Not all experiences of precarious work lead to precarity: the case study of young people at university and their welfare mixes

The concept of precarity has gained momentum and challenges social scientists to consider the effects of labour-market insecurity across classes and welfare arrangements. This article discusses the varieties of experiences of precarious work by young people in university and identifies in which cases they are also experiences precarity. It is one of the first studies of its kind to investigate the material triggers of inequality by comparing young people’s experiences across countries (England, Italy and Sweden) and by looking at the welfare mixes available to young people who are working at university. Through a comparative qualitative research involving young people from different socio-economic backgrounds and ‘welfare mixes’, the article shows that experiences of precarity concern a minority of young people who have an absolute necessity to rely on labour-market sources, due to the lack or insufficiency of state support and family sources. It also identifies: a group of young people who feel pressure to get precarious jobs to fill a decline in family resources; and a convenient use of precarious jobs suiting the circumstances of young people with abundant family resources. Overall, the research found that precarity is deeply connected to young people’s welfare mixes.     

Precarious work: A global perspective

Precarious work is universal, though its forms and consequences vary across countries due to institutional, cultural, and historical differences. This article reviews recent research on precarious work from a global perspective, emphasizing the comparative and interdisciplinary research needed for a comprehensive understanding of the structural transformations in contemporary capitalism that promote precarious work. The article has three foci. First, research that details the diverse forms of precarious work, which have become increasingly heterogeneous as national labor markets have been interwoven with global production networks. Second, research on precarious work that emphasizes its disparate impacts for women, youth, the elderly, racial and ethnic minority groups, and migrants, revealing an articulation of precarity and social cleavages. Third, research on the politics associated with precarious work and how some precarious workers have successfully organized and mobilized their interests, such as by unionizing and becoming involved in electoral politics. Still, questions remain regarding precarious work: how precarious workers differ from regular workers in representing their interests and demands and whether precarious workers are a new, independent social class or remain part of a changing working class. Finally, topics for future research on the global dimensions of precarious work are discussed.     

The specter of failure: rendering Afghan women as sites of precarity in empowerment regimes

This article analyzes how the category of “Afghan women” and discourses of precarity intersect within the women’s empowerment regime in Afghanistan. By examining an NGO that seeks to empower women through writing, I argue that staff members draw upon precarity as a go-to logic to describe the state of Afghan women writers’ successes under conditions of insecurity and limited communication. Specifically, it is writers’ desires to subvert their social orders and to carve out their own futures that staff members and writing coordinators frame as subject to potential destruction. While recent work has highlighted the importance of recognizing the precarious lifeworlds of vulnerable populations, this article points to the potential implications of a hyper-recognition of precarity – namely, the obscuring of the complexities of individual women’s past and present realities. Through analyzing the pedagogies of one empowerment NGO working with women in a post-9/11 Afghanistan, I show how the logic of precarity is concerned with the vulnerability of women’s desires and sentiments, rather than their material and political vulnerabilities. It is thus deeply inflected by a historically situated “common sense” about which potentialities and aspirations are inherent to Afghan women.     

Precarious leisure: (re)imagining youth,transitions and temporality

ABSTRACT

The precarity of young people’s transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in youth studies. As Furlong and others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the ‘contamination’ of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of ‘leisure precarity’. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people’s experiences and understandings of leisure such that young people have come to fear ‘empty’ or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that most participants in our research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented between past, present and future. The paper argues that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing youth transitions into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century.     

Precarity,gender and care in the neoliberal academy

This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD (Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development), government initiatives and post‐crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only of the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalized academic market, premised on the care‐free masculinized ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour‐led contractual precarity and are over‐represented in part‐time and fixed‐term positions. Women who comply with these organizational commands need to peripheralize their relational lives and experience care‐led affective precarity.     

