The successful 1997 strike by the Teamsters against UPS, and the overwhelming support the American public gave the strikers highlighted the impact of contingent work—an umbrella term for a variety of tenuous and insecure employment arrangements such as temping, independent contracting, employee leasing, and some self-employment and part-time or part-year work. This new book contends that contingent work represents a profound deviation from the employment relations model that dominated most of this century's labor relations. It delineates essential features of contingent work from both the worker's and the organization's point of view.

Articulating a variety of perspectives from various disciplines, the contributors examine the business forces driving contingent work and assess the consequences of working contingently for the individual, family, and community, taking into account issues of race, class, and gender. They ask how current labor and employment laws need to be rewritten to provide contingent workers with the same comprehensive protections offered to permanent employees. In the final chapter, the editors comment on the status of research on contingent work and chart future research directions.

Kathleen Barker is a Professor of Psychology at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York. Kathleen Christensen is a Program Officer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

This volume... offers a many-faceted look at the work and the workers at the lower end of the contingent work continuum.... Readers of this volume will gain increased appreciation for how most contingent employment arrangements benefit the firms much more than the contingent workers they employ in usually undesirable jobs. This informative book examines an important labor market phenomenon and will appeal to all students of the labor market regardless of discipline.

The authors argue that growing numbers of contingent workers have permanently altered labor relations and the so-called employment contract, with employers coming to regard workers as 'disposable' and employees abandoning notions of organizational loyalty.

Barker and Christensen's well-organized, interesting and useful book takes us on a tour of the downside of changing employment relations. This book is a compelling introduction to the human issues of the downside of contingent employment. It is written at a level that should be accessible and interesting to most undergraduate students.

An informative, insightful, and multidimensioned view.

A quick and accessible read for policymakers and students alike. Its challenge to contemporary liberal thinking about poor women's work makes it a provokative text for courses in public welfare policy, women's labor history, and recent feminism, as well as a needed reminder to activists for social justice.

Interesting and diverse.