- Precarity
:"For a sociological view of labor conditions, see
Precarious work Definition
Precarity is a condition of
existence withoutpredictability orsecurity , affecting material or psychological welfare. The term has been specifically applied to either intermittent work or, more generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious existence.Precarity in Europe
It is a term of everyday usage as "Precariedad", "Précarité", or "Precarietà" in a number of European countries, where it refers 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 employers since the late 1970s.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 saidcitation 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.While
contingent labor has been a constant of capitalist societies since the industrial revolution,Michael Hardt andAntonio Negri have argued [Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire", New York: Penguin Press, 2004.] that the flexible labor force has now moved from the peripheral position it had underFordism to a core position in the process of capitalist accumulation underPost-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 aquarter 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 marketsegmentation in postindustrial economies: pink collars working in retail and low-end services (cleaners, janitors, etc.) underconstrictive but standardized employment norms; and young talent temping for cheap in the information economy of big cities around the world: the
creative class of strongly individualistic workers illustrated by managerial literature.It also remains to be seen 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, enjoy relatively high pension benefits and who command a disproportionate weight in European public opinion and political debate.
Precarity and the Antiglobalization Movement
Around year 2000, the word started being used in its English usage by some
antiglobalization activists ("Marches Européennes contre le chômage la précarité et les exclusions" - European Marches against unemployment, precarity and social exclusion), and also inEU official reports onsocial welfare . But it was in the strikes of young part-timers atMcDonald's andPizza Hut in the winter of 2000, that the first political union network emerged in Europe explicitly devoted to fighting precarity: Stop Précarité, with links to AC!,CGT , SUD,CNT ,Trotsky ites and other elements of the French radical left. [Abdel Mabrouki, "Génération précaire", Le Cherche Midi, 2004.]In 2001 Italian antiglobalization collectives and networks, as they were preparing for the
Genoa counter-summit just months away,inaugurated inMilan a new kind of first of may, MAYDAY, spelling it like the international call for rescue, and explicitly centering it on the street representation of the so-called "precarious generation." It employedcarnival -like techniques of agitation (allegorical wagons, media subvertising, colorful actions etc.) in imitation ofgay pride s and love parades of the 1990s. Italian activists meant it as a revival of thewobbly traditions ofMay Day citation, and consequently as a break with traditional union representation and social-democratic compromise that had allowed precarity and social insecurity to spread unchecked to reach critical levels in all of Europe, thus repeating the experience of UK and US economies with a few years' lag.By 2003, the event had grown exponentially in size, and Catalan antiglobalization activists participated as non-neutral observers. In2004, activists in
Barcelona joined the Mayday efforts, as delegations of French Intermittents participated as guests of honor in both mayday parades. The same year saw the launch of theicon of "San Precario",patron saint of the struggle against precarity. The religious imagery proved very popular inItaly and elsewhere, and would colonize the mainstream mediascape in the following yearscitation. By virtue of all these developments, Mayday 2004 drew 80,000 young protesters from all over Italy. This attracted attention from other parts ofEurope .an Precario
February 29 is the day of San Precario, the patron saint of precarious workers. S/he was created by the
Chainworkers at theMilan ese spaceReload where the 2004EuroMayDay was organised with others including theCritical Mass group. The Milan Critical Mass already had its own patron saint,Santa Graziella (Graziella is the name of a bicycle firm).San Precario was originally convceived as a male saint (Romano, 2004).
ChainWorkers then did a hoax in 2005 during the Milano Fashion Week, by using a fictive stylist who was in fact an anagram for San Precario (the Saint's first pubblic appearance was at a Sunday supermarket opening on Feb 29, 2004) calledSerpica Naro .The groups claim that the name functions like a multiple user name or myth such as
Luther Blissett and quote theWu Ming collective in giving theoretical coherence, although it is mostly seen as aCatholic detournement of the concept. [http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/vanni_tari.html]Precarity and EuroMayDay
In October 2004, libertarian and syndicalist collectives from across Europe gathered at Middlesex University at "Beyond ESF" (a critical reference to the
European Social Forum that was being held in London at the same time) in order to give life to a unified European May Day of precarious and migrant workers: EUROMAYDAY, which involved a dozenWestern Europe an cities in 2005, and about twenty in 2006, with Milan, Paris, Helsinki, Hamburg, and Sevilla among the most lively nodes. In2006, the mayday process was launched inBrussels onGood Friday with a few hundred activists from Belgium, France, Italy, and Germany protesting against pro-business lobbies in Europe: "no borders, no precarity: fuck the new inequality!".The
EuroMayDay network has gathered several times across the EU to discuss in its assemblies common actions against precarity andmobilizations against the persecution of immigrants, and particularly the segregation of undocumented migrants in detention centers all over Europe. EuroMayDay demands the full adoption of the EU directive on temporary workers being blocked by theBarroso Commission , as well as a European minimum wage and basic income. Cyber and queer rights are also part of the mayday deliberations and activities.Rebelling against Precarity in France, Denmark, and the US
A core constituency of mayday has been the movement of
Intermittents , the French expression to refer to stage hands and showbiz personnel. In 2002-2005, the Intermittents captured the French imagination and filled the press with their inventive rebellious tactics (e.g. they famously disrupted live TV news programs and the 2004 edition of the Cannes festival) denouncing precarity in the form of cuts to theirunemployment benefits (they counterproposed an alternative reform of the system which was so well crafted that put French élites and union leaders in an awkward position).In the early months of 2006, French youth rejected the CPE, thefirst-job contract introduced by the government who made it easier tofire workers under age 26. Clashes with the riot police, as it reclaimedSorbonne from occupying students was the signal that something majorwas happening, as the university had been the epicenter of socialinsurgence in
1968 . Four decades later, France was again paralyzed by huge student demonstrations and solidarity strikes called by the major French unions, as well as the more militant unions and organizations. With the vast majority of French universities occupied for more than a month, and the whole nation on strike, theVillepin government was forced to withdraw the provision, in a test of force with democracy in the streets that weakened the presidency itself. "Le Monde" commented that "précarité" was going to be a central issue in the upcoming 2007 presidential elections.A few months before, France had been rocked by generalized rioting of the French youth of Arab and African descent in its suburban ghettos("cités"), who sought to express angst at racial and economic discriminationthat they were experiencing from the rest of French society. Although expressions of the same national malaise and social anguish, banlieue rioters and student protesters did not really share tactics and demands. The French explosion of 2006 against precarity was followed a few months later by a lengthy general strike in
Denmark to protest against welfare cuts especially discriminatory with respect to young people. All universities were occupied, and the right-wing government was forced to withdraw the provisions that had to do with student subsidies and other welfare benefits for young people, although it retained pension cuts for older employees.In a different context,
May Day 2006 was also a historic day of protest for U.S. immigrants, mostly of Latin-American origin, who mobilized in all major American cities to protest against a punitive anti-immigration bill being discussed in Congress. Hundreds of thousands of people from San Francisco to Chicago celebrated the first of May by taking the streets against increased repression of undocumented immigrants by the Bush administration. Grassroots and community organizing, helped and funded by the progressive wing of North-America's organized labor — which had already been behind the successfulJustice for Janitors campaign, narrated byKen Loach in "Bread and Roses", that has organized many legal and illegal immigrants in Los Angeles — were crucial for the media attention and social impact of the demonstrations.Catholic Origins
In its English usage, "Precarity" was first used by
Léonce Crenier , a Catholicmonk who had previously been active as an anarcho-communist. In1952 the term was used byDorothy Day , writing for theCatholic Worker Movement ::"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. (...) 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." [ [http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=633&SearchTerm=luke,%20St Poverty and Precarity] by Dorothy Day] .
See also
*
Casualisation
*Catholic social teaching
*Christian anarchism
*DefunctFirst Employment Contract (CPE)
*New Employment Contract (CNE)
*Directive on services in the internal market , also known as "Bolkestein Directive".
*Prekariat - the social class, not necessarily poor or members of a particular underclass, disposed towards precarity. The prekariat is the post-Fordist analogue of theproletariat (in German)References
External links
* http://www.euromarches.org
* http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/publications/2003/ke5103471_en.html
* http://www.euromayday.org/
* http://www.chainworkers.org/
* http://www.yomango.net
* http://www.cip-idf.org
* http://www.greenpeppermagazine.org/process/tiki-index.php?page=Precarity+Issue
* http://www.metamute.org/en/node/415
* http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704
* http://adbusters.org/blogs/Big_Ideas_Precarity.html
* http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/neilson_rossiter.html
* http://www.republicart.net/disc/precariat/index.htm
* http://helsinki.euromayday.org/index2.htm
* http://berlin.euromayday.org/
* http://www.maydaysur.org/
* http://www.maydayfr.org/
* http://www.actupparis.org/
* http://www.generation-precaire.org/
* http://www.ac.eu.org
* http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/04/france_the_prec.html
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