Download or read book Women Precarious Work and Care written by Grabham, Emily and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most workers on temporary, zero hours and involuntary part-time contracts in the UK are women. Many are also carers. Yet employment law tends to exclude such women from family-friendly rights. Drawing on interviews with women in precarious work, this book exposes the everyday problems that these workers face balancing work and care. It argues for stronger and more extensive rights that address precarious workers’ distinctive experiences. Introducing complex legal issues in an accessible way, this crucial text exposes the failures of family-friendly rights and explains how to grant these women effective rights in the wake of COVID-19.

Download or read book Women Precarious Work and Care written by Emily Grabham and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on interviews with women in precarious work, this text explores the everyday problems they face balancing work and care responsibilities. This crucial book exposes the failures of family-friendly rights and explains how to grant these women effective rights in the wake of COVID-19.

Download or read book Making the Woman Worker written by Eileen Boris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-09-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair globalization, standardized employment and decent work for women in the developing world. In Making the Woman Worker, Eileen Boris illuminates the ILO's transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice. Boris analyzes three ways in which the ILO has classified the division of labor: between women and men from 1919 to 1958; between women in the global south and the west from 1955 to 1996; and between the earning and care needs of all workers from 1990s to today. Before 1945, the ILO focused on distinguishing feminized labor from male workers, whom the organization prioritized. But when the world needed more women workers, the ILO (a UN agency after WWII) highlighted the global differences in women's work, began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women's labor participation. Today, the ILO enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking. As Boris shows, the ILO's treatment of women is a window into the modern history of labor. The historic relegation of feminized labor to the part-time, short-term, and low-waged prefigures the future organization of work. The labor force is increasingly self-employed and working as long as possible--a steep price for flexibility--with minimal governmental oversight. How we treat workers in the next century will inevitably build upon evolving ideas of the woman worker, shaped significantly through the ILO.

