Auto-plastics factories tend not to be part of the big car companies like Ford. They are usually arms-length suppliers, ‘who tend to be non-unionised and tend to be able to get away with more employment-standard violations’, Rochon Ford tells me. It doesn’t help that Windsor, Ontario, the heart of the auto industry in Canada, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The result is that workers know that if they demand better protections the response will be ‘Fine, you’re out of here. There’s ten women outside the door who want your job.’ We’ve heard factory workers tell us this in the exact same words,’ says Rochon Ford.
If this sounds illegal, well, it may be. Over the past hundred years or so, a framework of employee rights has been established. They vary from country to country, but they tend to include a right to paid sick and maternity leave, a right to a set number of hours, and protection from unfair and/or sudden dismissal. But these rights only apply if you are an employee. And, increasingly, many workers are not.
In many nail salons, technicians are technically independent contractors. This makes life much easier for the employers: the inherent risk of running a company based on consumer demand is passed on to workers, who have no guaranteed hours and no job security. Not enough customers today? Don’t come in and don’t get paid. Minor accident? You’re out of here, and forget about redundancy pay.
In 2015 the New York Times reported the story of manicurist Qing Lin, forty-seven, who splashed some nail-polish remover on a customer’s patent Prada sandals.8 ‘When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman’s hand came out of the manicurist’s pay’, and Lin was fired. ‘I am worth less than a shoe,’ she said. Lin’s story appeared in a New York Times investigation of nail salons which revealed ‘all manner of humiliation’ suffered by workers, including constant video monitoring by owners, verbal, and even physical abuse.9 Lawsuits filed in New York courts include allegations of sixty-six-hour weeks at $1.50 an hour and no pay at all on slow days in a salon that charged manicurists for drinking the water.
Following the publication of the New York Times investigation a licensing system was introduced in New York. Workers there must be paid at least the minimum wage, and nail salons must display a ‘bill of rights’ in multiple languages.10 But workers elsewhere in the US, and elsewhere in the world, are less lucky. In the UK, regulation and licensing of nail bars is largely voluntary11 – which in practice means largely non-existent. A 2017 report described the predominantly female Vietnamese workforce as ‘victims of modern slavery’.12
Nail salons are the tip of an extremely poorly regulated iceberg when it comes to employers exploiting loopholes in employment law. Zero-hour contracts, short-term contracts, employment through an agency, these have all been enticingly rebranded the ‘gig economy’ by Silicon Valley, as if they are of benefit to workers. But the gig economy is in fact often no more than a way for employers to get around basic employee rights. Casual contracts create a vicious cycle: the rights are weaker to begin with, which makes workers reticent to fight for the ones they do still have. And so those get bent too. In the UK, which has seen one of the fastest growths in precarious work in the EU,13 TUC research uncovered a work environment that was rife with employers using casual contracts to illegally undermine workers’ rights.14
Naturally, the impact of what the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has termed the ‘startling growth’ of precarious work has barely been gender-analysed.15 The ITUC reports that its feminised impact is ‘poorly reflected in official statistics and government policies’, because the ‘standard indicators and data used to measure developments on labour markets’ are not gender-sensitive, and, as ever, data is often not sex-disaggregated, ‘making it sometimes difficult to measure the overall numbers of women’. There are, as a result, ‘no global figures related to the number of women in precarious work’.
But the regional and sector-specific studies that do exist suggest ‘an overrepresentation of women’ in precarious jobs. In the UK, the trade union Unison found that by 2014 women made up almost two-thirds of low-paid workers,16 and many were ‘working multiple jobs on precarious contracts to make up lost hours’.17 According to a recent Fawcett Society report, one in eight British women is employed on a zero-hours contract.18 In London that figure is nearly one in three.
And although we often think of precarious work as being relegated to the less ‘prestigious’ end of the job market it increasingly appears in all sectors and at all levels.19 According to the UK’s University and College Union, tertiary education, usually considered an elite profession, is the second highest user of casual labour.20 The UCU’s data is not sex-disaggregated, but according to the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency,21 women are more likely than men to be on shorter, fixed-term contracts, and statistics from Germany and Europe show the same.22
More broadly, across the EU most of the increase in women’s employment over the past decade has been through part-time and precarious work.23 In Australia, 30% of women are in casual employment, compared to 22% of men, while in Japan, women make up two-thirds24 of non-regular workers. A Harvard study on the rise of ‘alternative work’ in America between 2005 and 2015 found that the percentage of women in such work ‘more than doubled’, meaning that ‘women are now more likely than men to be employed in an alternative work arrangement’.25
This is a problem because while precarious work isn’t ideal for any worker, it can have a particularly severe impact on women. For a start, it is possible that it is exacerbating the gender pay gap: in the UK there is a 34% hourly pay penalty for workers on zero-hours contracts, a 39% hourly pay penalty for workers on casual contracts, and a 20% pay penalty for agency workers – which are on the increase as public services continue to be outsourced.26 But no one seems interested in finding out how this might be affecting women. An analysis of pay policy in Europe criticises the outsourcing trend for seeming ‘to have been implemented with little or no reference to their gender effects’.27 And existing data suggests that those gender effects are plentiful.
There is, to begin with, ‘limited scope for collective bargaining’ in agency jobs. This is a problem for all workers, but can be especially problematic for women because evidence suggests that collective bargaining (as opposed to individual salary negotiation) could be particularly important for women – those pesky modesty norms again. As a result, an increase in jobs like agency work that don’t allow for collective bargaining might be detrimental to attempts to close the gender pay gap.
But the negative impact of precarious work on women isn’t just about unintended side effects. It’s also about the weaker rights that are intrinsic to the gig economy. In the UK a female employee is only entitled to maternity leave if she is actually an employee. If she’s a ‘worker’, that is, someone on a short-term or zero-hours contract, she isn’t entitled to any leave at all, meaning she would have to quit her job and reapply after she’s given birth. A female worker is also only entitled to statutory maternity pay if she has worked for twenty-six weeks in the last sixty-six and if her average wage is at least ￡116 per week.
And this is where the problems can kick in. Not being entitled to return to her job meant that Holly, a research associate at a UK university, ended up dropping two pay grades after giving birth.28 Maria, also a university researcher, had her hours suddenly and mysteriously cut in half six weeks before she was due to give birth; conveniently for her employee, the amount of maternity pay she was owed dropped correspondingly. The same thing happened to Rachel, who works in a pub restaurant: her hours suddenly dropped when she told her employer she was pregnant. She now might not even qualify for statutory maternity pay at all.