Contingent work, health, and citizenship: The discursive management of stigmatising employment among temporary help agency workers

This study examines how contingent workers hired through temporary help agencies conceive of and experience their work. Contingent employment—short-or fixed-term contracts, part-time, casual/on-call, self-employment, seasonal, and temporary agency work—has re-emerged in the context of the globalisation of trade, investment, production, and intensified competition. Its expansion has raised concerns about the health effects for workers. Efforts to assess these effects have however been hampered by conceptual and definitional disagreements and by methodological challenges. While researchers in the area of contingent work and health have examined the experience of workers, much of this research has (i) tended to adopt a particular perspective with the result that alternative aspects of workers' experience are not considered; (ii) employed an objective or quantitative approach, which cannot adequately capture the complexities of differences in work arrangements and worker experiences. As a result, research findings have been largely inconsistent and/or inconclusive and the relationship between contingent work and health remains unclear. I propose that examining contingent work via workers' experience and by means of a qualitative methodology might cast light on, or further our understanding of this relationship.;Using a combination of social constructionist theoretical perspective and an interpretive, qualitative, analytic approach, this interview based study of the experiences of 23 day labourers and clerical workers employed through temporary help agencies (i) describes the dual discourses that these workers use to portray their experience of contingent work; (ii) accounts for these discourses in terms of general perceptions of contingent work as inferior or stigmatising work and in terms of the broader socio-political and economic contexts in which they are located; and (iii) considers the health implications of these discourses. The study found that workers conceive their work in terms of discourses of advantage and disadvantage and it argues that these individual-level discourses are shaped by and mirror neoliberal rationalities. The study also argues that workers, who are conceived as active agents, use these discourses to resist, counter, and reconstruct the social, structural, symbolic conditions of stigmatised work and to (re)present themselves as active neoliberal citizens. The implications of this discursive management of contingent work are discussed.