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Precarious work, women, and the new economy: The challenge to legal norms. Edited by Judy FUDGE and Rosemary OWENS. Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2006. xxx+ 401 pp. References, index. ISBN 1-84113-616-6.
As globalization and flexibilization operate to diversify the global workforce, the segmentation of labour markets into secure, protected and highly paid work and insecure low-quality jobs and informal work has become a focus of scholarship across a range of disciplines. One approach that animates this research consists in identifying and exploring the axes of this diversification, including its gender dimension. This concern is central to Precarious work, women, and the new economy, a collection of essays edited by Judy Fudge and Rosemary Owens that explores the legal dimensions of these trends, focusing on their harsh impact on women, and makes a significant contribution to the literature on the impact of current economic and policy trends on working life.
The book is a collection of fifteen essays by leading labour law scholars. All address precarious work, which the editors define at the outset as low-wage "non-standard" or "atypical" forms of work, capturing a range of working relationships that diverge from the "standard" model of full-time permanent bilateral employment, including part-time, fixed-term, agency and casual work and self-employment. The contributions examine the role of legal instruments and discourses in generating and perpetuating these forms of work, determining their quality and influencing their impact on women. They also address the legal measures crafted to respond to concerns about non-standard forms of work, in the shape of initiatives to improve their quality or tailor them to the needs of workers.
The book incorporates an analysis of international and supranational trends, which are addressed in Kerry Rittich's essay on the influence on the work of the International Labour Organization of the vision of labour regulation being promoted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank,1 Leah F. Vosko's examination of the treatment of precarious work under the international labour standards,2 and a contribution by Diamond Ashiagbor on the place of non-standard work in the legal instruments and employment policy documents of the European Union (EU).3 The remainder of the book is devoted to domestic case studies, all drawn from industrialized countries, namely Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom...