| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Cynthia J. Cranford, Judy Fudge, Eric Tucker, and Leah F. Vosko, Self-Employed Workers Organize: Law, Policy, and Unions (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2005)

THIS BOOK analyses the efforts of self-employed workers in four occupations — newspaper carriers, rural mail couriers, personal care workers, and freelance editors — to organize for collective representation and bargain to improve their pay and working conditions. The four case studies together with well-presented introductory and concluding chapters provide considerable insights into the limitations of labour law and the dominant model of industrial unionism for self-employed workers. Through this analysis, the authors also present important challenges to the routine classification of workers into dichotomous categories of the employed versus the self-employed. The book highlights the diversity of self-employed work experiences, and the degree to which many self-employed workers face a dependency and insecurity far more akin to that of employees than to the ideals of entrepreneurship with which they are more typically associated.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the employment norm that is presumed by much of Canadian labour law since World War II. That norm is the "continuous, full-time employment relationship in which the worker has one employer and works at the employer's premises or under his or her supervision." (3) Most collective bargaining legislation is based upon such a model. The right of workers to associate is fundamental but also limited by legal concerns about conflict of interest (e.g., in cases of organizing managerial staff) and the stifling of competition (e.g., in cases of organizing professional and self-employed workers especially doctors and lawyers). Because self-employed workers have been viewed as entrepreneurs, their unionization has been cast as a threat to competition. Members of the occupations featured in this book were initially regarded as entrepreneurs.

The authors draw on descriptions of the varied and often insecure work arrangements faced by self-employed workers to debunk the assumption that self-employment is analogous with entrepreneurship and all of its attributes — ownership, autonomy, control over production, and profitmaking. Many workers are actually disguised employees who are illegally recorded as self-employed so that their employers can avoid paying employee taxes and benefits. However, even legally defined self-employed workers (e.g., independent contractors, domestic service workers) experience many of the characteristics of part-time and temporary employees. The authors draw on data to demonstrate that increasing numbers of self-employed workers earn little more than subsistence-level income and have only minimal control over their working conditions. The concept of social location emphasizes the ways in which political and economic conditions interact with gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and sexual orientation to shape the experiences of self-employed workers. The four occupations presented in this book are populated by workers who are women, people of colour, and immigrants.

Even when the parallels between employees and some groups of self-employed workers are recognized, there are other features of these occupations that make collective organizing difficult and union recognition elusive. None of the four occupations in this book involved work at a single site. Such geographical dispersion made organizing extremely difficult. Each occupation also permitted some leeway for workers to set their work schedule and routines. Many of them worked only part-time and jobs were temporary. The personal care workers and freelance editors had multiple employers. Courts and labour boards often deemed one or more of these characteristics sufficient rationale to deny union representation. Employers were active in promoting definitions of workers that made them ineligible for collective representation.

Each case study illustrates, in a slightly different manner, the weaknesses of prevailing laws and dominant models of industrial labour relations. After much struggle, the newspaper carriers were able to organize, but then the newspaper quickly contracted out their jobs to another firm. Subcontracting is a constant threat to the organization of workers in the new economy. The rural route mail couriers were statutorily defined as non-employees. Nevertheless, they struggled to organize first as an independent association and later as a union. The struggle was complicated by rival unions vying for the right to represent the carriers in the prevailing model of winner-take-all unionization. Their ultimate success illustrates the high expenditures associated with organizing self-employed workers. This case also illustrates the importance of social and political context in shaping labour movement outcomes. The election of a Liberal government and public reports of postal corporation profits improved the climate for unionizing rural mail carriers. Personal care workers successfully organized by gaining recognition as employees, but now face further obstacles from new government policies that define the disabled client as the employer instead of the government or subcontracting agency. These changes may lead to a redefinition of personal care workers as either independent contractors or domestic workers, either of which could mean the loss of their collective bargaining rights.

In the final chapter, the authors draw on their case studies to identify changes necessary for improving the collective representation and working conditions of self-employed workers. They emphasize the need to shift away from employee and industrial-centred models of labour relations toward models that promote parity and plurality. Parity refers to giving all workers the right to freedom of association for collective bargaining. Within this framework, self-employment would not be presumed equivalent to some entrepreneurial ideal. Plurality would entail the use of a variety of models for worker organization and representation, including organization by craft rather than by employer, geographical organization, and combining of bargaining units. Workers, not labour tribunals, would choose the organization that can best represent them. The authors also suggest that principles of majority support and exclusive representation be excised from labour law and policy.

The most compelling part of the final chapter is the discussion of community unionism: "Community unionism addresses the need to expand the narrow focus of business unionism beyond traditional topics of bargaining, such as terms and conditions of employment, to include matters relating to service and standards. As well it expands the group of those who have the right to participate in collective bargaining beyond employees and employers to include clients and consumers and other relevant constituencies." (186) Community unionism is truly a model for labour organizing that is appropriate for the new economy. For example, in the case of personal care workers for disabled individuals, community unionism models would bring consideration of both worker and client needs into the decision-making mix.

This is a fine piece of social science research and should be read by anyone interested in the sociology of work and occupations, labour relations, employment law, or work in the new economy. Brief comparisons with US labour regimes clearly establish the relevance of this work for US as well as Canadian students, faculty, organizers, and policy-makers. The detail of the back-and-forth battles between organizing efforts and government regulators/corporate actors gets a bit tedious at times. Tighter thematic organization within those chapters, especially more strategic use of subheadings, might have remedied this problem. However, the introductory and concluding sections within each chapter were helpful reminders of where the reader has been and where the argument was going. The introductory and concluding chapters are both very strong and clearly establish the significance of this book.


Nancy C. Jurik Arizona State University

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