We should avoid construing the proliferation of precarious work as a global catastrophe

In recent years the labour market has undergone a profound transformation, with precarious employment conditions a fact of life for an increasingly large section of the workforce. Elizabeth Cotton explains how this change has been driven by the contracting out of risk and duties of the employer vis-a-vis employees onto others. However there are problems within the existing literature on the subject, which are likely to impede meaningful social responses unless they are addressed. 
The debate about regulating precarious work is a defining one in the field of employment relations, challenging established management practices and questioning the entire contents of business school libraries. Despite the trend of flexibilisation and development of global production systems being in evidence since the 1970s, the precarious work debate is a relatively young one, in part trying to understand this process of externalization. Externalisation is the trend of obtaining labour from outside a corporation’s boundaries, linked to the strategy of outsourcing and contracting out. This involves what is sometimes called a triangulation of the employment relationship, no longer a neat binary affair, with the introduction of a third party.