Conceptualizing Flexibility and Security: The Case of Immigrant Personal Home Care Workers.

Flexible work organization often results in labor market insecurity for workers, prompting some scholars to consider policies and organizational practices that support flexibility with security. This paper conceptualizes the potential for combining flexibility with security for workers through a comparison of immigrant women workers in two publicly-funded personal home care models. Most studies examine the relationship between flexibility and insecurity in the labor market. Immigrant workers, however, also face a more intimate insecurity of person linked to racialized relations in the daily labour process, as documented in studies of domestic work. This analysis finds that workers' responses to micro-level racialization vary with social and organizational policies. In the Medical Model, where funding levels and social policies shape a decentralized and competitive work organization, employers' pursuit of numerical flexibility results in the classic flexibility-security trade-off for workers documented i the literature. In this context, immigrant workers value labor market flexibility, despite the consequence of labor market insecurity, in order to avoid insecurity of person through racialized interactions. In the Independent Living Model, where social policies shape a more centralized and uncompetitive work organization, employers do not seek labor market flexibility, or permit it for recipients or workers. In this setting, workers do not value flexibility but instead draw on employer and union policies and supports to resist insecurity of person. The comparative analysis demonstrates the importance of conceptualizing the relationship between flexibility and security at multiple levels if we are to achieve flexibility with security for workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]