Download or read book Living Insecurity written by Veronica Sheen and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The research aimed to examine the intersection of three long term social developments - the growth of women's participation in the workforce, the ageing of the workforce in line with population ageing and the decline of secure, permanent employment in favour of precarious jobs. Two research questions emerged: How does feminisation and ageing of the workforce interact with, and shape a precarised labour market? How do the interactions between a feminised, ageing workforce and precarious employment construct new forms of social risks? Thirty-eight midlife women, in the age range 45 to 54, participated in the study, through extended, in-depth interviews and one focus group. The primary research was embedded within an extensive secondary research process involving interrogation of large data sets and a wide range of empirical and theoretical research literature in fields covering social policy, labour studies, social theory, and social welfare. An extensive investigation of relevant contemporary public policy was also undertaken for the study. The key finding of the research is that the growth of precarious employment combined with reduced opportunities for secure employment creates new forms of social inequality and social stratification. As precarious jobs displace secure jobs, the avenues for occupational mobility have become narrower and opportunities for improvement of living standards more limited. Social risks of poverty and other forms of marginalisation, in the present and the future, thus accumulate. Secure jobs are heavily contested and women in midlife are not well-positioned in the contest. Old patterns of gendered occupational segregation have mutated into new forms of precarised occupational structures. (The terms 'precarised' and 'precarisation' are used in the study to denote a process of becoming more insecure and can apply to both people and structures). Midlife women searching for jobs in occupations consistent with their career background find that these are now the most heavily precarised. Past experience and educational qualifications do not necessarily assist in the contest and can instead, impose a barrier where flexibility and malleability are the premium traits sought by employers and perceived to be attributes of younger workers. New requirements for credentials in certain occupations also cut midlife women off from jobs they held in the past. The women who had lost permanent jobs within the last ten years, could find little purchase in the new labour market from their occupational background and skills. A precarious job for women in mid-life is increasingly less likely to be a transitional phase to a better quality, more secure job. As the number of precarious jobs has increased relative to secure jobs, the division of labour is more tightly configured within occupational structures and the boundaries in occupational hierarchies are more rigid. A precarised worker is more likely to be viewed as an expendable and substitutable appendage in a work situation and less likely to be considered a worker who may have an interest in occupational progression with improved income and security. The fact of this dynamic is suggested by the significant number of women in the study who had been in the same precarious job within an organisation over a considerable period of time without opportunity for upward movement or a more secure position. While these jobs are unsatisfactory, perceptions that there are limited employment opportunities, often based on earlier job search efforts, mean that women stay in these jobs. If they have prioritised caring at an earlier stage of life, women find themselves in a very disadvantageous position at the point, often well into their forties or fifties, when they need to find a job to support themselves and their families. The situation is especially dire following a divorce after the age of 45 where there has been little preparation to be self-supporting through workforce participation. If they have had limited prior work experience and limited education or have only ever worked in precarious jobs, they are likely to face unemployment or relegation to particularly onerous occupations with little prospect of occupational mobility or improvement in their socio-economic status. Caring for elderly parents can also impact on women's working lives in midlife especially if they are already in precarious jobs. Elder care can solidify an already disadvantaged labour market position. The system of social protection plays a double-edged part in the lives of many women in the study. It provides very basic income support for sole parents and the unemployed. However, it is a heavily conditional system and acts as a conduit for disadvantaged women into precarious jobs which they are required to accept under the terms and conditions of social security law. Rigorous job search requirements are attached to income support for the unemployed. As unemployment payments are below the poverty line, there is a necessity to take on whatever work is available. There is little encouragement or provision within social welfare for improvement in the long term occupational prospects of disadvantaged women trapped in precarious, low wage jobs. Support for education and training has a pragmatic and instrumental focus to place participants in work as quickly as possible. In addition, there is no accommodation or recognition within the social welfare system of women's past contributions such as raising a family. The age pension eligibility age will increase to 67 by 2023, which places a significant burden on disadvantaged women, such as those covered in this study, to continue in difficult employment which they may not be able to sustain to such an advanced age. There are many examples in the study of abhorrent and dehumanising work conditions in precarious jobs as a result of labour commodification. Women report arduous performance requirements, surveillance and monitoring, competition with other workers, and little control over work schedules and hence income. A few report covert and overt intimidation, and unsafe conditions. There is little in the way of collective support mechanisms for most women in the study. Even where the job is less onerous, such as in a community organisation, hospital or university, there is a strong sense of commodification and lack of security. Labour commodification leads to the 'precarisation of existence' depending on protective factors in women's lives. At the worst end, there is a high level of social risk. It is encumbered in a distressing conflation between a precarious job and otherwise difficult life circumstances where mental and physical wellbeing is compromised through low income, anxiety and stress. The social welfare system abets labour commodification by driving disadvantaged women into the most precarious jobs. But even where there are other protective factors in women's lives, such as a partner or secure housing, precarious jobs are in various ways arduous, demoralising and stressful as well as antagonistic to family obligations. The study identified social and economic injustice evidenced in the discriminatory employment practices, in the entrapment in dehumanising jobs, in the dualistic role of social security, and in the accumulating disadvantages in women's lives. The outcome is an odious form of social stratification based on the vulnerabilities of midlife women which were engendered within the context of labour market and social expectations of an earlier era. These vulnerabilities, constituted of personal characteristics and workforce background, form considerable barriers to employment and social equality under the terms and conditions of the new labour market. This study contributes another layer of understanding of women's contemporary experience in the labour market by focusing on midlife women. It was clear that for a number of women, social and class status had changed over time as a result of parenting and job loss with factors such as the erosion of the value of education and age discrimination also coming into play. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that the gains of the 1970s and 1980s in opening opportunities for women have in more recent years reverted to old patterns of gendered labour market divisions as a result of the forces of precarisation. This is noted by the widening of the gender wage gap and the decline of women's full time employment. However, where women have been able to maintain or improve their occupational status they have done well. These gains are noted by some scholars in improvements in the extent of vertical occupational segregation. Thus, it can be seen that there are forces supporting both continuity and change in women's labour market status in the 21st century.

Download or read book Precarious Work Women and the New Economy written by Judy Fudge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-04-26 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalisation, the shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment, and the spread of information-based systems and technologies have given birth to a new economy, which emphasises flexibility in the labour market and in employment relations. These changes have led to the erosion of the standard (industrial) employment relationship and an increase in precarious work - work which is poorly paid and insecure. Women perform a disproportionate amount of precarious work. This collection of original essays by leading scholars on labour law and women's work explores the relationship between precarious work and gender, and evaluates the extent to which the growth and spread of precarious work challenges traditional norms of labour law and conventional forms of legal regulation.The book provides a comparative perspective by furnishing case studies from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and the US, as well as the international and supranational context through essays that focus on the IMF, the ILO, and the EU. Common themes and concepts thread throughout the essays, which grapple with the legal and public policy challenges posed by women's precarious work.

