The Limits of Worker Rights: Understanding the Employment Conditions of Temporary and Part-Time Municipal Workers in Western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neoliberalism has led to a proliferation of precarious work across geographical boundaries and economic sectors in Canada. The conditions of the precariat working in governments have received little scholarly attention. This research examines the impact of recent trends on the rights of precariat municipal workers in the cities of Calgary (Alberta) and Saskatoon (Saskatchewan). Guided by Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography (IE) and Mobilization Theory (MT), the study examines collective bargaining rights, rights to dispute resolution, and legal provisions for municipal workers rights. Qualitative data were collected through interviews with union officials, temporary, seasonal, casual, part-time employees, and city officials in both municipalities. The analysis also relied on close reading of documents such as collective agreements, labour codes, and international declarations, to explore how such texts coordinate social action and at the same time repress municipal workers’ rights. Findings from the study show that the rigours of engagement in more than one job, the fear of losing one’s job, and the non-inclusion on bargaining teams suppress workers in precarious employment voices and rights. I also found that municipal governance and administration are text-based systems. These texts privilege employers to treat temporary and part-time workers differently. Employers and unions are not equal partners at negotiating table as employers issue mandates and unions compromise. Provincial employment laws set minimum standards guiding terms and conditions of employment relations. Areas of discrimination that negatively affect the rights of temporary and part-time workers exist. These include lack of guaranteed hours of work; vacation pay and benefits. There are also gender-based discriminations in municipal establishments. Among the study’s conclusions is the need to factor the conditions faced by workers in precarious employment into the reform of labour legislation and collective bargaining agreements. This may be a tall order due to Canada’s increasing embeddedness in neoliberal order.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".