contracts (which can become permanently temporary), seasonal contracts (which can flourish year round), agency work and other forms of outsourced, indirect, third party or triangular relationships which obscure the relationship with the real employer; bogus self-employment as independent contractors, abusive apprenticeships, internships and training schemes; and the transformation of employment contracts into commercial contracts through, for example, the creation of cooperatives, as in the Brazilian and Colombian sugar, palm oil and banana sectors.We can arrive at a definition of work which unifies these diverse forms by defining it as the negation of the ILO's definition of the employment relationship, described as full-time work, under a contract of employment for unlimited duration, with a single employer, and protected against unjustified dismissal. …