L F Vosko
Biographic Data
| ID | 48191 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L F Vosko |
| GIVEN NAMES | L F |
| FAMILY NAME | Vosko |
| SIGNATURE | VOSKO L F |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5506-7742 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 222 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Migrant Work by Another Name
Migrant Work by Another Name explores the complexities of Canada's evolving international migration and employment policy landscape. It critically examines the shift towards “mobility” programs under the recently inaugurated International Mobility Program (IMP). This shift occurs alongside the contraction of certain streams within Canada’s long-standing Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). The book investigates the implications of policy chan…
Understanding Temporary Labour Migration through a Settler Colonial Lens
The relationship between differential inclusion of workers migrating for employment internationally and the dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous people and lands is a growing area of study within critical migration studies. Less attention has been paid, however, to how (im)migration policies that foster migrant worker precariousness also extend settler colonial practices. Scholars situated in the transdisciplinary fields of Black Studies …
The Effects of Activation
L'article analyse les effets des stratégies d'activation – ou des interventions politiques visant à encourager et à réglementer la participation au marché du travail – ciblant les étudiants étrangers pendant leurs études. Il analyse la Base de données sur la dynamique canadienne entre employeurs et employés (BDCEE) de Statistique Canada pour révéler qu'une plus grande proportion d'étudiants étrangers que d'étudiants locaux occupent des emplois et…
Through the back-door
In Australia and Canada, working holidaymaking is rationalized on the basis of encouraging cultural exchange among youth. Yet, in both countries, there is mounting evidence that working holiday programs are operating as back-door migrant work programs to help fill demands for labor in occupations and industries characterized by precarious jobs undesirable to locals. As scholarship on working holidaymakers’ labor market participation is more devel…
“Vulnerable Workers” and Third Way Governance
This article traces the definition and treatment of “vulnerable workers” within the province of Ontario’s regulation of employment standards over a fourteen-year period. An examination of the government’s discourse and its enforcement and legislative history reveals significant shifts and inconsistencies between the government’s claims and its enforcement practices. These shifts and inconsistencies are understood within a political economic analy…
Probationary precarity? Differential inclusion among post‐graduation work permit‐holders in Canada
In high‐income receiving states, educational visa‐holders are routinely cast as beneficiaries of immigration systems prioritizing well‐trained workers. Promising pathways to permanent residency, Canada's Post‐Graduation Work Permit Program (PGWPP), an expanding stream of its new International Mobility Program, is a case in point. Yet there is a dearth of scholarly analysis of program design and its effects on visa‐holders. Addressing this lacuna,…
The ‘contract’ and its discontents
Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and considers the possibilities and limitations for ameliorating it. It outlines formal recommendations that t…
The Origins and Application of the "Core of Indianness" in Indigenous Labour Relations
This article examines the history of, and legal precedent set by, Four B Manufacturing v. United Garment Workers of America, a 1980 Supreme Court of Canada case involving an Indigenous-owned manufacturing firm that resisted the efforts of its Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers to form a union on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a reserve in southeastern Ontario. The employer, Four B, contested the jurisdiction of the Ontario Labour Relations B…
Determining the “Core of Indianness
In light of Bill C-92, which establishes a framework for delegating child and family service provision to Indigenous communities, this article addresses the contested regulation of employment and labour relations in Indigenous social service workplaces. It approaches this subject by looking back at NIL/TU,O Child and Family Services Society v. B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union, a case in which employees at a First Nations child and fam…
Covid-19 Outbreaks in Canada and the Crisis of Migrant Farmworkers’ Social Reproduction
Understanding Migrant Farmworkers’ Health and Well-Being during the Global Covid-19 Pandemic in Canada
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada imposed certain international travel bans and work-from-home orders, yet migrant farmworkers, declared essential to national food security, were exempt from such measures. In this context, farm worksites proved to be particularly prone to COVID-19 outbreaks. To apprehend this trend, we engaged an expanded and transnational employment strain framework that identified the employment demands and resources underst…
Migrant agricultural workers’ deaths in Ontario from January 2020 to June 2021
Migrant agricultural workers have been disproportionately harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Greater attention to the unique needs of this population is required to avoid further preventable deaths
Indigenous Access to Social Assistance and Identity
In Canada, the settler colonial state uses the regulation of the so-called Indian identity as a dispossessive strategy, a racialized and gendered means of controlling access to resources and attempting to contain Indigenous human, nonhuman, and land-based relations. This regulation is informed by Western patriarchal ideals and mechanisms. We examine settler accounts of “Indian” identity and their effects through a gendered reading of Shubenacadie…
