Precarity: A Genealogy of a

ConceptMaribel Casas-Cortes + Sebastian Cobarrubias

Post-Doctoral Fellows Geography Department, UNC-CH

Prewhat?

• Precarity > to pray, to plead

• Precarious literally means unsure, uncertain, difficult, delicate.

• Instead of the neutral sounding “flexible labor”,

• precarity has a critical connotation referring to living and working conditions without guarantees.

• It is a term of everyday usage in a number of European countries, where it refers to the widespread condition of temporary, flexible, contingent, casual, intermittent work, brought about by the neoliberal labor market reforms that have strengthened the right to manage and the bargaining power of employers since the late 1970s.

Precariedad Précarité Precarietá

Precarity is a general term to describe how large parts of the population are being subjected to flexible exploitation or flexploitation (low pay, high blackmailability, intermittent income, etc.), and existential precariousness (high risk of social exclusion because of low incomes, welfare cuts, high cost of living, etc.)

• The condition of precarity is said to affect all of service sector labor in

• a narrow sense, and the whole of society in a wider sense, but particularly youth,

• women, and immigrants

Precarity: analysis & politics

• Critical analysis of current trends in the new economy,

• Political rethinking of heterogenous class formations.

• Precarity is used both as an analytical tool and as a strategic point of departure to produce political subjectivities and re-invent different alliances and ways of struggle.

• “ Precarity is a political proposition more than a sociological category”

MayDay organizer

Conceptual developments

1.Worsening of Labor Conditions

2.Qualitative Transformations of Labor

3.Labor and Migration

4.Vulnerability in Everyday Life

Cartography of the conceptual development of precarity & European

precarity struggles

Loss of labor rightsQualitative transformations of laborLabor and MigrationVulnerability in Everyday life

Loss of labor rightsQualitative transformations of laborLabor and MigrationVulnerability in Everyday life

• The use of the term precarity emerged as response to the legalization of temporal, part-time and training contracts. The generalization of these atypical types of contracts were associated with an unstable labor

• relationship, normally a lower salary and lessened protections against firing.

• Precarity means increasing loss of labor rights historically won by historical workers’ movements in certain European countries. Including quantitative transformations in labor conditions and labor contracts such as:

• from full-time to part-time, from permanent job to temp job, from full labor protections to less acquisitive power, less security measures, easier layoffs or less unemployment benefits.

• This loss includes other welfare protections such as health insurance.

worksite based struggles against flexplotation:general strikes, anti-privatization, interns & unemployed

movements

• Defensive struggle to prevent the erosion of labor conditions and welfare rights

•New demands of free services

Loss of labor rights

Qualitative shifts of laborLabor and MigrationEveryday vulnerability

While the first bubble focuses on precarity as insecurity, as a quantitative deviation that workers should fight to correct back; this second round of responses looks at precarious labor as qualitatively different, with distinct characteristics, that will make it spread as a general tendency beyond workspaces. This conceptual wave advanced two new qualities of labor: 1) intermittency and 2) immateriality.

1. intermittency:Temporary work as permanent condition

2. immaterial labor: Growing use of communicative, affective and intellectual skills during production

Loss of labor rightsQualitative shifts of labor

Labor and MigrationVulnerability in Everyday Life

•Special vulnerability of undocumented workers

•The becoming migrant of labor: mobility as fundamental trait of all laborers

Loss of labor rightsQualitative shifts of laborLabor and Migration

Vulnerability in Everyday Life

•A general tendency that affects the overall everyday existence (questions of care, body, city, etc...)

Towards a Precarious Workers Day

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CHAPTER 6. PRECARITY: TOWARDS A GENEALOGY OF A CONCEPT

I. Precarity as Loss of Labor Rights

a. The arrival of garbage contractsb. Legalizing Temporary Job Agenciesc. The decline of traditional union organizingd. Efforts by current grassroots unionisme. Spanish Labor Reforms and the European Economic Policiesd. Flexibilization and the European Union

Extension #1: Welfare as social wageExtension #2: Utopias of no-work

Los Lunes al SolRe-appropriation of services and goods

II. Precarity as qualitative transformation of labor

a. From mall consumer to chain workerb. From McDonalds’ Strikes to MayDay Paradesc. From San Precario to Bio-sindicalism d. Intermittent work as current labor paradigme. Precarity as Immaterial Labor f. Struggles of the Cognitariat

Extension #1: Free Culture & Copy Left

Copy Left Licenses Copy Left and Immaterial LaborFighting for the New CommonsActors in DisputeTowards a Hacking PragmaticsThe Politization of SharingFree Culture logic in Global Justice Movements

Extension #2: Updating Demands

FlexicurityCommonfareBasic Income

III. The Intermingling of Precarity & Migration

Intro: Call for Madrid MayDay 2008 by PDMigrant and Autochthonous workers unite!The Becoming-Migrant of LaborSpeaking from the Border: the Biopolitics of PrecarityMilitant Cartographies of the Border

Extension #1: Freedom of Movement

IV. Precarity as Uncertain Lives

Spaces of ReproductionFeminization of LaborPrecarization of Life Precarity & CarePrecarity and Body Precarity and the City: Metropolitan Cartographies

Extension #1: Reorganization of Care Work

V. Archipelago of Cross-Crossing Bubbles: New Social Rights Intro: Precarity as a Platform of new social demands

A Conference on, by and for Precari@s?The Archipelago of Criss-Crossing KnittersSocial Rights Offices and Agencies for Precarious

AffairsTowards Social Movements’ Institutions [Parenthesis for Theoretical/Methodological

Speculations]

Bubbling as MethodSocial Movements as Meaning MakersPossible shortcomings of the conceptPrecarity travels to the USA

Precarity in Asia?

•MTextText

Call for Mayday 2008 in Tokyo