The Legal Construction of Personal Work Relations and Gender

The rigid divide between a standard employment contract and other work relations has always presented particular difficulties for women. There is a fundamental mismatch between the binary divide that is inscribed in law and many women’s experience, in which the boundaries between paid and unpaid work, between public and private, and between the labor market and social security are permeable and shifting. The effects of this mismatch are particularly felt among those women who predominate among “non-standard” workers, who find themselves characterized as “independent” or “quasi-independent” despite the reality of their lack of real autonomy or self-sufficiency in the market.1 But this mismatch also has serious effects for those women at any one time employed under an employment contract because of the incentives created by the law for employers to cut costs by re-characterizing their relationship as falling on the far side of the binary divide. Freedland and Kountouris’s extraordinarily perceptive book, The Legal Construction of Personal Work Relations, not only allows us to escape from this rigid legal typology, it sheds light on the complex interactions between the many different personal work relations and labor market statuses that women engage in throughout their lives, pointing the way to a system of legal entitlements which better reflects these realities.