“You’ve Just Cursed Us”: Precarity, Austerity and Worker’s Participation in the Non-Profit Social Services

Drawing on qualitative interview data from two case studies of non-profit social service agencies in Ontario, Canada, this article explores the impacts of austerity and precarity on worker's participation in the non-profit social service workplace. The article reveals that market-embracing austerity is driving the erosion of workplace participation, both in terms of the level of control workers exercise over their day-to-day task and representative security. In the latter case, this includes union and non-union forms of representation. Workers in each organization exhibited efforts to resist the continuing undermining of their terms and conditions, but an increasingly hostile and assertive management facing pressure to cut costs was less likely to accede to worker demands.