This interdisciplinary volume offers a multifaceted picture of precarious employment and the ways in which its principal features are reinforced or challenged by laws, policies, and labour market institutions, including trade unions and community organizations. Contributors develop more fully the concept of precarious employment and critique outmoded notions of standard and nonstandard employment. The product of a five-year Community-University Research Alliance, the volume aims to foster new social, statistical, legal, political, and economic understandings of precarious employment and to advance strategies for improving the quality and conditions of work and health.

Contributors include John Anderson (Canadian Council on Social Development), Pat Armstrong (York University), James Beaton (York University), Stéphanie Bernstein (University of Québec at Montréal), Jan Borowy (Ontario Public Sector Employees' Union), Cynthia Cranford (University of Toronto), Tania Das Gupta (York University), Alice de Wolff (Independent Researcher, Toronto), Andrew Jackson (Canadian Labour Congress), Andrew King (United Steel Workers of America), Kate Laxer (York University), Wayne Lewchuk (McMaster University), Katherine Lippel (University of Québec at Montréal), Chris Schenk (Ontario Federation of Labour), Michael Polanyi (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives), Emile Tompa (McMaster University and University of Toronto), Heather Scott (University of Toronto and Institute for Work and Health [IWH]), Scott Trevithick (University of Toronto and IWH), Sudipa Bhattacharyya (IWH), Eric Tucker (York University), and Nancy Zukewich (Statistics Canada).