More than 2.1 million Canadians today work in temporary, part-time or otherwise unstable jobs . For these workers, the ideal of a " standard employment relationship " - the predominant model for employment for decades in the second half of the 20th century - no longer defines their employment experiences or expectations.
Author
- Natalie Adamyk
PhD Student, Sociology, University of Toronto
Decades ago, full-time, permanent positions granted most employees extensive benefits and protections from their employers they could expect to receive until they retired.
Today, temporary work is largely characterized by few or no employer protections or even guarantees that employers' contracts will be renewed .
How should we understand these workers' experiences and lived realities? The rise of job precarity requires re-conceptualizating the nature of employment .
One way to think about this is: Rather than the largely straightforward "threads" characterizing standard employment relationships, contract employment is better thought of as a patchwork with different jobs or fabrics. Some overlap, and sections take different sizes and textures.
This metaphor allows us to conceptualize these workers' experiences as intertwined or overlapping. Many workers are required to take on different jobs in quick succession or at the same time.
Contract academia
This patchwork reality is likely experienced by many contract professors within Canada's universities. As of 2019, nearly 54 per cent of academics within Canadian universities were hired on a contractual basis. Half of social science and 56 per cent of humanities faculties also consist of contract academics .
I interviewed 40 contract academics across Canada, to better understand what these academics' work experiences were like when explored in relation to their larger employment histories and education. I hoped to attain a sense of how these workers make emotional sense out of their jobs and job arrangements which, often, do not make logical sense.
My interview analysis found many professors rely on both previous and current employment experiences in ways which instilled confidence and infused their work with deep personal meaning .
This resulted in contract academics possessing valuable skills which I conceptualize in my research as emotional capital. Emotional capital refers to psychosocial resources which come from individuals' previous work experiences and education which they transfer to current work situations .
Emotional capital and emotion management allows these workers to make sense of the work they do within universities, which often treat them as secondary to tenure-track professors, while providing them with few supports and opportunities for input.
Precariously employed voices
In academic contract jobs like these, how do professors' emotional resources allow them to feel competent, engaged and fulfilled by their jobs?
For Deirdre (not her real name), a sociology lecturer at a large, research-intensive Ontario university, her experiences as a server enabled her to speak more credibly to social inequality during her lectures. This allowed her to facilitate interactions with her students, based on their shared work experiences and class backgrounds. According to Deirdre:
"I teach sociological theory. A lot of it is talking about different ways of interacting with the social world, and [the] student population is predominantly lower socioeconomic status, 90 per cent of them are working. When I'm able to talk about waiting tables, that seems to resonate with a lot of people."
Deirdre draws on her experiences in the service industry, which allows her to form friendly but professional relationships with students in order to meet the university's prescribed rules for teaching and student management.
Cybil (not her real name) was concurrently employed as a health inspector during her appointment as a limited-term professor. She describes how this background allowed her to maintain a dichotomy of friendliness and professionalism. She said that that "as long as [students] follow the rules I set forward, we're not going to have a problem. I do a decent job of walking that line between being kind and accommodating, to being able to enforce a rule or regulation."
These comments demonstrate how these contract university instructors are able to derive both dignity and meaningful relationships with students within their positions. These instructors convey a sense of authority by drawing on the emotional dimensions of their lives and past experiences.
Lacking 'status shield' of tenure
The instructors' emotional agency was also curtailed to varying degrees by both institutional attitudes towards contract academics, and, in some cases, sexist and racist attitudes from students.
Lacking some of the important employment "status shields" that tenured professors have access to, contract academics often used emotion management to protect themselves against attacks on their credibility and employment prospects.
For example, Giselle, a part-time professor, acknowledges that being a young woman of colour from a Trinidadian background can make interactions with some students more fraught, as "being a woman in brown skin and [younger], in some instances it works against me."
However, she also described how this identity can can be advantageous in certain ways and disadvantageous in others: "Sometimes they'll say, I picked up your accent, and they want to know about travel, because I grew up in Trinidad, and their relatives are from there." Through these interactions, Giselle and her students "bond." As she notes, "those are female students coming to me, having girl talk." Giselle's ability to engage in "girl talk" constitutes emotional capital that operates along gendered and racialized lines.
Contract work and emotional labour
Amid increasing temporary and contractual employment in most sectors in Canadian workplaces , this research points to an important pathway to understanding.
These workers' jobs and experiences represent a patchwork made of multiple jobs and experiences which workers navigate and make emotional sense of using emotional capital.
As contractual employment becomes increasingly prevalent and contract workers dominate many sectors, their work and emotional lives deserve to be taken seriously and explored in greater depth.
This research shines light on how academic contract workers make emotional sense out of their jobs. Sometimes this happens through taking control of emotional situations in their jobs by conveying authority and creating meaningful relationships with others.
In job markets that have largely abandoned the standard employment relationship and the ensuing protections and stability that accompanied it, workers often use their emotional labour and skills as substitute to create a sense of personal stability, fulfilment and purpose.
Natalie Adamyk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
