DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Closing the Enforcement Gap

Improving Employment Standards Protections for People in Precarious Jobs

Leah Faith Vosko author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Toronto Press

Published:3rd Mar '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Closing the Enforcement Gap cover

The nature of employment is changing: low wage jobs are increasingly common, fewer workers belong to unions, and workplaces are being transformed through the growth of contracting-out, franchising, and extended supply chains. Closing the Enforcement Gap offers a comprehensive analysis of the enforcement of employment standards in Ontario.

Adopting mixed methods, this work includes qualitative research involving in-depth interviews with workers, community advocates, and enforcement officials; extensive archival research excavating decades of ministerial records; and analysis of a previously untapped source of administrative data collected by Ontario’s Ministry of Labour. The authors reveal and trace the roots of a deepening "enforcement gap" that pervades nearly all aspects of the regime, demonstrating that the province’s Employment Standards Act (ESA) fails too many workers who rely on the floor of minimum conditions it was devised to provide. Arguably, there is nothing inevitable about the enforcement gap in Ontario or for that matter elsewhere. Through contributions from leading employment standards enforcement scholars in the US, the UK, and Australia, as well as Quebec, Closing the Enforcement Gap surveys innovative enforcement models that are emerging in a variety of jurisdictions and sets out a bold vision for strengthening employment standards enforcement.

Closing the Enforcement Gap Research Group

Leah F. Vosko
Guliz Akkaymak
Rebecca Casey
Shelley Condratto
John Grundy
Alan Hall
Alice Hoe
Kiran Mirchandani
Andrea M. Noack
Urvashi Soni-Sinha
Mercedes Steedman
Mark P. Thomas
Eric M. Tucker

International/Quebec Contributors
Nick Clark
Dalia Gesualdi-Fecteau
Tess Hardy
John Howe
Guylaine Vallée
David Weil

"This book makes a substantial and impressive contribution to knowledge on the politics and outcomes of labor regulation."

-- Sean O’Brady, McMaster University * ILR Review
  • Winner of Best Book Prize in Work and Labour Studies The Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies 2021 (Canada)

ISBN: 9781487506391

Dimensions: 235mm x 165mm x 33mm

Weight: 820g

472 pages