Abstract
There is undoubtedly a burgeoning literature on precarity and job insecurity in English and collecting a series of explicitly critical perspectives on this matter in a single edited book is the main merit of the editors. A particularly important contribution is the making available of work by important scholars who mainly publish in other languages (French and German): among them I would flag up Doerre’s and Cingolani’s chapters.
However, it can be said that the majority of social science publications on precarity is rather critical: even Kalleberg (who can be considered one of the exponents of mainstream sociological approaches) is quite direct about the social aspects of job insecurity which – according to him – leads to ‘precarious living conditions and a decline in subjective well-being or even a destructuring of existence’ (Kalleberg 2018: 90). In the face of this positioning of mainstream social sciences, it is actually not clear what are the main strong critiques of this social phenomenon advanced in the book, apart from the contribution of a few singular chapters. In that sense I would flag up the best in terms of providing a critical and well-informed frame to understand, criticize and ‘subvert’ precarity: Cingolani (A Pandemic- related Turning Point: Precarious Work, Platforms and Utopian Energies), Puligano and Morgan (The Social Foundations of Precarious Work: The Role of Unpaid Labour in the Family) and Hardy (Organizing and Self-organized Precarious Workers).
In general, and considering this review is for the readers of Capital & Class, there is a surprising lack of consideration of Marxist and Feminist critical analysis on precarity: Vosko (2010), Palmer (2014), Jonna and Foster (2015), Ferguson and McNally (2015), the recent book of Bernards (2018) and even E.O. Wright (2016) are hardly mentioned at all. The lack of engagement with this type of critical literature renders the claim of presenting ‘critical perspectives’ quite partial and incomplete. It seems to me the major flaw of this edited collection.
Critical perspectives on ‘precarity’ and precariousness presented in this book do focus on and consider capitalism as a broad socio-economic mechanism producing uncertainties in employment relations and in the social lives of individuals. These broad critical perspectives on capitalism are often filtered through the consideration of neoliberalism as an epochal transition from Keynesianism and welfare intervention in the economy towards more individualistic and fragmented organization of labour. Some of the contributions focus more specifically on the conflictual labour-capital relations, although these relations are then framed within institutional or cultural forms which produce subjectivities. For instance, in Umney’s chapter, the conflictual relations between labour and capital are strictly linked to ‘conjunctions’ in specific sectors of the economy. Doerre prefers to link labour-capital relations to mechanisms of social exclusion inscribed in the post-welfare state. In the very clear contribution of Pulignano and Morgan, the socio-economic developments of neo-liberal capitalism are revealed as profoundly embedded in the asymmetric, gendered division of care work.
Others are less concerned in revealing the link of precarity to the conflictual labour-capital relation. In Armano, Murgia and Morini’s, the development of neoliberal discourse is interlinked with the ‘diffusion of precarization processes [which] is one of the fundamental traits of the current forms of subjectivization’ (pp. 30–31). So precariousness becomes a phenomenon connected to the production of subjectivities. Informing some of these critical perspectives, there is what Horkheimer would have called ‘bourgeois scepticism’ in play, in the sense that bourgeois scepsis considers every concept a flatus voci, so of course ‘precarity’ and all the other related concepts become just insubstantial for this abstract critical perspective. For me, this is the case for some of the theoretical chapters.
I find the best approaches those who avoid empty definitional attempts and link precarity to struggles ‘from below’. Cingolani’s and Hardy’s chapters have the merit of placing the focus on the suffering of people in precarious employment and on their struggles to change oppressive material conditions. Indeed, a very general theme is that for many authors precarity is ‘something good’ to think or criticize, rather than a possible new phenomenon to be linked to old injustices (e.g. wage subordination). Vice versa, Hardy’s and Cingolani’s chapters steer the concept of ‘precarity’ towards the practices of people involved in precarious employment relations and their struggles to change these conditions. In these chapters, we leave a generic abstract criticism of the like: ‘Precarity [as a concept] has suffered terribly from its modishness’ (as in Choonara’s, p. 94) and we move towards a concrete-critical approach that maintains that people in precarious employment are suffering from living in degraded material conditions, yet producing forms of social antagonism.
Despite all the analyses, definitions and re-definitions, despite all the scepticism about the term precarity and associated concepts, the overall project of the book does not engender a cancelling-surpassing of this term into another concept that would preserve some of the issues that are attributed to precarity (e.g. heightened sense of insecurity or material state of insecurity) while connecting it to a broader yet more concrete frame. As explained above, Hardy and Cingolani achieve that, when connecting precarity to the struggles from ‘below’. I would add Doerre’s and Pulignano-Morgan’s, in the sense that precarity is seen as an issue of social exclusion for the former and an issue linked to wider social reproduction for the latter. In particular, Pulignano and Morgan maintain that when discussing precarity it is necessary to ‘discover’ its social foundation, which is the unpaid reproductive work done by women inside the family. Outside these contributions, the general scepticism of some of the contributors at times achieve the paradoxical result of saying that, because of the new logic of neoliberal capitalism, ‘individuals are not exploited’ (Armano et al., p. 33). Similarly, later on: ‘A particular situation may be precarious, but it doesn’t make sense to sort the people embroiled in it according to whether they are or not’ (Umney, p. 91). So, the reader is left wondering if this means that people in precarious employment are fine, it’s just that their work situation is precarious.
In sum, Faces of Precarity is a book which is important for critical researchers who need to be aware of the many sides through which precarity as socio-economic phenomenon can be framed. However, if we are looking for a radical critique of precarity as manifestation of the conflictual labour-capital relation, it is also important to focus our attention to other authors, as suggested above.