Racialized Precarious Employment and the Inadequacies of the Canadian Welfare State

Abstract

Although the rise in precarious employment within Canada is tied to the ascendancy of neoliberalism, racialized persons have long been marginalized within the Canadian workforce and relegated to precarious workforce participation. Through an exploration of the relationship between precarious employment and racialized power structures, it will be demonstrated that while the moderate Keynesian welfare policies of the post–World War II era served to mitigate the experiences of those excluded from the workplace, racialized power structures were not fundamentally altered in that era. This critique offers a response to scholarship on the impact of neoliberalism that valorizes the welfare state without paying sufficient attention to its history of racial exclusions. It proposes new strategies to address these underlying inequalities within the existing structures of the Canadian workforce.