Sylvia Fuller

Lone motherhood, welfare reform and active citizen subjectivity

Welfare-to-work policies have become a central priority of governments in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and Scandinavia. Drawing on multiple in-depth interviews generated as part of a longitudinal qualitative study, we explore how welfare is imbricated in lone mothers’ subjectivity and citizenship. We consider women’s everyday claims-making activities as we interrogate three dimensions of welfare reform in British Columbia, Canada: (i) the employment imperative underlying active citizen subjectivity and the way this plays out in terms of gender, race and class-based occupational streaming; (ii) the coerciveness of gendered norms instantiated in such streaming; and (iii) the resulting practices of stratified reproduction. Following in the tradition of critical poverty studies, our research focuses on claims-making activities to challenge prevailing public policy practice that risks positioning impoverished lone mothers ‘under erasure’, invisible as mothers or moral citizens, and visible only as low waged worker citizens.

Predicting Immigrant Employment Sequences in the First Years of Settlement

Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, we analyze factors shaping new immigrants’ month-by-month employment trajectories over their first 4 years of settlement. We treat trajectories as multidimensional and holistic entities, seeking to predict the correlates of a set of typical pathways identified via optimal matching techniques and cluster analysis. Human capital attributes and household context shapes trajectories in important ways, but patterns related to bias and discrimination are not straightforward and social ties have little impact.

Do Pathways Matter? Linking Early Immigrant Employment Sequences and Later Economic Outcomes: Evidence from Canada

Employment mobility is a critical feature of immigrants’ settlement experiences and longer-term life chances. While current research typically treats mobility as a singular outcome, becoming established in a new labor market is a complex process that can entail multiple transitions in and out of employment and between different types of jobs over time. This article advances understanding of the process of immigrant labor market incorporation by engaging with its potentially multidimensional, cumulative, and path-dependent aspects. Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, I test the impact of an empirically derived typology of month-by-month immigrant employment trajectories on the odds of occupational degradation and on weekly wages. I find that the pathways immigrants take through the labor market in their first four years constitute a distinct and important mechanism shaping later employment outcomes.

Workplace Variation in Fatherhood Wage Premiums: Do Formalization and Performance Pay Matter?:

Parenthood contributes substantially to broader gender wage inequality. The intensification of gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work after the birth of a child create unequal constraints and expectations such that, all else equal, mothers earn less than childless women, but fathers earn a wage premium. The fatherhood wage premium, however, varies substantially among men. Analyses of linked workplace-employee data from Canada reveal how organizational context conditions educational, occupational and family-status variation in fatherhood premiums. More formal employment relations (collective bargaining and human resource departments) reduce both overall fatherhood premiums and group differences in them, while performance pay systems (merit and incentive pay) have mixed effects. Shifting entrenched gendered divisions of household labour is thus not the only pathway to minimizing fathers’ wage advantage.

‘Bad’ Jobs in a ‘Good’ Sector: Examining the Employment Outcomes of Temporary Work in the Canadian Public Sector:

Canada’s public sector has historically provided good jobs, but its increasing reliance on temporary workers has important implications for job quality. We compare temporary and permanent workers in the public sector on three dimensions of job quality (employment security, access to benefits and income trajectories) to assess whether favourable conditions in the public sector are extended to temporary employees, or whether polarization between temporary and permanent workers is the norm. We find provisions related to employment security and access to leave benefits in public sector collective bargains are clearly two-tiered. Drawing on nationally representative panel data, we also find a persistent earnings gap between matched permanent and temporary employees. Further, although temporary public sector workers out-earn their private sector counterparts, the earnings disadvantage relative to matched permanent workers is more pronounced and longer lasting in the public sector. Underlying this difference is greater persistence in temporary employment within the public sector.

“Family-Friendly” Jobs and Motherhood Pay Penalties: The Impact of Flexible Work Arrangements Across the Educational Spectrum:

This article focuses on how flexible work arrangements affect motherhood wage penalties for differently situated women. While theories of work–life facilitation suggest that flexible work should ease motherhood penalties, the use of flexibility policies may also invite stigma and bias against mothers. Analyses using Canadian linked workplace–employee data test these competing perspectives by examining how temporal and spatial flexibility moderate motherhood wage penalties and how this varies by women’s education. Results show that flexible work hours typically reduce mothers’ disadvantage, especially for the university educated, and that working from home also reduces wage gaps for most educational groups. The positive effect of flexibility operates chiefly by reducing barriers to mothers’ employment in higher waged establishments, although wage gaps within establishments are also diminished in some cases. While there is relatively little evidence of a flexibility stigma, the most educated do face stronger wage penalties within establishments when they substitute paid work from home for face time at the workplace as do the least educated when they bring additional unpaid work home. Overall, results are most consistent with the work–life facilitation model. However, variability in the pattern of effects underscores the importance of looking at the intersection of mothers’ education and workplace arrangements.