Precarity in the Global North Flashcards
Critical geography of precarity
Waite (2009)
The new precariat
Standing (2014)
Critiques of Standing (2014)
Munck (2013); Breman (2013)
Overview of prevarious work:
* Employment that is uncertain, unpredictable and risky from the worker’s perspective
* Neoliberal globalisation has intensified economic competition
* Political changes
* Consequences: greater economic inequality, insecurity and instability
Argues that this is now the dominant feature of the social relations between employers/workers.
Kalleberg (2009)
Another overview of precarity.
Defined as both contingent structures of employment and perceptions of insecurity
Alberti et al (2018)
Psychological perspective of precarity
Allan et al (2021)
Health perspective of precarity
Jaydarifard et al (2023)
Employment Precarity Index - to encompass broad changes across all forms of employment.
Also a critique of official labour market data measures.
Lewchuk (2017)
Affective nature of precarity in Japanese films. Feminist perspective
Vij (2013)
Case study: university students and precarity
Comparative study of England, Italy and Sweden. Finds that welfare mix, family resources and state support determine experiences of precarity.
Antonucci (2018)
Case study: Australia’s automotive manufacturing industry.
Factors such as household security, asset wealth, job tenure and age determined trajectories of precarity
Precarity is relational and temporal
Barnes & Weller (2020)
Case study: feeling precarious in Australian millenial women.
Feelings of precarity invade and impact experiences of employment even if work is secure.
Worth (2016)
No universally accepted definition or measurement of precarious employment can be achieved.
Livanos & Papadopoulos (2019)
Case study: migration and the fashioning of precarious workers.
Precarity is institutionally produced - since immigrants are subjected to a higher degree of regulation e.g. dependence on employers for legal status - this actively produces precarity
But the availability of workers with these characteristics constructs markets that are dependent on them
Anderson (2010)
Precarity as political concept and Fordism as exception.
Nielson & Rossiter, 2008
Government of the precarious. Precarisation as a process under neoliberalism, the instrumentalisation of insecurity to render a population governable.
Roots traced back to C19 liberal notions of individual responsibility and the idealisation of the married, white male bourgeois subject
Unequal access to security is a biopolitical feature of governance that serves as the basis of social relations
Undermining community fosters governability of the populace
Lorey (2015)
The scale and nature of precarious work in the UK:
* More likely to be women
* Only 25% are at unionised workplaces
* Between 2009-2018, approximately 5% of the UK population were precarious workers
NB precarity is defined as having low income and being in non-traditional work/low-income and EMG/in non-traditional work and EMG
Posch et al (2020)
Case study
- Investigates lengthy university placement amongst Australian students
- Young Australians reliant on family resources due to a lack of state welfare
- Many take up paid-time jobs on the side
- Impact of mandatory unpaid placements on students: displaced paid work entirely, working less, working at more inconvenient times, or accepting increasingly precarious work
Precarious work is shaped by the intersection between employment status, forms of employment, labour market insecurity, and worker’s social context/location
Oke et al (2013)
What is driving the rise of in-work poverty?
Identifies systemic issues
Innes (2020)
The neoliberal government of social security
* Centaur state
* Double regulation of the poor
* Critique: perspective is too top-down. Governmentality perspective helps us see how these processes operate in practice
Wacquant (2009)
Historical analysis of workfare in the UK
Parallels with inter-war period and British labour camps.
An estimated 33,000 men in labour camps in 1934 - also a response to concerns about the dangerous working class.
Equally as ineffective - serve to punish behaviour
Fletcher (2014)
The violence of workfare
Stories from ‘Boycott Workfare’
Benefit claimants are structurally disempowered and vulnerable so can be exploited by employers for free labour
Burnett & Whyte (2017)
Criminalising benefit claimants in Britain.
Applying Wacquant (2009) to the UK context and recent welfare reforms.
* Series of reforms has criminalised benefit receipt
* British state operates to punish the poor but in a more centralised and class-focused manner
* Surveillance: Universal Jobmatch vacancy system
* Sanction: punitive language + increasing fines
* Deterrence: punishing with poverty as UC is below destitution rate
Fletcher & Wright (2018)
The moral economy of welfare recipients post 2012.
Demonstrates self-governance of individuals who are subject to narratives of sanction and criminality.
* Participants felt they had paid into national purse in moral and material ways = they have a right to social inclusion and adequate welfare
* Disproportionate impact on female respondents who appealed to recognition of informal and unpaid care work
* Feeling grateful but stigmatised
* Participants also drawing lines and boundaries about who was deserving/non-deserving - reproducing state boundaries
Welfare reforms doing important symbolic work.
Thiel (2022)
UC’s implications for citizenship.
* Shift towards instrumental behaviourism
* Major extension and intensification of conditionality to include in-work people, which is now a founding principle of state support
Dwyer & Wright (2014)
Think about how this links to migrants and citizenship - No Recourse to Public Funds
Paper links, for the first time, welfare conditionality to job quality in context of worsening employment conditions in the UK.
* Limited income
* Limited progression
* Undermined power
* ‘Work-life-welfare’ balance - added time to search for jobs in order to qualify for welfare
* One-sided flexibility and one-sided conditionality
* Fails to address and exacerbates entrenched labour market inequalities
Jones et al (2024)
Case study
‘Cruel optimism’ of waiting amongst young people in Turkey
* Precarity is not only a socioeconomic situation but also a collective shared affective condition/felt experience
* Specifically a neoliberal present (Berlant, 2011) of insecurity in which young people wait and keep hoping
* Taking individual actions such further education, perceived as a route out of disadvantage. Neoliberal mindset - precarity internalised as individual rather than structural issue
* Waiting as agentic: imagination of mobility is a way of expressing some control over the future
Goksen et al (2023)
Links to Worth (2016) on Australian millennial women
And any work on precarity as felt
