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by Ross Perlin
“The most important thing a worker ever produces is himself….”
-Raymond Williams
I’ve lived in eight cities over the past seven years; worked for at least twelve employers in a variety of industries with and without pay; gone without healthcare, unemployment insurance, and a stable residence for substantial periods of time; waited months for paychecks while being held to 24-hour deadlines; been sharply questioned about my income and employment status by police, immigration officers, landlords, banks, and others. Without a “regular job”, without property, and without a traditional family, I have never been counted as a “community member”. The only constant has been a weather-beaten laptop—and the endless search for space to work in. A clean, well-lighted place with electric outlets and dependable wireless. I’ve hated it and I’ve loved it—every day. I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee.
'The labour movement, and the Left more generally, must decide whether the goal is to roll back the tidal waves of precarious labour... or to embrace its positive dimensions and take up arms against its injustices'
Precarious labour is hard to picture and even harder to study. In some cities, the throng of more or less uniformed, somnolent commuters—massing in cars or trains or buses, bustling into downtown towers, suburban office parks, or factories at the appointed hour—is simply disappearing. A bewildering array of precarious work arrangements, some deliberately and happily customised but many accepted with resignation, is replacing the 9-to-5 migration. The new world of work is part-time, temporary, seasonal, casual, contract, intern, trial, on-call, sessional, independent, home-based, intermittent, temporary, flexible, project-based, freelance, fractional, leased, sweat equity, contingent.
The 9-to-5 caricature—commuting, punching a time card, occupying a cubicle, navigating the office hierarchy, playing out a whole career in a single line of work at one or just a few firms—has been coming undone for years. The Baby Boomers, our parents, could afford to revolt against work. Many of them reacted, rightly, against the deep undercurrents of racism, sexism, environmental destruction, and conformism they associated with “standard employment”. They could turn on, tune in, and drop out with reasonable certainty that jobs and careers would still be waiting for them. The Boomers were the product of postwar prosperity, labour-management accord, strong social welfare networks, and a massive push for free universal higher education. They went on to benefit from some of the greediest giveaways and most questionable booms of the past century, as amply documented for the UK in Ed Howker and Shiv Malik’s Jilted Generation.
The neoliberal world that we their children face could hardly be more different. Virtually overnight the labour force available to Western firms doubled with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the rise of reform across East Asia. Technology and globalisation have famously helped make work placeless, highly networked, 24-7. The labour movement has proven unequal to these epochal challenges, and a corporate-driven, neoliberal consensus has taken hold in the halls of power—the only challenge acknowledged by the new New Mandarins is the authoritarian state capitalisms of Beijing, Singapore, Dubai, and Moscow.
Enter 2011. From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, people in their 20s and 30s, many of them precarious workers, explode into a frenzy of new political movements. They understand intuitively that they have been made denizens, not citizens—to borrow a phrase from Guy Standing citing the world of the ancient Greek city-states. With the onset of the 2008 financial collapse, youth unemployment soared to record highs across the developed and much of the developing world: near 20 percent in the U.S. and the U.K., and up to emergency levels (near or above 30 percent, by the lowest estimates) in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere.
Closely tied to corporate greed and economic injustice, precarious labour, already a major source of dissent in Western Europe since the 1990s, is finally emerging in the Anglophone world as not just as a personal concern, but as a political question—along with the soaring costs of higher education, unpaid internships, onerous student loans, youth unemployment, and downward mobility. Among the messages from protesters at Occupy Wall Street: “Occupy Unpaid Internships”, “I Will Never Own My Own House”, “Middle Class and Sinking Fast”, “Lost My Job, Found an Occupation”.
New census data in the U.S. indicate that 37 percent of American households headed by someone under 35 now have a net worth of zero or less; households headed by a person over 65 have a net worth 47 times greater than younger households; the incomes of young people have fallen over 10 percent since 2000 even as the cost of living rises; and starting salaries are frozen or down even for those who do find jobs. Over a million more young people are living at home since 2008, and a “boomerang” generation (returning to live with their parents because of precarious work prospects) has grown up across North America and Western Europe. Traditional milestones of adulthood—living independently, marrying, having children, buying a home—seem as distant to the precariously employed as the traditional social welfare network based on “standard employment”.
Precarious labour is not exploitation tout court—the flipside is greater independence, flexibility, self-direction, and agency. Categories of precarious labour are largely informal yet may still retain distinct identities: an independent contractor may be a permanent employee deliberately misclassified by their employer, a part-time teacher may be a mother who wants to stay at home, a full-time intern may still self-identify primarily as a student, a temp may also work as a freelancer. There is a marked tendency to blurred distinctions, overlapping roles, transient circumstances, and constant flux. Guy Standing sees the “precariat” as consisting of three major social groupings: those drifting in from working-class backgrounds, migrants and others denied full citizenship rights, and the over-credentialised and over-educated ripe for “status frustration”.
Whether the precariat is an actual class-in-the-making or an academic category in search of willing members, there is every indication that temps, freelancers, interns, independent contractors, part-timers, and precarious workers of all stripes are asserting practical needs and political demands as never before. The labour movement, and the Left more generally, must decide whether the goal is to roll back the tidal waves of precarious labour (if that is even possible at this point) or to embrace its positive dimensions and take up arms against its injustices.
The challenges and opportunities are well-balanced. Online organizing offers scale and speed while diminishing possibilities for intense relationship-building and endurance. Face-to-face points of contact—conferences, retreats, networking events—now tend to be fleeting, but also diverse and globally-minded. Precarious workers have greater autonomy for political action (no single boss can “fire” them), but may also be constantly scrambling to earn a living, and thus need a “day off” (or a week, or a year) from political activism. Tactics like the individual strike (indeed unionisation itself) may prove ineffectual, while precarious workers instead discover other pressure points: mass actions on- and off-line, “occupations” of all kinds, perhaps even new species of electoral politics.
In the meantime, there is movement-building to be done within every category of precarious labour, and there are alliances to be made across all of those categories. Precarious work must be understood and made visible (or political value must be found in its very invisibility), and the achievements of individual precarious groups such as domestic workers, migrant farmworkers, and freelancers must be considered and emulated.
The hunt for a place to start working—a clean well-lighted place with power and wifi flowing—goes on.
Ross Perlin has written for, the New York Times, Time magazine, Lapham's Quarterly, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and Open Democracy. He is the author of 'Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy'.
Illustration by Ellie Jackson, who studies History of Art at the University of Cambridge.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_graduate_with_a_precarious_future
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