Temporary labour migration by any other name
To appease public anxieties and limit exploitation, in recent years Canada has sought to more strictly regulate and reduce temporary migrant work, while expanding opportunities for international mobility. This article explores the division between mobility and migration in this settler colonial context by charting developments in two overarching Canadian immigration program streams dedicated to facilitating international migration for employment …
Beyond “Legal Equality” vs. “Difference” Feminism
Eileen Boris’s new book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019, traces the history of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) incremental recognition of the work of social reproduction, culminating in the struggle of domestic workers to gain formal recognition at the ILO. Throughout three sections, Boris demonstrates the global making of the woman worker. She provides extensive evidence of h…
Who to Inspect? Using Employee Complaint Data to Inform Workplace Inspections in Ontario
In Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, employment standards enforcement includes reactively investigating employee complaints and, to a lesser extent, proactively inspecting workplaces. Analyses of administrative data from Ontario’s Ministry of Labour (MOL) show that the use of complaint data to inform workplace inspections is quite limited. Strict adherence to the MOL’s procedures for workplace inspections is not conducive to the investigat…
Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker and International Mobility Programs
This article analyses contemporary developments in top source countries of Canada's temporary migrant worker programmes, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and International Mobility Program (IMP). An analysis of administrative data and policy suggests that most temporary migrant workers from key source countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are present in Canada under highly restrictive conditions of the TFWP, largely as agricultu…
Disrupting Deportability
The Employment Standards Enforcement Gap and the Overtime Pay Exemption in Ontario
Employment Standards (es) legislation sets minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. es legislation is designed to provide minimum workplace protections, particularly for those with little bargaining power in the labour market. In practice, however, es legislation includes ways in which legislated standards may be avoided, including through exemptions that…
Legal but Deportable
This article explores how model temporary migrant worker programs (TMWPs) that permit seasonal return can institutionalize deportability or the possibility of removal among participants with legal status. It draws on the cases of two groups of workers who participated in the British Columbia-Mexico Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and who managed to unionize and secure collective agreements (CAs). The author argues that the design and…
Enforcement of Ontario's Employment Standards Act
This article examines the impact of recent reforms on the enforcement of the Ontario Employment Standards Act (2000). It analyzes changes to complaints processing before and after the implementation of the Open for Business Act (2010), part of which aimed to streamline workplace regulation. Drawing on a previously untapped source of information on employment standards enforcement, the Ministry of Labour's Employment Standards Information System, …
Methodological K/nots
This article traces methodological discussions of a multidisciplinary team of researchers located in universities and community settings in Ontario. The group designed and conducted a research project on the enforcement of labor standards in Ontario, Canada. Discussions of methodological possibilities often began with “nots”—that is, consensus on methodological approaches that the team collectively rejected. Out of these discussions emerged sugge…
Blacklisting as a modality of deportability
This article illustrates how blacklisting can function as a modality of deportability among temporary migrant workers participating in a programme touted as a model of ordered migration internationally, with attention to sending state action. In 2010, Local 1518 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union applied successfully to British Columbia's Labour Relations Board to represent a group of circular migrants engaged under Canada's Seasonal…
Making or Administering Law and Policy? Discretion and Judgment in Employment Standards Enforcement in Ontario
The purpose of this paper is to advance an approach to analyzing decision-making by front line public officials. The notion of discretion in front line decision-making has been examined widely in the law and society literature. However, it has often failed to capture the different kinds and levels of decisions that enforcement officials make. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on political, sociological, and legal analysis, we propos…
Introduction Liberating Temporariness? Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway for Social Inclusion
Temporary Employment and Social Inequality in Canada
At the temporary-permanent divide
This paper explores the production of temporariness in Canada, and its implications for the citizenship rights of migrants. It investigates the production of temporariness within three policy fields that are typically not examined together – security, work and settlement. Within these three fields, it considers public policies concerning: (1) security of presence; (2) access to paid employment for spouses of migrants; and (3) eligibility for sett…
Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker and International Mobility Programs