Social workers: a new precariat? Precarity conditions of mental health social workers working in the non-profit sector in Greece

ABSTRACT

Traditionally, in western countries, the social work profession primarily has come into contact with issues of precarity through the lives of service users. This paper introduces precarity in the social work scholarly literature as a feature of social workers’ professional and personal lives. It draws from the findings of a qualitative small study of mental health social workers working in the non-profit sector in Greece. The findings reflect a picture of social workers experiencing precarious conditions as they have become part of the growing phenomenon of the working poor, surviving by loans, experiencing housing insecurity, reproductive insecurity, fuel poverty and unable to pay for their commuting expenses to and from work. Furthermore, the paper maintains that the expansion of the conditions of precarity to university-educated professionals, such as social workers, needs to be understood within an International Political Economy (IPE) perspective in order neoliberal capitalism which brings rising levels of inequalities to become a focus of intervention.     

Global development and precarity: a critical political analysis

ABSTRACT

Precarity as a concept has come to be conceived as a distinctive experience of neoliberal development, especially in the European context. The experience of precarity, according to some, has influenced efforts aimed at living otherwise from the precepts of neoliberal development. Yet, for others, precarity is producing a ‘new dangerous class’. However, despite different perspectives of the effects and implications of precarity, the analytical purchase and political utility of the concept has received insufficient attention. In this article, we hope to contribute to critical debates on the limitations of ‘precarity’ as a concept for critical political analysis. We argue that in the dominant use of precarity as an analytic of inequality, particular experiences are rendered as historical universals. Consequently, these (particular) experiences are disconnected from global social and political relations of inequality, while at the same time reinforcing a linear and reductionist conception of development. We demonstrate that the temporal scheme represented by the notion of the ‘age of post-Fordism’, which serves as a crucial marker of the explanatory framework of precarity (in Europe), actually misconstrues the politics of global development through inequalities. Moreover, the tendency to focus on subjectification as conditioning the formation of a ‘new’ dangerous class, entails far-reaching omissions of actual transnational political struggles against domination and inequality. Instead of precarity, a critical engagement with the politics of global development ought to be the subject of analysis for understanding contested relations of affluence, insecurity and inequality.     

The global subject of precarity

ABSTRACT

This article explores the universalizing logic of precarity and precariousness in global studies discourse. Originally articulated in the work of Guy Standing and Judith Butler, this logic presupposes a possibility for a global politics of equality between precarious subjects in the North and South based on an emergent shared horizon of suffering. In a close reading of Standing and Butler, I challenge claims about equivalence by calling attention to the liberal analytics that inform their work. Drawing on a postcolonial attunement to historically constituted exclusions, I argue that precarity is better understood as a dis-ordering experience of sovereign subjectivity whose principal referent is the liberal not global subject of precarity. Globalizing the liberal subject of precarity entails the recuperation of its constitutive outside, namely the Third World, as the original site of abjection. The de-politicizing implications of attempts to universalize the subject of precarity are briefly outlined in conclusion.     

‘Escaping’ managed labour migration: worker exit as precarious migrant agency

ABSTRACT

This article narrows in on the mundane yet extraordinary events surrounding migrant farm workers’ decisions to leave their state-approved employment and to seek a better life in Canada outside of state-managed circulatory labour migration. In so doing, this research contributes to conceptualisations of precarity, and of precarious status in particular, that are beginning to recognise its effects not only on workers’ economic survival, but also the more ordinary daily conditions surrounding workers’ sense belonging and personal autonomy. In their refusal to accept the terms of their contractual circulatory labour migration agreements through what is conceptualised here as an act of ‘escape’, workers claim a space of belonging that contradicts the precarity of their formal citizenship status. In carving out a space in which they may perform autonomy and self-determination in daily life, however, this rejection of contingent citizenship status intensifies the precarious material conditions governing workers’ relationship to the state.     

Precarious work among young Danish employees - a permanent or transitory condition?

There is broad agreement that precarious work is a growing problem, and that it is highly prevalent among young employees. The financial crisis in 2008 has reinforced the need for knowledge about how precarious work affects young employees. This paper explores how the concept of precarious work may apply differentially to different groups of young people at work and whether this challenges the term ‘transition’, which until now has been one of the core elements within contemporary youth research. We examine discursive representations of precarious work, vulnerability and risks among young Danish employees aged 18–24 in the healthcare sector, the metal industry and retail trade captured in 46 interviews involving 74 participants. Results are discussed taking into consideration the Nordic welfare model with an active labour marked policy. We conclude that precarious work is not, in fact, simply a characteristic of young employees’ work as such, but rather it is related to their position in the labour market and the type of jobs in which they are employed. While some are in transition, others are at risk of being trapped in precarious and risky working conditions.     

Precarious in Piraeus: on the making of labour insecurity in a port concession

ABSTRACT

Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by COSCO’s subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminals (PCT). By contrasting the threatened unionized labour regime at OLP with the highly precarious labour conditions at PCT, the paper asks how the operative dimensions of capital condition precarity’s intensification and spread. In this light, precarity emerges not simply as a form of labour insecurity or an unevenly shared condition of human vulnerability but as a relational nexus that links questions of political economy to matters of subjectivity, space, power, and governance.     

Migration,Precarization and the Democratic Deficit in Global Governance

This article attempts to provide a critical understanding of the dual signification of “precarity”. It explores what “precarity” as a concept may potentially offer to studies of the changing contemporary political economy of migration. It discusses shifting trends in global migration and point to tendencies for a possible convergence between “South” and “North”, “East” and “West”. Based on a review of current advances in research, it discusses, with reference to the classical work of Karl Polanyi, the potential for a contemporary “countermovement” which would challenge the precarity of migrants. Bringing forward the issue of the “space for civil society” the article addresses a still lingering democratic deficit in the global governance of migration.

Policy Implications

The article is relevant to policymakers, trade unions and civil society organizations. It contributes to the understanding of policy making processes in emerging multilevel global governance and focuses on issues of precarization, migration, and the implementation and accountability of human, migrant and labour rights.     

China’s precariats

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a stylized account of the trajectory of precarious labour in China over the past seven decades and identifies the various contested terrains constitutive of its politics. I define ‘precarity’ not as a thing-like phenomenon with fixed attributes but as relational struggles over the recognition, regulation, and reproduction of labour. For each of the three periods of contemporary Chinese development, i.e. the Mao era of state socialism (1949–1979), the high-growth market reform era (1980–2010), and the current era of slow growth and overcapacity (since around 2010), I analyse the political economic drivers of precarity – from state domination to class exploitation and then to exclusion, indebtedness and dispossession – and workers’ changing capacity and interest to contest it.     

Autonomous Youth? Independence and Precariousness in the Indonesian Underground Music Scene

Indonesia boasts a thriving underground music scene that has become an important element in the identity practices of many urban youth. For dedicated ‘scenesters’, the underground is more than a personal expression of style; it is a way of life, and often a way to make a living. I draw on the concept of ‘precarity’ to examine the underground value of independence (kemandirian) in the context of the precarious position of urban youth in neoliberal Indonesia. The identities and practices of the underground scene are both a reaction against and a reflection of this experience. Scenesters draw on their underground identities, and the autonomous community networks they have established, in order to assert their independence from the demands of capital. However, they also mobilise this independence as the basis for their own entrepreneurial activities, resulting in a nascent tendency towards capital accumulation and class polarisation within the scene.     

Precarious beauty: migrant Chinese women,beauty work,and precarity

This study focuses on precarious labor, in particular, the experiences of a group of internal migrant women working in a beauty shop in South China. The study aim is to elucidate the ways in which migrant Chinese women negotiate the demands of work and life that help to shape the imaginations and aspirations of modern city dwellers. Women factory workers, it is argued, leave other employment for work in the aspiring Chinese beauty industry, which promises significant facets of modern identity such as urban status, cosmopolitanism, and upward mobility. Their work, nevertheless, remains fundamentally precarious because of not only low wages and limited job security but also the construction and circulation of femininity and assumptions about gender normality in both work and family. The precarious work also indexes the ambivalent relationship between the national affect of hope and the fragility of individual potentiality under neoliberal ethos.     

