| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ola Bergström and Donald Storrie, eds., Contingent Employment in Europe and the United States (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 2003)

THIS VOLUME offers a wealth of information and analysis on contingent employment and provides an invaluable resource to scholars, students, and policy-makers interested in this expanding segment of the labour market. The book consists of nine chapters including in-depth examinations of six countries —the UK, Sweden, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA — as well as chapters devoted to exploring contingent employment from a more comparative and conceptual vantage point. The goals of the study are to analyse the increased use of contingent work in a number of advanced western democracies; to explore the impact of labour market regulation and institutional frameworks on the functioning of contingent work in various national settings; and to consider policy solutions to some of the problems raised by the extensive use of contingent work. (xi) As a global assessment, the book successfully achieves these broad aims.

It is clear that national surveys of labour forces consistently and systematically under-report and misclassify individuals working in contingent forms of employment. Moreover, some countries are far less accurate in their identification of contingent employment patterns than others. Under these circumstances, making accurate readings of the size and growth of the contingent workforce becomes a precarious task. In addition, making comparisons across countries is complicated by these sampling problems. These limitations are acknowledged and addressed in this study in a manner that enables useful cross-national analysis, a significant achievement.

A related challenge is determining a common definition of the kinds of employment captured by the term 'contingent employment'. Ola Bergström operationalizes contingent employment as any form of "employment contracts or work arrangements that, from the point of view of the user, could be terminated with minimal costs within a predetermined period of time. This includes employees working on limited duration contracts (LDCs) or working through temporary work agencies (TWAs)." (1) This is, at one and the same time, a rather open yet limiting definition. Various authors in the volume use shifting boundaries respecting whom they include as part of the contingent workforce. For example, in some of the chapters self-employed workers hired by a firm for a defined task or time period are included while other contributions exclude such self-employed individuals. To some degree these differences are a manifestation of differently structured labour markets and how national statistics are collected as much as the individual choices of the researchers. In the case of the chapter on the Netherlands, for instance, some self-employment work arrangements are included in their contingent work analysis, while in the chapter on Sweden they are not. More importantly, however, other forms of flexibilized nonstandard employment are largely excluded from the volume's analysis, thus limiting its reach.

In one of the most satisfying chapters, "Contingent employment in the UK," Surhan Cam, John Purcell, and Stephanie Tailly examine this more narrowly cast grouping of "contingent workers" but they do so within the broader context of the growth of 'other' forms of flexibilized work like part-time and own account self-employment. They adopt an explicit political economy orientation that links the rise of Thatcherite driven political and public policy shifts with neoliberal economic and civil society developments and radical labour market restructuring. This holistic approach serves to ground our understandings of the strategic place that contingent work has come to occupy in economies featured by high unemployment and market-oriented deregulation.

It must be said that at times it is easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of statistical and public policy development information presented. While the wealth of empirical evidence on contingent employment and its governance is valuable in its own right, it is easy to lose the central lines of argument in a forest of facts and figures. Consequently, the volume would have benefitted from a stronger interpretive thrust with rather less dedication to excessive detail. The British case study chapter, once again, offers a welcome antidote to this tendency for while it is rich in empirical detail the political economy focus of its analysis ties together what could otherwise be simply a dense rendering of 'the facts.'

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages that contingent work is said to bring with it. The most important positive attribute is the claim that its widespread use helps to lower unemployment rates. But conversely and simultaneously it increases employment insecurity, and lowers wages and benefits, thus contributing to the overall diminishing of the quality of the job stock. This volume tackles these questions directly. Its conclusions are that contingent forms of employment expand rapidly during periods of high unemployment. This may in fact serve to create more employment opportunities, of a particular type, in tight labour markets. Interestingly enough, however, there is evidence from the country case studies that once economic recovery occurs and unemployment levels fall, the size of the contingent workforce does not significantly decrease in size. This is consistent with a more general pattern where restructuring opens up space for the displacement of standard employment — permanent full-time jobs — by other forms of flexible employment. Each successive period of restructuring since the 1970s has resulted in a higher plateau in the proportion of the labour force occupied by nonstandard work. This has occurred to such an extent that today there are many countries where flexibilized types of work have so eroded full-time jobs that they have become the de facto new work norm.

With respect to employment quality, the studies are in agreement that pay and benefit levels are lower and job security, by its very nature, far less for contingent workers than standard workers. In this regard the flexibility brought by contingent work is primarily a flexibility that is of greater benefit to employers than workers. The volume also observes that state regulation around contingent work can make an important difference in improving the wages, benefits, and job security provisions for these workers. In this regard TWAs can play a key role. TWAs can offer a point of longer term employment attachment for the workers, and workers in such settings can be more easily unionized and regulated by the state to the benefit of the employees. TWAs are not with-out their problems in terms of the contingent employment relationship, however. For while they can improve many aspects of employment quality they also introduce the complication that workers have relationships with two employers at the same time — the agency and the employer the worker is contracted out to. With respect to issues like health and safety the existence of dual employers has made it difficult to determine employer responsibility in cases of work-related accidents and ill health.

Another central issue that the volume perceptively raises is the problem of 'training deficits'. Firms with no long-term commitment to workers have little incentive to invest in their human capital development. In fact there is a strong disincentive as such investments are likely to benefit competitor firms eager to poach 'trained' flexible workers. A labour market that is more and more characterized by the use of contingent workers is also one that under-utilizes the full range of skills of its existing workforce. Moreover, it creates polarization in the labour market between an ever shrinking number of core workers permanently attached to firms that receive employer sponsored training and an expanding army of flexible workers who do not. This dynamic runs against the stated logic of neoliberal policy that purports that human capital investments are essential to the success of modern economies.

In the final chapter of the volume Donald Storrie poses the key policy question, namely: can employer demands for increased levels of flexibility promised by contingent work arrangements be reconciled with worker desires for expanded regulation of contingent work to improve job security and overall job quality? This chapter provides a very good overview of the continuities and discontinuities regarding contingent employment trends and regulatory developments among the countries under study. The USA and Britain are home to the most deregulated contingent work regimes while Spain and Sweden (because of high trade union density and the regulation collective bargaining brings) are the most regulated with the Netherlands and Germany falling in between. It is clear that in the cases of more regulated labour markets stronger measures of protection are extended to contingent workers. Storrie contends that greater use and regulation of contingent work through TWAs would be the best way of achieving a better balance between the interests of employers and employees. Nonetheless, there is recognition that contingent work by its nature is a highly desirable form of employment for capital because of the employer-friendly flexibility it introduces, especially with respect to employment security. The flexibilities offered by contingent employment create power asymmetries that are decidedly to capital's benefit and while regulation may help to mitigate their most negative effects on workers, it is not capable of eliminating the disadvantages to workers altogether.


John Shields Ryerson University

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