Precarious Work, Precarious Stress and Precarious Health: The interconnectedness of mental, physical and emotional health with the nature of precarious work


Ryan Joseph Duffy, York University

Work, stress and health are three words that I am deeply familiar with. The latter two, often paired with a negative adjective, seem to find their way into almost every sentence I utter and line that I write when asked to describe what it was like to work precariously at various colleges and in the service industry in Ontario for over a decade. Attempting to continue teaching outside of my PhD obligations proved disastrous for my mental health and job performance. As class sizes and workload doubled over the years due to online delivery modes, I found myself with classes of 55 students and my stress levels and anxiety grew significantly worse. Still, I tried to do both, wishing I had two TA-ships at the university instead of trying to find a way to get to different schools and campuses each day. Suddenly, I was managing 160 college students with the same pay and expectations as previous contracts with 100.  I was losing myself again. The nature of precarious work had done me in before, but I wanted to beat it. Suddenly, I found myself pushed to a new limit, and no further ahead in any other aspect of life other than having a year of PhD coursework behind me. Of which, I was very proud. However, I had become just a being in motion. I was aware I was falling apart again, but too scared to stop. I was in too deep. Finally, I was just not there anymore. I would like to point out that this presentation is not about my life story, however my own lived experience informs key aspects of it. Working precariously for so long, and my desire to know how others faced their lives living in precarity, greatly influenced my decision to enter the grueling and rewarding undertaking of graduate studies. I knew when I got in that I would be submitting to the commitment of dedicating a significant portion of my life to interrogating existing social policy surrounding precarious work and pay equity. This is the battle I have chosen to fight, a fight for real work-life balance and something better than being paid for only 42 weeks each year. This is a fight for people who can’t sleep at night or play with their kids because they are endlessly thinking about bills, groceries, rent and clothes. And there seems to be only one way to do this. For I believe that as it is with certain afflictive emotions that many precarious workers experience daily, such as fear, anger,  and insecurity – antiquated and deliberately unfair social policy - cannot withstand a direct gaze. To affect change requires staring at it eye to eye, and facing the problem directly, if meaningful change and real progress will ever be made. This presentation will discuss key findings of my masters RRP and ongoing PhD research which draws from literature, statistics and interviews written, compiled, and conducted by leading employment researchers in order to frame the precarious work environment as a key social determinant of health. My presentation aims to emphatically weave throughout its entirety an understanding of how interconnected mental, physical and emotional health complications are with the nature of precarious work. Throughout this presentation, I consider how specific characteristics of precarious work directly contribute to mental health complications and how stress may be uniquely experienced by precarious workers. In order to ground my presentation within a theoretical and historical context, I refer to Karl Marx’s concept of the industrial reserve army to help explain the prevalence, and low paying characteristics, of contemporary precarious work.  I also discuss how precarious work is often presented as a progressive, flexible and accommodating model of employment designed to benefit the employee; however, it is all too often, in fact, an employment condition that can drastically affect the health of workers, their families and communities that benefits the employer at the expense of the employees’ health in order to reduce labor costs (Vosko 2020). Precarious work is indeed a problem in Ontario, and I focus on this subset of the population as this is where I live, study, work and where I plan to conduct future research. I will also briefly explore the topic of precarious work within the context of OECD countries to further frame precarious work as a global issue. Toward its end, this presentation reveals a key insight from my research thus far; the discovery that employment insecurity - actual or perceived - has a profound, and almost equal, impact on the social, economic and psychological wellness of those who work within uncertain and changing conditions.

This paper will be presented at the following session: