Precarity in the Global North

Question 1

Critical geography of precarity

Answer 1

Waite (2009)

Question 2

The new precariat

Answer 2

Standing (2014)

Question 3

Critiques of Standing (2014)

Answer 3

Munck (2013); Breman (2013)

Question 4

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.

Answer 4

Kalleberg (2009)

Question 5

Another overview of precarity.
Defined as both contingent structures of employment and perceptions of insecurity

Answer 5

Alberti et al (2018)

Question 6

Psychological perspective of precarity

Answer 6

Allan et al (2021)

Question 7

Health perspective of precarity

Answer 7

Jaydarifard et al (2023)

Question 8

Employment Precarity Index - to encompass broad changes across all forms of employment.
Also a critique of official labour market data measures.

Answer 8

Lewchuk (2017)

Question 9

Affective nature of precarity in Japanese films. Feminist perspective

Answer 9

Vij (2013)

Question 10

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.

Answer 10

Antonucci (2018)

Question 11

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

Answer 11

Barnes & Weller (2020)

Question 12

Case study: feeling precarious in Australian millenial women.
Feelings of precarity invade and impact experiences of employment even if work is secure.

Answer 12

Worth (2016)

Question 13

No universally accepted definition or measurement of precarious employment can be achieved.

Answer 13

Livanos & Papadopoulos (2019)

Question 14

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

Answer 14

Anderson (2010)

Question 15

Precarity as political concept and Fordism as exception.

Answer 15

Nielson & Rossiter, 2008

Question 16

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

Answer 16

Lorey (2015)

Question 17

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

Answer 17

Posch et al (2020)

Question 18

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

Answer 18

Oke et al (2013)

Question 19

What is driving the rise of in-work poverty?
Identifies systemic issues

Answer 19

Innes (2020)

Question 20

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

Answer 20

Wacquant (2009)

Question 21

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

Answer 21

Fletcher (2014)

Question 22

The violence of workfare
Stories from ‘Boycott Workfare’
Benefit claimants are structurally disempowered and vulnerable so can be exploited by employers for free labour

Answer 22

Burnett & Whyte (2017)

Question 23

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

Answer 23

Fletcher & Wright (2018)

Question 24

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.

Answer 24

Thiel (2022)

Question 25

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

Answer 25

Dwyer & Wright (2014)

Think about how this links to migrants and citizenship - No Recourse to Public Funds

Question 26

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

Answer 26

Jones et al (2024)

Question 27

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

Answer 27

Goksen et al (2023)

Links to Worth (2016) on Australian millennial women
And any work on precarity as felt