Description
Precarious Work and Precarious Health: How American Labour Law has Contributed to the Rise of Precarious Work and its Potential Relationship with Deaths of DespairAbstract
In the United States between 1999 and 2022, approximately 3.1 million people have died from suicide, alcohol-related diseases, or overdoses, collectively labelled Deaths of Despair. Economists have argued that this partially results from long-term economic misery. These deaths comes at the end of several decades of neoliberal policies and changes within the US labour market. To cut costs employers started outsourcing nonessential jobs to third party firms. This has created a highly polarized labour market. Many of the victims have been experiencing increasing difficulty in this polarized labour market. Precarious work, along with a spectrum of economics factors, has placed workers at an elevated risk for Deaths of Despair. This paper will use the right to just and favourable working conditions enumerated by Article 7
of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights along with the
conventions and recommendations of the International Labour Organisation as a key points of reference of international standards on labour rights in order to analyse the potential detrimental health effects of non-standard work. US legal definitions of the employer-employee relationship have allowed this to metastasize over time. It will draw upon the theories of the Critical Labour Studies movement, to inform its analysis of this definitional issue of employee and employer. While labour law jurisprudence has struggled to adequately protect workers from more sophisticated business practices, workers are being exploited and isolated. It will argue that the purpose of labour law needs to re-examined to adequately protect thosein non-standard work.
| Period | 16 Apr 2025 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Liverpool, United KingdomShow on map |