Abstract
Although the rise in precarious employment within Canada is tied to the ascendancy of neoliberalism, racialized persons have long been marginalized within the Canadian workforce and relegated to precarious workforce participation. Through an exploration of the relationship between precarious employment and racialized power structures, it will be demonstrated that while the moderate Keynesian welfare policies of the post–World War II era served to mitigate the experiences of those excluded from the workplace, racialized power structures were not fundamentally altered in that era. This critique offers a response to scholarship on the impact of neoliberalism that valorizes the welfare state without paying sufficient attention to its history of racial exclusions. It proposes new strategies to address these underlying inequalities within the existing structures of the Canadian workforce.
Highlights
The rise of neoliberalism within Canada in the 1980s, accompanied by the decline of the Keynesian welfare state, contributed to an increase in precarious employment; for marginalized members of the Canadian workforce, precarious employment is not a new phenomenon
The Canadian workforce and the policies of the post–World War II welfare state were built around the norm of a White male–breadwinner model, which perpetuated the experience of marginalization for racialized, as well as for female, workers
While neoliberalism has intensified the experience of precariousness and exclusion from the workforce for racialized Canadians, the solution to this exclusion cannot be found in advocating for a return to an inadequate system of moderate Keynesian policies that never challenged the racialized power structures
Summary
The rise of neoliberalism within Canada in the 1980s, accompanied by the decline of the Keynesian welfare state, contributed to an increase in precarious employment; for marginalized members of the Canadian workforce, precarious employment is not a new phenomenon. While labor advocates frequently laud the rise of the postwar welfare state within Canada as the “Golden Age” (see, for example, Abu-Laban & Gabriel, 2008), the full-employment objective was never earnestly pursued within Canada, and significant degrees of precariousness, marginality, and exclusion were accepted as norms of the Canadian workforce.
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