Search

For many years, scholars have directed our attention to the gender gap in domestic labour. Even when women engage in paid employment, they nevertheless perform the majority of the household labour in most wealthy countries. At the same time, disasters and crises both expose and exacerbate existing social inequalities. In this paper, we ask: in what ways has the COVID−19 pandemic contributed to the gender gap in household labour, including childcare? How do women and men feel about this gap? Using data from the Canadian Perspectives survey series (Wave 3), conducted by Statistics Canada three months into the pandemic, our analyses consider the task distribution that made household labour intensely unequal during COVID−19, with women ten times more likely than men to say childcare fell mostly on them, for example. Yet, in nearly all of our models, women did not ubiquitously report being more dissatisfied with the division of domestic tasks within the house, nor were they more likely than men to say that the household division of labour "got worse" during COVID; however, parents did feel that it got worse. We discuss what these findings mean for women's mental health, long‐term paid labour, and interpersonal power, and raise questions about why it is we are not seeing a decrease in women's reported satisfaction with this division of labour. These findings spotlight gender inequality and the family as ongoing pillars of capitalism, and how the structural and interpersonal weathering of the pandemic comes at a particularly great expense to women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first time in generations prairie capitalism has come to rely on migrant labor. Specifically, a global division of labor that intersects with the constellation of Canada's foreign worker programs has shaped the contemporary political economic character of the "New Saskatchewan." These programs function to construct labour markets for growing low‐wage industries that exist alongside high‐wage resource sector employment in Western Canada. Along with these developments, the provincial government has attempted to mitigate the "unfreedom" experienced by foreign workers through the development of the Foreign Worker Recruitment and Immigration Act. The paper draws from data obtained through government access to information requests and unpacks the enforcement of migrant labor rights and efforts to confront status‐induced precarity in Saskatchewan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]