Working Precariously: The New Normal?

When I was an art student, my friends were telling me about a word that was being thrown around a lot in the sculpture course they were all taking. I guess a lot of the work in their class that semester intentionally looked like it was about to fall over and it was often described as “precarious.” Now that I’m studying labour sociology, I would also use that same word to describe the design of capitalist economies. 

The Understanding Precarity in BC Project and SFU Public Square recently hosted the webinar “Working Precariously: The New Normal?” which discussed the newly published report But is it a good job? Understanding employment precarity in BC. The event included an introductory presentation of the report’s main findings from its authors Iglika Ivanova and Dr. Kendra Strauss, followed by a discussion with Pamela Charon (Workers’ Solidarity Network), Cenen Bagon (Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers and Caregivers Rights) and Dr. Maureen Kihika (SFU Labour Studies).  

One of the many insights gleaned from listening to the speakers animate this research on precarious employment in B.C. is that although everybody needs access to healthcare and social protection, the latter is offered to approximately half the workforce and is distributed in ways that fall along classed, racialized and gendered lines. Additionally, the report interrogates whether access to secure working conditions, social security, and human rights should be contingent on a rarified and increasingly precarious “standard job.” 

The report pulls from a survey designed by Ivanova and Strauss which discovered that in the pre-pandemic labour market, about half of the province’s workforce was employed precariously. The survey took place in the late fall of 2019 and was completed by 3,000 workers between the ages of 25 and 65 from across British Columbia. The report states that precarity is hard to define, but this is not for a lack of effort or precision. Following the webinar and reflecting on the range of the evening’s speakers, precarity can be understood as something that cannot be captured by a single report and it cannot comprehensively be defined by economists and researchers.

However, Strauss emphasized that “precarity is racial capitalist because it impacts Black, Indigenous and racialized workers in greater proportion to non-racialized, status-secure workers.” Ivanova followed by identifying precarity as highly concentrated among recent immigrants, as “more than half of recent immigrants (less than 10 years in Canada) were in precarious jobs (55%) – the highest proportion of any group in our surveys.” 

Precarity varies from workforce to workforce, so the definitions that workers articulate will be informed by the social, political, and geographic specificity of their respective workplaces and sectors. The evening’s speakers spoke in solidarity with food service workers, migrant domestic and care workers, and Black nurses in the province, who have expressed shared and distinct conditions of precarity at work.

Pamela Charron highlighted key findings from the report, Can’t Stand the Heat? Get Out of the Kitchen!, which was recently published by the Workers’ Solidarity Network. This report examined how restaurant workers were impacted by extreme heat and wildfires, and how severe weather events exacerbated their  health and safety risks. According to food service workers, precarity may comprise a different suite of conditions from that of a migrant careworker, who face fear of reprisal because of loss of immigration status. Although their experiences and these precarious conditions may stem from a common system of networked exploitation, state failures, and settler-colonial capitalist expansionism, the experiences of precarity are distinct from industry to industry.

During the webinar, Cenon Bagon of the Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers and Caregivers’ Rights considered the question “What does precarity look like on the ground in migrant communities?” The audience learned that migrant care work is done by temporary foreign and care workers, mostly women from developing countries, and “care work is a non-standard job.” For Bagon, migrant workers justice also entails  status-upon-arrival and emphasizes that “those who work, deserve to stay.” 

Another panelist, Dr. Maureen Kihika, shared her research, which focuses on registered nurses and Black immigrant youth, and how Black identities intersect with precarity. In the case of Black immigrant caregivers, it is mostly women working in the public health sector as support persons, care aids and registered nurses. Kihika remarked that in her research, workers and community members have shared how they have been assigned “sicker” patients, more difficult or challenging work, and are given irregular work schedules as auxiliary care workers. Here, we can see how even standard employment with a public sector job can also be embedded with precarious elements, as revealed when researchers talk to women, racialized, immigrant workers. 

A conventional understanding of what constitutes a “good job” has largely been defined by a specific historical context: the postwar era, when many workers had one or two full-time jobs with employers that provided benefits such as health insurance, sick leave, vacation pay, etc. Additionally, the report states that these jobs were more than likely to be unionized. 

The report states that “Canada’s system of workplace rights and protections — including access to workers’ compensation, employment insurance and parental leave, pensions, extended health coverage, paid sick time, etc — is still largely designed around the historically white and male breadwinner model of the ‘standard job’ or ‘standard employment relationship.’” According to the report, just under half of the survey workers had standard jobs. These jobs are concentrated in Metro Vancouver and were less likely to be held by women, Indigenous, Black and racialized and recently immigrated workers. 

Although access to social security is perceived to be hinged on a “standard job”, the report indicates that precarity is encroaching on the standard employment relationship. “Even workers with standard jobs may experience aspects of precarity not captured by the definitions of standard versus non-standard employment, such as unpredictable scheduling, low pay or lack of access to an extended health care plan.” 

If we project the economic trends that the report captures, those in “standard jobs” will soon have their own suite of precarious conditions to add to an already diverse understanding of what precarious work looks like. Speaking optimistically, perhaps there will be a  mobilization of labour solidarities between sectors of standard and non-standard types of workers, but for now, Iglika Ivanova and Kendra Strauss are calling for a “societal revaluing of care work” and a “decoupling of some of the benefits that are currently associated with employment, such as disability insurance and health benefits.” 

At the event, Strauss put forward a few immediate and concrete strategies for policy makers, labour organizers, and researchers can undertake while we work towards broader societal transformation. These strategies include enabling sectoral bargaining for those who have not historically had access to unions, implementing stronger pay equity legislation, and furthering research on precarious employment as a lever for conversations to design effective solutions. In addition, the report’s conclusions recommend expanding access to benefits and addressing unpaid child care and care work, reflecting much of what was focused on throughout the evening’s panel.

Ultimately, there is no comparing states of precariousness between a sculpture that is about to fall over in an art class and labour economies that are designed to exponentially withhold social necessities to the majority of its workforce. This report and the subsequent webinar identify how the overall quality of jobs in B.C. –  be it private, public, freelance, temporary, or migrant – has depreciated in ways that cannot be addressed solely through addressing the standard employment relationship. 

As echoed by the speakers at this event – climate disaster, border states, and environmental racism must be viewed as labour issues, rather than adjacent to them.