Cleaning Up: How Hospital Outsourcing Is Hurting Workers and Endangering Patients, by Dan Zuberi. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2013, 200 pp., ISBN: 978 0 8014 5072 3, $59.95, hardback.
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12073 |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Author | Karen Jaehrling |
working under much weaker protections than the ‘domestic’ workforce. This dis-
course played out in the Canadian media with a mining company arguing that it
needed to bring in ‘temporary foreign workers’ from China for a mining project in
British Columbia. Similarly, the Royal Bank of Canada employment practices also
came under scrutiny when ‘domestic’ employees complained that they were being
required to train temporary foreign workers to replace them.
While this volume will be of interest to those seeking to understand the intersection
among regulations, agencies and the non-standard workforce, it has a few weak-
nesses. First, personal interviews of what it is like to be in these employment arrange-
ments would be useful, and offering some comparisons to Canada with other
destination countries for Filipino labour would offer some additional context for the
caregiver case. For example, how do Filipino caregivers experience working in other
countries? How does their experience in North America compare and contrast with
their experience in other countries? Second, a concluding chapter would help bring the
rich material presented in this volume together, and to highlight some potential future
directions based on the insights provided. With such a range of important themes to
consider, offering some guidance about the shortcomings of existing theories to
capture these realities, and providing some final thoughts about how these relation-
ships will evolve within and across countries, and how the non-standard workforce
will be able to develop a sustainable livelihood, do seem a missed opportunity. In the
introduction, Fudge and Strauss refer to the growing ‘unfreedom’ of those who find
themselves in non-standard employment relationships are encountering. Developing
some regulatory solutions that can help restore freedom or at least improve protec-
tions for the non-standard workforce would be helpful guidance. Beyond these minor
suggestions, valuable lessons emerge from this volume about the ever-evolving defi-
nition of non-standard work, the growing role of agencies and other types of labour
market intermediaries, and the limits of national-level labour and employment pro-
tections in the face of a globally mobile workforce.
DANIELLE VAN JAARSVELD
University of British Columbia
Cleaning Up: How Hospital Outsourcing Is Hurting Workers and Endangering
Patients, by Dan Zuberi. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2013, 200 pp.,
ISBN: 978 0 8014 5072 3, $59.95, hardback.
Outsourcing has been used as a strategy to cut costs across a wide range of sectors and
countries already for decades. Public-sector institutions might not have spearheaded
this trend, but they certainly have not been spared from it, despite more protective
rules and institutions that used to distinguish public-sector employment from parts of
the private sector, in both co-ordinated and liberal market economies. Thus, a sub-
stantial share of offices, hospitals, residential care homes and other providers of
public services rely on private contractors for cleaning, food service work and other
types of service work considered as ‘non-core’ activities. Even though the manage-
ment literature seldom explicitly argues that the efficiency gains attributed to out-
sourcing can be achieved by reducing wages and eliminating staff, a large number of
empirical studies have shown that this is indeed the dominant strategy chosen by
providers. A near-consensual finding of the empirical literature on outsourcing, there-
fore, is that it negatively affects the working conditions of employees.
bs_bs_banner
Book Reviews 167
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
To continue reading
Request your trial