One of the things our research is trying to do is to separate this notion of precarious employment from that of low-wage employment; they're not quite the same. It's certainly true, though, that the majority of people in low-wage employment will also find themselves in precarious employment. They'll be in jobs that don't have benefits. They don't have control over their schedule. They're on short-term contracts and are perhaps employed through a temp agency. But our research is also showing us that there are a number of people in precarious employment with those insecure characteristics but who are not low-waged.
If you think about the change that's taking place in our economy, it's in the media, in the arts, in education—much of university teaching is now done by contract workers—and in health care. We've seen real growth in these middle-income jobs, but these are jobs that are time-limited. They may be six-month jobs or one-month jobs. They often are jobs that don't have any benefits beyond the wage. So what we have is a growing group of what we would call middle-class Canadians, but they're not in the kinds of jobs that middle-class Canadians had 20 or 30 years ago, so that once you had that job, you expected to keep that job for 20 or 30 years. Nowadays people are moving from job to job. There's uncertainty. Part of it is just the result of rapid technical change.
If you got a job with Ford in 1906 when they started making Model Ts in Windsor, you could still be working at Ford, because they're still in Windsor. But if you got a job making BlackBerrys with RIM in 1998, you wouldn't have a job now, because they don't make BlackBerrys anymore, and that's just the pace of technology.
Employers are also hiring a smaller core of permanent workers and surrounding that with a much larger ring of contract and temporary workers. Sometimes those are very well-paid jobs, but they're not permanent, and I think that's what we need to deal with as a society.