Precarity

Precarity has been adopted in leftist circles as the English-language equivalent of Precariedad, Précarité, Precarietà, terms of everyday usage in Latin countries that refer to the widespread condition of temporary, flexible, contingent, casual, intermittent work in postindustrial societies, brought about by the neoliberal labor market reforms that have strengthened the right to manage and the bargaining power of big and small employers since the 1980s.

Precarity is a general term to describe the fact that large parts of the population are being subject to flexible exploitation or flexploitation (low and insecure pay, high blackmailability, intermittent income etc), and existential precariousness (high risk of social exclusion because of low wages, welfare cuts, high cost of living etc). This condition of precarity is said to affect all of service labor in a narrow sense, and the whole of society in a wider sense, but particulary youth, women, immigrants.

While contingent labor has been a constant of capitalist societies since the industrial revolution, it is argued that the flexible labor force has now moved from the peripheral position it had under Fordism to a core position in the process of capitalist accumulation under Post-Fordism, which is thought to be increasingly based on the casualized efforts of affective, creative, immaterial labor. There is scattered empirical evidence in support of this thesis, such as the growing share of non-standard employment on the overall labor force, particularly on new hires (for example, in Western Europe, between a quarter and a third of the labor force now works under temporary and/or part-time contracts, with peaks in UK, Holland, Spain and Italy).

More problematic is the fact that precarity seems to conflate two categories of workers that are at opposite ends of labor market segmentation in postindustrial economies: pink collars working in retail and low-end services (cleaners, janitors, nurses etc.) under constrictive but standardized employment norms designed to leave them isolated vis-a-vis management power; and young talent temping for cheap in the information economy of big cities around the world: the creative class of strongly individualistic workers illlustrated by managerial literature.

It also remains to be seeen whether the insider/outsider division that economists observe in European labor markets means that the young, precarious, non-voting, and non-owning outsiders have fundamentally conflicting aims with respect to older insiders who tend to work full-time, long-term contracts and/or enjoy relatively high pension benefits and who command a disproportionate weight in European public opinion and political debate.