This article analyses contemporary developments in top source countries of Canada's temporary migrant worker programmes, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and International Mobility Program (IMP). An analysis of administrative data and policy suggests that most temporary migrant workers from key source countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are present in Canada under highly restrictive conditions of the TFWP, largely as agricultu…
The Pasts (and Futures) of Feminist Political Economy in Canada
In the last three decades, Canadian scholars have played a central role in shaping the field of feminist political economy. We have contributed to challenging the gender-blindness of political economy scholarship and advancing debates in feminist theory. Globalization, accelerating commodification and welfare state retrenchment, however, pose a number of challenges and opportunities to scholars in the field
Temporary labour migration by any other name
To appease public anxieties and limit exploitation, in recent years Canada has sought to more strictly regulate and reduce temporary migrant work, while expanding opportunities for international mobility. This article explores the division between mobility and migration in this settler colonial context by charting developments in two overarching Canadian immigration program streams dedicated to facilitating international migration for employment …
Decent Work
With the proliferation of supranational trade agreements and the deregulation of national labour markets, calls for representative international organizations and international mechanisms aimed at improving the conditions of workers are growing. One outcome of these developments is that international organizations, like the International Labour Organization (ILO), are rethinking their roles under globalization. This article examines the ILO's new…
Temporary Work in Transnational Labor Regulation
Blacklisting as a modality of deportability
This article illustrates how blacklisting can function as a modality of deportability among temporary migrant workers participating in a programme touted as a model of ordered migration internationally, with attention to sending state action. In 2010, Local 1518 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union applied successfully to British Columbia's Labour Relations Board to represent a group of circular migrants engaged under Canada's Seasonal…
Methodological K/nots
This article traces methodological discussions of a multidisciplinary team of researchers located in universities and community settings in Ontario. The group designed and conducted a research project on the enforcement of labor standards in Ontario, Canada. Discussions of methodological possibilities often began with “nots”—that is, consensus on methodological approaches that the team collectively rejected. Out of these discussions emerged sugge…
Legal but Deportable
This article explores how model temporary migrant worker programs (TMWPs) that permit seasonal return can institutionalize deportability or the possibility of removal among participants with legal status. It draws on the cases of two groups of workers who participated in the British Columbia-Mexico Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and who managed to unionize and secure collective agreements (CAs). The author argues that the design and…
Where Women’s Efforts Count
After more than ten years of organising and lobbying by women's groups, the 1996 Canadian Census included, for the first time, a detailed question about the amount of time people spend on unpaid housework and care giving for children and seniors. According to Statistics Canada, this information was collected to provide a better understanding of how these unpaid activities contribute to the well-being of Canadians. However, behind this formal expl…
Probationary precarity? Differential inclusion among post‐graduation work permit‐holders in Canada
In high‐income receiving states, educational visa‐holders are routinely cast as beneficiaries of immigration systems prioritizing well‐trained workers. Promising pathways to permanent residency, Canada's Post‐Graduation Work Permit Program (PGWPP), an expanding stream of its new International Mobility Program, is a case in point. Yet there is a dearth of scholarly analysis of program design and its effects on visa‐holders. Addressing this lacuna,…
The ‘contract’ and its discontents
Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and considers the possibilities and limitations for ameliorating it. It outlines formal recommendations that t…
Less than adequate
This article analyzes the Directive on Temporary Agency Work (2008) in the face of a new internal market in services in the European Union. I argue that the adoption of this Directive is paradoxical: on the one hand, it breaks the lengthy stalemate characterizing workers' and employers' efforts to craft a framework agreement. On the other hand, the compromise reached marks a setback for workers' protection because the Directive qualifies equal tr…
The Employment Standards Enforcement Gap and the Overtime Pay Exemption in Ontario
Employment Standards (es) legislation sets minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. es legislation is designed to provide minimum workplace protections, particularly for those with little bargaining power in the labour market. In practice, however, es legislation includes ways in which legislated standards may be avoided, including through exemptions that…
Enforcement of Ontario's Employment Standards Act
This article examines the impact of recent reforms on the enforcement of the Ontario Employment Standards Act (2000). It analyzes changes to complaints processing before and after the implementation of the Open for Business Act (2010), part of which aimed to streamline workplace regulation. Drawing on a previously untapped source of information on employment standards enforcement, the Ministry of Labour's Employment Standards Information System, …
