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- ''For information about Casual work, see Contingent work.
Precarity is an ideological term which has been promoted particularly in western Europe at the beginning of the twenty first century to place Casual work in a new setting. Through the pretense that intermittent working conditions are novel, a discourse has been created which ignores previous workers experience and resistance to working conditions which ignore their general needs (e.g. see Great Dock Strike).
Catholic Origins
The term 'precarity' was used long before the more recent trend:- "Last May I wrote an article on Poverty and Precarity, using the latter word of Brother Crenier who spoke of the need of religious orders to embrace precarity." - see Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker, 1952
- "True poverty is rare," a saintly priest writes to us from Martinique. "Nowadays communities are good, I am sure, but they are mistaken about poverty. They accept, admit on principle, poverty, but everything must be good and strong, buildings must be fireproof, Precarity is rejected everywhere, and precarity is an essential element of poverty. That has been forgotten. Here we want precarity in everything except the church. These last days our refectory was near collapsing.
- We have put several supplemental poles and thus it will last, maybe two or three years more. Some day it will fall on our heads and that will be funny. Precarity enables us to help very much the poor. When a community is always building, and enlarging, and embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for the poor. We have no right to do this as long as there are slums and breadlines somewhere."
More recently the term emerged in France in the year 2000 as précarité (of the same family as the English word "precarious") to refer to the linking of a condition of work to a social condition, for the protest rallies that were officially titled the 'Marches Against Unemployment, Job Insecurity, and Social Exclusion'. At that time and subsequently, debates have been held around the themes of inclusion / refusal of work / Social Europe / migration / and the equation of different kinds of work within discussions on precarity.
According to some perspectives, precarity is a condition of late-capitalism, as nations shift from manufactory to service and information based economies. Thus, Saskia Sassen has argued in Global City that if the new service economy favorized high-level financial services concentrated in a few urban areas (sometimes called "world geographic oligopolies" or "global cities"), which gives work to DINK (Double Income No Kids), the needs of this new economy and of the leisure of the DINK means that it also creates a whole lot of contingent jobs (illegal aliens working in restauration, in fashion tailoring illegal workshops, sweatshops, etc). Thus, she argued that the new economy, much more dependent on financial fluctuations and thus on Wall Street's chronic unstability, created more inequality, by giving jobs to highly-educated young people (DINKs), while the pressure of the financial markets on several economic sectors pushed them to resort to illegal aliens and such.
For others, precarity has been a feature of most forms of work in capitalism for most of the world's population. It is only by comparison with the exceptional period of Fordism and the welfare state, and from the perspective of particular kinds of (paid) work in some countries, that precarity appears to be a new phenomenon.
Precarity.org: "The opposite of precarity, as it is presented to us, is regular wages and stable housing. But this supposed 'opposite' to precarity is often just another version of it. The privileges of enjoying this material security is at the cost of everything else - your time, life, energy, integrity, creativity and autonomy."
According to another perspective, "The idea of transversal social unity in shared precariousness is closely linked to the insight that 'all life is work', in the sense that value is transformed from labour into capital right across the social field, not just in jobs. But 'all life is work' doesn't mean all work is the same. Far more value can be squeezed out of some kinds of labour than from others: hence the war on 'economic inactivity' waged by governments and employers, a desperate mobilisation to get as many people working (in the traditional sense) as many hours as possible. Pious identification between violently stratified social subjects does nothing whatsoever to undermine this war effort." Mute - Precarious edition
More recently, discussions have focussed on the project of a 'Social Europe' and migration, prompting a closer examination of strategies and concepts in the lead-up to EuroMayday 2005 and the April 2nd Mobilisation for Freedom of Movement.
A slow and loose research project called 'Precari-Punx' is hosted by 'How We Live' based in the 56a Infoshop Social Centre in London, UK. (See http://www.56a.org.uk/precari.html)
See also
- Defunct First Employment Contract (CPE)
- New Employment Contract (CNE)
External links
- http://www.precarity.info/
- http://www.chainworkers.org/
- http://www.euromarches.org/
- http://www.metamute.com/
- http://noborder.org/
- http://www.euromayday.org/
- http://www.eurotopiamag.org/
"Precarity"