Subalterns ‘speak’: migrant bodies,and the performativity of the arts

ABSTRACT

The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their precarious lives look from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The following investigation treats the way their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as it is articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembene’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern speak and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyse raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.     

Rising powers,people rising: neo-liberalization and its discontents in the BRICS countries

ABSTRACT

The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These socio-economic fault lines have, in turn, given rise to political convulsions across the BRICS countries, ranging from single-issue protests to sustained social movements oriented towards structural transformation. This article presents an innovative theoretical framework for theorizing the emerging political economy of development in the BRICS countries centred on neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggles. It discusses the contributions to this special issue in terms of how they illuminate the intersection between neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggle in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.     

Refugee life,refugee space: Ankara as a bottom-up alternative

During research conducted in the summer of 2020, I observed the advanced marginality of the refugees in Ankara, Turkey. While some authors have examined this precarity, and some others have examined how refugees have begun to live in a spatially distinct section of certain cities, the combination of these two phenomena demands further investigation. If the underpinning truly is spatial as claimed by Lefebvre (The production of space. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), then the precarious subject and the precarious space co-produce each other. What this paper intends to do is to combine space and precarity using the observations of Wacquant (Urban poverty and the underclass: a reader. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996, Urban Studies, 2016, 53, 1077) in his various analyses on the ghetto in France and the United States. In Wacquant's work, we can begin to see a spatial conception of precarity, and we can further extend this to the point that as space is a production and its subjects are also a co-constitution of that space. Nevertheless, Sampson (Ethnic & Racial Studies, 2014, 37, 1732) points out a certain state centrism in Wacquant's analysis. Building upon this, as well as the work of Roy (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011, 35, 223 and Territories of poverty: rethinking north and south. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), we can offer the refugee neighbourhood in Ankara as an example of “bottom-up” agency, alternative to Wacquant's original state-centric analysis. In the course of this paper, this possibility of a “bottom-up” refugee solidarity and related refugee space will be analysed.     

Labor after Neoliberalism: The Birth of the Insecure Class in South Korea

Abstract

This article examines the rise and fall of organized labor in post-democratization, neoliberal Korea and traces the process through which a new labor underclass has been created since the late 1990s. Under the sweeping implementation of neoliberal policies, Korean labor has become increasingly fragmented, stratified, and marginalized both in the market and political arena. In this polarizing process, an ‘insecure class’ was born, consisting of irregular workers and the low-income self-employed. These working people are characterized by precarious labor conditions, bare social protection coverage, and frail organizational–political representation. This study explicates such a drastic restructuration of the Korean working people from the interaction of chaebol-centered economic structure, labor unions' organizational narrowness, and unrepresentative political parties devoid of programmatic competition. The examination of the insecure class in Korea casts light on the significance of class issues in neoliberal political economy and the analytical importance of rethinking social class in contemporary capitalist societies.     

Precarious lives and resistant possibilities: the labour of people with learning disabilities in times of austerity

This paper draws on feminist and queer philosophers? discussions of precarity and employment, too often absent from disability studies, to explore the working lives of people with learning disabilities in England in a time of austerity. Recent policy shifts from welfare to work welcome more disabled people into the job market. The reality is that disabled people remain under-represented in labour statistics and are conspicuously absent in cultures of work. We live in neoliberal-able times where we all find ourselves precarious. But, people with learning disabilities experience high levels of uncertainty in every aspect of their lives, including work, relationships and community living. Our research reveals an important analytical finding: that when people with learning disabilities are supported in imaginative and novel ways they are able to work effectively and cohesively participate in their local communities (even in a time of cuts to welfare). We conclude by acknowledging that we are witnessing a global politics of precarity and austerity. Our urgent task is to redress the unequal spread of precaritization across our society that risks leaving people with learning disabilities experiencing disproportionately perilous lives. One of our key recommendations is that it makes no economic sense (never mind moral sense) to pull funding from organisations that support people with intellectual disabilities to work.