Making or Administering Law and Policy? Discretion and Judgment in Employment Standards Enforcement in Ontario
The purpose of this paper is to advance an approach to analyzing decision-making by front line public officials. The notion of discretion in front line decision-making has been examined widely in the law and society literature. However, it has often failed to capture the different kinds and levels of decisions that enforcement officials make. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on political, sociological, and legal analysis, we propos…
The Co-Workplace
Figures and Tables Preface 1 Putting Work in Its Place 2 Situating Homework in Time and Space 3 If You Worked Here You'd Be Home By Now: Pros and Cons of Home-Based Telework 4 Are We There Yet? The Telework Centre Office 5 Your Mother Doesn't Work Here: Learning from Existing Models of Co-Workplaces 6 Where Can I Sign Up? The Demand for Co-Workplaces 7 Planning the Co-Workplace: Six Scenarios 8 Humanizing Home-Based Work with the Co-Workplace App…
Indigenous Access to Social Assistance and Identity
In Canada, the settler colonial state uses the regulation of the so-called Indian identity as a dispossessive strategy, a racialized and gendered means of controlling access to resources and attempting to contain Indigenous human, nonhuman, and land-based relations. This regulation is informed by Western patriarchal ideals and mechanisms. We examine settler accounts of “Indian” identity and their effects through a gendered reading of Shubenacadie…
Who to Inspect? Using Employee Complaint Data to Inform Workplace Inspections in Ontario
In Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, employment standards enforcement includes reactively investigating employee complaints and, to a lesser extent, proactively inspecting workplaces. Analyses of administrative data from Ontario’s Ministry of Labour (MOL) show that the use of complaint data to inform workplace inspections is quite limited. Strict adherence to the MOL’s procedures for workplace inspections is not conducive to the investigat…
Temporary Work
Where Women’s Efforts Count
After more than ten years of organising and lobbying by women's groups, the 1996 Canadian Census included, for the first time, a detailed question about the amount of time people spend on unpaid housework and care giving for children and seniors. According to Statistics Canada, this information was collected to provide a better understanding of how these unpaid activities contribute to the well-being of Canadians. However, behind this formal expl…
Temporary Work
'Not a Man's Union'
This article traces the transformation of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a labor organization that had formally excluded women, but began to recruit them into membership in the 1940s. Government directives forced the temporary abeyance of the exclusionary policy during World War II, and after the war the union leadership's desire to expand the organization's size and scope led to a dramatic shift; women were then welcomed as members …
Decent Work
With the proliferation of supranational trade agreements and the deregulation of national labour markets, calls for representative international organizations and international mechanisms aimed at improving the conditions of workers are growing. One outcome of these developments is that international organizations, like the International Labour Organization (ILO), are rethinking their roles under globalization. This article examines the ILO's new…
The Pasts (and Futures) of Feminist Political Economy in Canada
In the last three decades, Canadian scholars have played a central role in shaping the field of feminist political economy. We have contributed to challenging the gender-blindness of political economy scholarship and advancing debates in feminist theory. Globalization, accelerating commodification and welfare state retrenchment, however, pose a number of challenges and opportunities to scholars in the field
Temporary Work
The Co-Workplace
Figures and Tables Preface 1 Putting Work in Its Place 2 Situating Homework in Time and Space 3 If You Worked Here You'd Be Home By Now: Pros and Cons of Home-Based Telework 4 Are We There Yet? The Telework Centre Office 5 Your Mother Doesn't Work Here: Learning from Existing Models of Co-Workplaces 6 Where Can I Sign Up? The Demand for Co-Workplaces 7 Planning the Co-Workplace: Six Scenarios 8 Humanizing Home-Based Work with the Co-Workplace App…
Self-Employed Workers Organize
Over a million self-employed Canadians work every day but many of them not entitled to the basic labour protections and rights such as minimum wages, maternity and parental leaves and benefits, pay equity, a safe and healthy working environment, and access to collective bargaining. The authors of Self-Employed Workers Organize offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the legal, political, and social realities that both limit collective action by…
Temporary Work in Transnational Labor Regulation
Temporary Employment and Social Inequality in Canada
The Partial Eclipse of the SER and the Dynamics of SER‐Centrism in International Labour Regulations
This chapter initiates the book's statistical portrait of employment trends in industrialized contexts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This portrait illustrates the slow erosion of full‐time permanent employment in Australia, Canada, the European Union 15, and to a lesser extent the United States. Linking employment trends to sex/gender divisions of unpaid work, it also reveals that, despite formal equality, full‐time permanent employm…
Self‐Employment and the Regulation of the Employment Relationship
This chapter examines responses to the destabilization of the employment relationship and labour market insecurities coming in its train. The regulation of principal focus is the ILO Recommendation on the Employment Relationship (2006), marking a shift from equal treatment to effective protection. The empirical focus is Industrialized Market Economy Countries experiencing a rise of self‐employment resembling paid employment, a subset of which was…