Download or read book Making the Woman Worker written by Eileen Boris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair globalization, standardized employment and decent work for women in the developing world. In Making the Woman Worker, Eileen Boris illuminates the ILO's transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice. Boris analyzes three ways in which the ILO has classified the division of labor: between women and men from 1919 to 1958; between women in the global south and the west from 1955 to 1996; and between the earning and care needs of all workers from 1990s to today. Before 1945, the ILO focused on distinguishing feminized labor from male workers, whom the organization prioritized. But when the world needed more women workers, the ILO (a UN agency after WWII) highlighted the global differences in women's work, began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women's labor participation. Today, the ILO enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking. As Boris shows, the ILO's treatment of women is a window into the modern history of labor. The historic relegation of feminized labor to the part-time, short-term, and low-waged prefigures the future organization of work. The labor force is increasingly self-employed and working as long as possible--a steep price for flexibility--with minimal governmental oversight. How we treat workers in the next century will inevitably build upon evolving ideas of the woman worker, shaped significantly through the ILO.

Download or read book Precarious Work Women and the New Economy written by Judy Fudge and published by Hart Publishing. This book was released on 2006-04-26 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays by experts in the field explores the relationship between precarious work and gender.

Download or read book A Labour of Love written by Janet Finch and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-24 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the realities of ‘community care’ – the unpaid care given by hundreds of thousands of women, often in their own homes – for children and adults who are handicapped or chronically sick, or for frail elderly people? Originally published in 1983, this book explores the experiences of such women and the dilemmas which ‘caring’ poses for them. At a time when most women needed to earn money from a paid job, how did ‘carers’ manage to juggle their caring and other domestic responsibilities, and what happened if they had to give up work? Against a background of government policies which favour care ‘by’ the community, the contributors to this book raise crucial issues for social and economic policy. Hilary Graham examines what caring really means and Clare Ungerson asks why women do it. Sally Baldwin and Caroline Glendinning focus on mothers with handicapped children and Fay Wright on single adults with elderly dependants. Alan Walker highlights the dependencies implicit in caring relationships with the elderly. Lesley Rimmer looks at the economic ‘costs’ of care, and Dulcie Groves and Janet Finch examine the invalid care allowance – a carers’ benefit for which married women can never qualify. In exploring the domestic sector of welfare, A Labour of Love was a highly topical contribution to the debate both on welfare provision and on the division of labour between men and women at the time.

Download or read book Precarious Employment written by Leah F. Vosko and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2006 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Precarious Employment' explores the nature and dynamics of precarious employment in contemporary Canada.

Download or read book Women Work and Care in the Asia Pacific written by Marian Baird and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comparative analysis of the social, economic, industrial and migration dynamics that structure women’s paid work and unpaid care work experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Each country-focused chapter examines the formal and informal ways in which work and care are managed, the changing institutional landscape, gender relations and fertility concerns, employer and trade union responses and the challenges policy makers face and the consequences of their decisions for working women. By covering the entire region, including Australia and New Zealand, the book highlights the way different national work and care regimes are linked through migration, with wealthier countries looking to their poorer neighbours for alternative sources of labour. In addition, the book contributes to debates about the barriers to women’s participation in the workforce, the valuation of unpaid care, the gender wage gap, social protection and labour regulation for migrant workers and gender relations in developing Asia.

Download or read book Gender and the Contours of Precarious Employment written by Leah F. Vosko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Precarious employment presents a monumental challenge to the social, economic, and political stability of labour markets in industrialized societies and there is widespread consensus that its growth is contributing to a series of common social inequalities, especially along the lines of gender and citizenship. The editors argue that these inequalities are evident at the national level across industrialized countries, as well as at the regional level within federal societies, such as Canada, Germany, the United States, and Australia and in the European Union. This book brings together contributions addressing this issue which include case studies exploring the size, nature, and dynamics of precarious employment in different industrialized countries and chapters examining conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of precarious employment in comparative perspective. The collection aims to yield new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, measuring, and responding, via public policy and other means – such as new forms of union organization and community organizing at multiple scales – to the forces driving labour market insecurity.

