Human Resources committee  The rules that we design for firms and for businesses—which generally have been encouraged, as I said, through the steady increase in globalization, freer trade and more competition—put them in a position where the contracts and the employment arrangements they set out for workers essentially fall within the competitive environment that they must function within.

Human Resources committee  Are these questions for me?

Human Resources committee  I will let the other witness answer.

Human Resources committee  That is an excellent question. In one older report, I pointed out that there were many risks inherent in revising the labour laws. That is obvious, and I was afraid mistakes would be made if people tried to go too far. However, I want to remind you of the message I tried to convey in my statement today.

Human Resources committee  Off the top, women tend to have much higher concentrations of part-time work. Part-time work tends to fall into that more precarious category of work because there tends not to be the same amount of income security that you get with a full-time job. Scheduling is often more complicated.

Human Resources committee  Workers want flexibility. This is what workers want. They want flexibility. Some of the previous speakers mentioned that there is some preference among workers to take on more non-standard forms of employment, which tend to be more precarious, because they want that flexibility.

Human Resources committee  I do want to thank the chair and the committee for inviting me today to discuss with them an important issue: how we can work towards better defining and measuring precarious work, and do so in a way that helps to evaluate and design policies to address it. I want to spend the first half of my presentation discussing options to achieve a more standardized definition of precarious work.