Regulating Part‐Time Employment
This chapter explores contemporary regulatory responses to challenges to the temporal boundaries of the SER and their associated precariousness, typified by the 1994 ILO Convention on Part‐Time Work, which subscribes to equal treatment. To analyse the logic of this regulation, it considers the nature and significance of part‐time employment in Australia, where it is highly prevalent and also deeply gendered. However, it is the composition of part…
Constructing and Consolidating the Standard Employment Relationship in International Labour Regulation
This chapter traces the evolution of the SER as the baseline of international labour regulation in the interwar and post‐World War II periods. It reviews the SER's central pillars—the bilateral employment relationship, standardized working time, and continuous employment—and analyses their construction in ILO regulations. This discussion highlights the significance of exclusions in the creation of this employment norm. It also shows how even as t…
Managing the Margins
This book seeks to understand the precarious margins of late‐capitalist labour markets. Its point of departure is the prevailing view that the full‐time continuous job or the standard employment relationship (SER) is being eclipsed by part‐time and temporary paid employment and self‐employment. To the extent that such a shift is taking place, what are its implications for precarious employment and those struggling against it? Addressing this ques…
Forging a Gender Contract in Early National and International Labour Regulation
This chapter traces the prehistory of the SER at the national and international levels, demonstrating its gendered roots. Building on scholarship in women's history illustrating how early attempts to establish minimum conditions of work at the national level centred on ‘protecting women’, it traces the emergence of a parallel emphasis in international labour legislation. The selection of initial subjects for international labour legislation was f…
Alternatives to the SER
Chapter 7 assesses three alternatives to the SER: the first advances a ‘tiered SER’ reflecting post‐1990 international labour regulations and convergent approaches within and among nation states examined in Chapters 4 to Chapters 6; the second involves creating what Bosch (2004) calls a new ‘flexible SER’; and the third aims to move ‘beyond employment’ as the basis for labour and social protection (Supiot 2001). The beyond employment option goes …
Regulating Temporary Employment
Introduction
Industrialized societies have experienced dramatic labour market transformations over the last few decades – and gender relations are at the centre of such changes. The key changes have proceeded through periods of economic growth and periods of recession. For example, women’s labour force participation rates have risen or stabilized at relatively high levels as a result of developments ranging from women’s collective struggle for formal equality…
Less than adequate
This article analyzes the Directive on Temporary Agency Work (2008) in the face of a new internal market in services in the European Union. I argue that the adoption of this Directive is paradoxical: on the one hand, it breaks the lengthy stalemate characterizing workers' and employers' efforts to craft a framework agreement. On the other hand, the compromise reached marks a setback for workers' protection because the Directive qualifies equal tr…
Precarious Employment and the Problem of SER-Centrism in Regulating for Decent Work
There is a growing disjuncture between changing patterns of labour force participation in highly industrialized contexts and systems of labour regulation. Policy actors at various levels are attempting to deal with the insecurities associated with ‘new’ forms of employment such as parttime and temporary paid employment and solo self-employment, which have disproportionate effects on women, migrants, older, and younger workers. At the same time, m…
At the temporary-permanent divide
This paper explores the production of temporariness in Canada, and its implications for the citizenship rights of migrants. It investigates the production of temporariness within three policy fields that are typically not examined together – security, work and settlement. Within these three fields, it considers public policies concerning: (1) security of presence; (2) access to paid employment for spouses of migrants; and (3) eligibility for sett…
Introduction Liberating Temporariness? Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway for Social Inclusion
Making or Administering Law and Policy? Discretion and Judgment in Employment Standards Enforcement in Ontario
The purpose of this paper is to advance an approach to analyzing decision-making by front line public officials. The notion of discretion in front line decision-making has been examined widely in the law and society literature. However, it has often failed to capture the different kinds and levels of decisions that enforcement officials make. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on political, sociological, and legal analysis, we propos…
Methodological K/nots
This article traces methodological discussions of a multidisciplinary team of researchers located in universities and community settings in Ontario. The group designed and conducted a research project on the enforcement of labor standards in Ontario, Canada. Discussions of methodological possibilities often began with “nots”—that is, consensus on methodological approaches that the team collectively rejected. Out of these discussions emerged sugge…
Political science (37 works) · Economics (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (21 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Engineering (14 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (13 works) · Politics (13 works)