Negotiating Risk, Seeking Security, Eroding Solidarity

Through a series of interviews with workers in the automotive parts industry, Negotiating Risk argues that the restructuring of labour markets and welfare states, paired with firm-level work and management reorganization, has exposed working-class families to greater levels of job risk and insecurity. Focusing on workers in Canada and Mexico and using a gender and race analysis, this book paints a bleak portrait of the lives of working people, where workers and their families continually renegotiate the effects of neo-liberal economic and social change. These changes see individuals working harder, longer and travelling further from home to keep their jobs, while straining familial and community relations and eroding the basis for worker solidarity and collective action.

HOLLY GIBBS is a doctoral candidate at McMaster University.

BELINDA LEACH is associate dean of research in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences and a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Guelph.

CHARLOTTE YATES is dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and a professor in the School of Labour Studies and Department of Political Science at McMaster University.