ABSTRACT

Precarious employment is spreading internationally. Yet national governments have been slow to respond to its spread due to the rigid system of labour legislation, regulations, and policy modelled on a standard employment relationship (Fudge and Vosko 2001a, 2001b; Vosko 2000). In contrast, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the foremost international organisation operating in the field of labour, began to respond to the growth of precarious employment in the early 1980s, propelled primarily by representatives of organised labour, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and member states concerned about accelerating casualisation. From the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, the ILO introduced several new measures to address the rise of nonstandard forms of work threatening to deepen precarious employment in labour markets, entering uncharted areas of labour regulation and advancing important new policy frameworks for national and subnational governments to follow.