The Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD): Feminist Approaches to Studying Labour Market Insecurity
This panel will introduce researchers to a new cross-national database designed to facilitate research and teaching investigating gender and precarious in a comparative industrialized context. Launched in late 2014, the Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD) is an online research tool that brings together a variety of resources, including a library and thesaurus and twenty-five years of harmonized labour statistics from thirty-three countries (Australia, Canada, the United States, and the European Union) with over 25 years of data. The three research and teaching modules of the database focus on forms of precarious employment, temporal and spatial dynamics, and health and social care. Each module contextualizes dominant trends by considering national, and, where relevant, supranational, laws and policies, legislation and social structures in attempt to provide experts and novices with key entry points into the study of precarious employment. This session will offer an overview of the CPD’s overarching theoretical and conceptual approach and reflect upon its three central modules.
Biographies: CPD Panel
Leah F. Vosko
Leah F. Vosko Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Gender & Work at York University where she teaches courses cross-listed to Political Science, Social and Political Thought, Socio-legal Studies, Sociology and Women’s Studies, on public policy, women and politics, and labour and employment and conducts research on labour market insecurity in Canada in international context. Her latest book, Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment, is published with Oxford University Press, UK and her recent co-edited collection, Liberating Temporariness?: Migration, Work and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity, is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Professor Vosko’s current research focuses partly on employment standards enforcement and access to labour rights and protections among temporary migrant workers. She is presently Principal Investigator of “Closing the Enforcement Gap: Improving Protections for People in Precarious Jobs,” a SSHRC Partnership Grant concerned with employment standards enforcement, and three research and teaching databases supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation – the Gender and Work Database (GWD) updated last year, the Global Employment Standards Database (GESD) under development and the Comparative Perspectives Database (CPD) which we are launching today.
Pat Armstrong
Pat Armstrong is Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto. She held a Canada Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institute of Health Research Chair in Health Services, is a Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Focusing on social policy, women, work and the health services, she has published widely. She chaired Women and Health Care Reform, a group funded for over a decade by Health Canada, was acting director of the National Network for Environments and Women’s Health and is currently a member of the Board for the York Institute for Health Research. She served as Chair of the Department of Sociology at York, Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton, and co-director at York of the Ontario Training Centre on Health Policy, She has served as an expert witness in a dozen cases heard before bodies ranging from the Federal Court to federal Human Rights Tribunals on issues related to women’s health care work and to pay equity. She is currently Principal Investigator on “Reimagining long-term residential care: An international study of promising practice” and of “Healthy Aging in residential places” and is co-investigator on “Invisible women in long-term residential care.”
Martha MacDonald
Dr. Martha MacDonald is a Professor and past chair in the Department of Economics, Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, where she has also been active in the Atlantic Canada Studies and Women and Gender Studies programs. Her research has focused on labour market restructuring, gender and economics, household livelihood strategies and social policy. She has published recently on gender and precarious employment, EI, restructuring in rural resource based communities, the social economy, long term care, immigration policy and labour mobility in rural Newfoundland. She is a past president of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). She has been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Canadian Studies, Feminist Economics and Studies in Political Economy.
Deatra Walsh
Deatra Walsh holds a PhD in Sociology from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and a Master’s of Rural Development from Brandon University, Manitoba. She specializes in research on rural labour mobility, migration, precarious employment, and gender. Deatra has an adjunct appointment with Yukon College. She currently lives and works in Iqaluit, NU.
Sylvia Fuller
Sylvia Fuller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research investigates relationships among career dynamics, institutional and regulatory contexts, and patterns of inequality and economic insecurity. She has published in a range of journals including The American Sociological Review, Social Science Research, International Migration Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, and Social Politics. In 2009 she was awarded the SSHRC Aurora Prize, which recognizes an outstanding new researcher in Canada in the Social Sciences or Humanities.
Women and Gender Studies Institute