ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to assess the extent to which the insecure workforce is gendered, drawing mainly on UK data. As is discussed elsewhere in this volume, ‘the insecure workforce’ is difficult to define. In the UK, progressive employment deregulation in the 1980s led to a situation where employees with less than two years’ continuous employment with the same employer have no legal rights to job security, regardless of their contractual status. Most of the analysis in this chapter will therefore be confined to consideration of recent trends in temporary employment, covering fixed-term, seasonal, agency, casual and other temporary work; forms of employment which are unequivocally insecure, whether or not they are freely chosen. However, in order to make sense of recent trends in the gendering of temporary employment, it is useful to consider the evolution of women’s labour force participation, particularly in the context of industrial and workforce restructuring.
