Establishing rights in the disposable jobs regime created by Peter Rossman

How elastic is the concept of precarious work? Elastic enough in some hands for the Employer spokesperson at the ILO’s October 2011 Global Dialogue Forum on the Role of Private Employment Agencies in Promoting Decent Work and Improving the Functioning of Labour Markets in Private Services Sectors to introduce his presentation by asserting that agency work “was neither precarious nor atypical”. 1 Unions, for whom combating the spread of precarious work has emerged as a major priority, would strongly reject the first of these assertions and insist on probing the meaning of the second. Agency work is precarious by nature. And its rapid expansion and invasive presence in virtually all economic sectors have overturned received notions of what is “typical”. The ILO’s core Conventions defining trade union organizing, representation and bargaining rights are built on the assumption of direct, openended employment–the “standard employment relationship” against which all other contractual relations are “atypical”. It is of course true that at no time in history has even close to a majority of the world’s workers enjoyed permanent employment status. Agriculture, with the world’s largest labour force, has always been dominated by precarious work. Work in the rapidly expanding hotel and tourism sectors remains predominantly precarious. In manufacturing, even high union-density sectors often sit atop a wider pyramid built on long chains of outsourced, precarious labour. Now even these nodules of permanent direct employment are succumbing to growing casualization.