Download or read book Caring in Times of Precarity written by Chow Yiu Fai and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caring in Times of Precarity draws together two key cultural observations: the increase in those living a single life, and the growing attraction of creative careers. Straddling this historical juncture, the book focuses on one particular group of ‘precariat’: single women in Shanghai in various forms of creative (self-)employment. While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, these women also find themselves interpellated as shengnü (‘left-over women’) in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual ideals, and global images of womanhood. Following these women’s professional, social and intimate lives, the book refuses to see their singlehood and creative labour as problematic, and them as victims. It departs from dominant thinking on precarity, which foregrounds and critiques the contemporary need to be flexible, mobile, and spontaneous to the extent of (self-)exploitation, accepting insecurity. The book seeks to understand– empirically and specifically–women’s everyday struggles and pleasures. It highlights the up-close, everyday embodied, affective, and subjective experience in a particular Chinese city, with broader, global resonances well beyond China. Exploring the limits of the politics of precarity, the book proposes an ethics of care.

Download or read book Caring by the Hour written by Karen Brodkin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen Sacks offers the first detailed account of the hospital industry's nonprofessional support staff---their roles in day-to-day health care delivery, and why they fought so tenaciously throughout the 1970s to unionize. This case study of the relationships between work life and unionization in Duke medical Center highlights women's activism in general and black women's leadership in particular. In addition to an analysis of the dynamics of women's activism, Caring by the Hour provides a comparative study of Duke Medical Center's treatment of both black and white female workers. Sacks links patterns of racial segregation in clerical jobs to the relationship between race, working conditions, and unequal opportunities for black and white women, and to their differing work cultures and patterns of public militance. She also discusses recent changes in service, clerical, and professional work and their effects on white and black women, placing them in the context of national changes in health funding and policies.

Download or read book Precarious Worlds written by Katie Meehan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction—defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate—and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse economies. Reflecting and expanding on ongoing debates within feminist geography, with additional cross-disciplinary contributions from sociologists and political scientists, Precarious Worlds explores the productive possibilities of social reproduction as an ontology, a theoretical lens, and an analytical framework for what Geraldine Pratt has called “a vigorous, materialist transnational feminism.”

Download or read book Ageing and the Crisis in Health and Social Care written by Bethany Simmonds and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberal political discourses have normalised the belief in northern European countries that individuals are responsible for their health and wellbeing, regardless of social class, gender or ethnic background. Drawing on examples from Germany, Sweden and the UK, Simmonds critically examines how the neoliberalisation and marketisation of health and social care have created an adverse environment for older people, who lack social and cultural capital to access the care they need. This crucial analysis scrutinises provision for ageing populations on an individual, national and global level. Challenging current political and social policy approaches, this rigorous text discusses innovative solutions to contemporary challenges in a complex care system.

Download or read book Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work written by Laura Addati and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The report analyses the ways in which unpaid care work is recognised and organised, the extent and quality of care jobs and their impact on the well-being of individuals and society. A key focus of this report is the persistent gender inequalities in households and the labour market, which are inextricably linked with care work. These gender inequalities must be overcome to make care work decent and to ensure a future of decent work for both women and men. The report contains a wealth of original data drawn from over 90 countries and details transformative policy measures in five main areas: care, macroeconomics, labour, social protection and migration. It also presents projections on the potential for decent care job creation offered by remedying current care work deficits and meeting the related targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Download or read book Women s Paid and Unpaid Labor written by Nona Yetta Glazer and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an original look at twentieth-century service occupations, Nona Y. Glazer offers an innovative interpretation of how managers reduce labor costs by shifting labor for paid women workers to women as family members. She critically examines the past and present practices of retailing and health service occupations as a way to better understand the deskilling, speed-ups, and job consolidation of nurses, salesclerks, and cashiers. Glazer calls the shifting of tasks from paid to unpaid labor the work transfer, one of the many mechanisms that managers used to change the labor process in service jobs. She maintains that these shifts in labor costs increase profit margins in a capitalistic economy that demands such increases. Drawing on social history, economics, interviews with health service workers, union newsletter accounts, and advertisements in mass market magazines and retail trade journals, this book affords new insights into how the hidden work of women is structured by changes in paid labor. Nona Y. Glazer is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at Portland State University and the editor of Woman in a Man-Made World and New Family/Old Family.