Redefining flexibility: How precarious work is changing employment relations

This dissertation describes how 'precarious' (contingent) work arrangements---especially temporary and contract work---are transforming employment relations. This transformation is illustrated through two primary case studies: one describing the temping-out of an entire workforce of garbage collectors in Southern Louisiana, and the other drawing on the experiences of temporary and contract workers in multiple occupations and industries in South Carolina. National-level data and debates over the use of precarious workers provide context for these regionally-specific cases.; Through these stories it is argued that employers' growing reliance on precarious workers is driven as much by efforts to increase their control over workers (and not only precarious ones) as it is by their desire to increase 'flexibility' as it is currently defined or even to cut labor costs. The power struggle argued here to be at the center of the rise in precarious work is hidden by much of the current writing on `contingent' staffing strategies and by weak conceptualizations of what 'flexibility' is.; The arrival of new players on the scene---temp agencies, leasing firms, and other labor market intermediaries---regulates and institutionalizes the new control that employers gain through the use of precarious workers. At the work site, precarious employment, particularly with the triangular relationship created with these new labor market intermediaries, enables employers to undermine the right and ability of all workers to form unions and collectively bargain contracts. Precarious work arrangements also enable employers to avoid complying with nearly every workplace protection provided by state and federal laws, including some customary protections that are not encoded in law. Workers are not passive recipients of all these changes but are actively innovating new strategies and institutional forms to re-negotiate capital-labor relations in light of the growth of precarious work.; How the use of precarious work arrangements transforms employment relations---in essence, the re-shaping of labor markets and the social relations that underlie them---cannot be told as a universal story, however. This dissertation draws on the work of industrial geographers and the evidence presented by the case material to show that this transformation needs to be seen at the level of local labor markets; here, key players in specific histories of class conflict, industrial organization and political power negotiate the outcome of the grand-scale shift to precarious employment.