lvosko


Leah F. Vosko

Photo of Leah F.  Vosko

Department of Politics

Professor
Distinguished Research Professor of Political Economy

Office: Kaneff Tower, 618
Phone: 416-736-2100 Ext: 33157
Email: lvosko@yorku.ca

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Leah F. Vosko, FRSC, is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics at York University. Her current research examines labour market insecurity/precarious employment, employment standards enforcement, international mobility programs, and deportability among workers labouring transnationally. She is the principal investigator of “Liberating Migrant Labour? International Mobility Programs in Settler-Colonial Context", a SSHRC Partnership Grant; "Canada's "New" International Mobility Program: Charting Differential Inclusion in the Transformation of Temporary Migrant Labour", a SSHRC Insight Grant; and, the Canada Labour Code-Data Analysis Infrastructure (CLC-DAI), an initiative involving a partnership with the Government of Canada’s Labour Program supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund; and four research and teaching databases – the Gender and Work Database (GWD), the Comparative Perspectives Database (CPD), the Employment Standards Database (ESD) and the CLC-DAI.
Her most recent authored books include Migrant Work By Another Name: Differential Inclusion and Precarity under Canada’s International Mobility Program (University of Toronto Press, 2025), Transnational Employment Strain in a Global Health Pandemic: Migrant Farmworkers in Canada (Vosko et al., Palgrave, 2023), Closing the Enforcement Gap: Improving Employment Standards Protections for People in Precarious Jobs (Vosko and the Closing the Enforcement Gap Research Group, University of Toronto Press, 2020), and Disrupting Deportability: Transnational Workers Organize (Cornell/ILR Press, 2019).

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Degrees

PhD, York University
MA Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University
BA Political Studies, Trent University

Appointments

Faculty of Health

Professional Leadership

2023-Present. Advisor, Creating Sustainable Work: Tackling Precarious Employment for a Better Future, Stockholm, Sweden

2021-Present. Academic Advisor, Labour Market Non-Compliance in the UK, Director of Labour Market Enforcement & Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK

2020 – Present. Member, Expert Working Group on Migrant Worker Health Project

2019 – Present. Member, Expert Working Group on Temporary Labour Migration, International Labour Organization

Community Contributions

Gender and Work Database (GWD) (www.genderwork.ca/gwd)
The Gender and Work Database (GWD) is an interdisciplinary research tool, whose development I have overseen since 2001 with the support of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund. The product of a collaboration involving over fifty scholars, policy researchers, statisticians, and university librarians, it contains seven interactive research modules, each representing different slices or points of entry into the field of gender and work. Module topics include: health care; migration; precarious employment; technology; unions; and unpaid work. The GWD has three core components: interactive, multidimensional statistical tables created using custom runs from Canadian surveys, conceptualized by researchers; a searchable library containing papers, citations to papers, and links to relevant theoretical and empirical works; and, a thesaurus of concepts and terms designed to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. The GWD became fully operational in 2006 and revised and updated (to include data up to) in 2015. It is available to researchers and students tied to the seventy-two institutions involved in the Data Liberation Initiative between Statistics Canada and Canadian colleges and universities, public policy analysts pursuing research for non-commercial purposes in Canada and internationally, and researchers outside Canada participating in the project.

Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD) (www.genderwork.ca/cpd)
The Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD) was developed under my oversight since 2006 with the support of the Leadership Opportunities fund of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund. Launched in Spring 2015, the CPD brings together a library of secondary and primary resources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – all geared to understanding precarious employment in comparative industrial context. Drawing on thirty years of data from the EUROSTAT, the Household Income Dynamics in Australia Survey, various open-source US surveys and several Statistics Canada surveys, it includes customized original multidimensional tables that researchers may use to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in thirty-three countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, twenty-seven European Union (EU) member countries and three non-EU member countries. The CPD is designed both for researchers, inside and outside the academy (e.g., in the NGO and government sectors), as well as students. In addition to facilitating research, it can also be used as an interactive classroom teaching tool. Functioning much like an online book, the CPD’s introduction provides basic information on the conceptual approach to studying precarious employment in a comparative perspective adopted in the database, an explanation of its methodology, and an outline of the design principles behind the creation of harmonized variables used in statistical tables. These principles are further developed in three interactive research modules on forms of precarious employment, temporal and spatial dynamics, and health and social care.

Employment Standards Database (ESD) (https://www.genderwork.ca/esd/) (launched May 2025)
The Employment Standards Database (ESD) is an online tool, funded by the Leadership Opportunities Fund of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund, that brings together a library of resources on employment standards, unique user-friendly statistical tables, a reference guide for national definitions of employment standards, and a thesaurus of concepts. Though it was developed using the platform of the GWD and the CPD, the ESD is methodologically distinct from its precursors in that it draws together principally small-scale surveys developed by researchers rather than national and supranational social statistics agencies. It is also distinct as it includes data derived from a unique survey of access to employment standards and their enforcement in Ontario. Users of the ESD are able to view and analyze its multidimensional tables to explore and compare employment standards in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Like its precursors, the ESD’s target audiences are both senior researchers and junior scholars. The database includes interactive research modules on wages & wage compensation, hours, complaints & enforcement, termination & severance, and non-wage benefits & compensation.

Canada Labour Code-Data Analysis Infrastructure (CLC-DAI)
The Canada Labour Code-Data Analysis Infrastructure (CLC-DAI) is an initiative under my direction of academics in partnership with the Government of Canada's Labour Program. Funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund, this infrastructure enabled researchers to transform a large-scale administrative database that the Labour Program maintains into a research database tool yielding new insights into labour standards compliance across Canada. Charged with enforcement of the Canada Labour Code (CLC), the Labour Program collects administrative data on its enforcement activities in a database known as the Labour Application 2000 (LA2K). The LA2K contains a near-complete census of complaints submitted under Part III of the CLC, which sets standards in areas such as minimum wages, hours of work and vacations for employees in the federal jurisdiction. The CLC-DAI provides the technical interface necessary to allow researchers to analyze administrative data to identify common patterns of labour standards (non)compliance, establish models to predict the most likely offenders and violation types, and to evaluate the impact of regulatory efforts.

Research Interests

Gender Issues , Labour, Migration, Political Economy, Citizenship , Indigenous Studies