Abstract
The Liminal Worker is an examination of precarious working conditions in austerity Greece. Austerity measures and policy reforms are entering their fifth year, and continue to destabilize the labour market, forcing a reconfiguration of traditional work practices. A timely and engaging read, it is a valuable contribution to anthropological writing on the relationship between formal and informal networks of work and social life. The book comes at a time of transformation in Greece: heightened labour market deregulation will be challenged by anti-austerity party Syriza, who recently gained power.
Spyridakis provides accounts of the postindustrial labour market condition, with a specific focus on Greece, to emphasize how deregulated employment practices, through legislation and policy, have led to inconsistent working patterns, amplified inequalities and uncertain futures. The Liminal Worker is based on the empirical research of three ethnographic case studies in different sectors of the labour market: workers at a Keranis tobacco factory, shipbuilding labourers in a suburb of western Piraeus and tertiary-sector bank employees in Athens. All three cases illustrate the increasingly unclear working and social worlds experienced by these workers.
The author uses a Marxist framework to investigate the inherent tensions between labour and capital that are central to this postindustrial context, interrogating neoclassical and neoliberal assumptions of individualistic rational decision making. Spyridakis argues that workers often act contrary to this theory; their decisions based less on economic rationality, and embedded in dynamic sociopolitical power structures. Individuals, in this context, consider work not in self-maximizing terms, but as an activity that is part of a web of activities that form identity and status, mediated by social relations developed through a lifetime of experience in the workplace. The ethnography examines how this process must change in light of new irregular work practices, workplace stresses and periods of unemployment.
The first chapter introduces the context of the book: the lived experiences of work in a post-Keynesian neoliberal austerity context. In Greece, a structural adjustment programme, public sector spending cuts and increasing poverty have become the key signifiers of life under Austerity. This precarious trajectory is of huge significance for the lives of respondents throughout the ethnography. Here, the author draws on notions of the centrality of work to people’s lives, and the shifting prospects of continuous full-time work during this period of social transformation. As the post-Second World War consensus has now expired and welfare-state retrenchment continues, a new social contract characterized by precarity, marginalization and liminality is being drawn up.
The reader is introduced to the experience of liminality in the following chapter, situating it in a symbolic, socially mediated and culturally specific context. The centrality of anthropological methods is elaborated on here. The concept of liminality, based on Victor Turner’s (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, applies to individuals as they pass through an unstable and uncertain period, which ends with the emergence of a new state of being replacing an older one. The author goes on to relate this liminal concept to employment in Greece. Its symbolic nature is particularly appropriate in the precarious world of austerity, as workers shift from secure to insecure working patterns. The author briefly summarizes contemporary Greek labour market trends, Greece’s relationship with the EU, the recession and the specifics of the austerity measures.
Spyridakis’s ethnography emphasizes the perspective of those experiencing hardships themselves, their attempts to preserve their identities as workers when work is scarce, and to reimagine their material and social terms. The condition of unemployment for these workers is not the natural result of the invisible hand, but the result of deliberate economic and political policies, and this is clearly emphasized. The author examines how, in an increasingly precarious work environment, networks of relationships are based around work and the acquisition of work. Most employees in the shipyard engage in casual work, and the process through which these informal workers gain employment, negotiate power relations and sustain connections is investigated. Both this and the tobacco factory ethnography draw on the importance of informal social networks for workers and the symbolic and socially mediated nature of gaining and sustaining employment, in the past, in the precarious present and in the expected future.
The final ethnographic study, of bank employees, emphasizes the negative effect of harassment in this increasingly deregulated tertiary sector. This is the mode through which a power-oriented hierarchy manages workers’ labour and reifies the organizational structure. At the bank in Athens, employees must negotiate the hierarchical challenges and maintain their employment while being threatened with increasing workloads and decreasing entitlements or redundancy. Workers find themselves increasingly ineligible for routine leaves of absence to deal with illness or caring responsibilities, and instead forced to negotiate a complex web of conditional permission granting from peers and bosses, as well as increased workloads, pay cuts and a lack of recognition of their efforts.
The Liminal Worker concludes with a short chapter summarizing the nature of work and life in these ethnographies, the skills workers develop to deal with risks stemming from austerity policies, the nature of markets, and their general postindustrial context. The author concludes that all three ethnographies support his thesis. In a society where it is fundamental to one’s identity to engage in paid work but only unsecure work is made available, inequalities will increase and the human impact will be great. Workers will have to find new and creative ways to secure their livelihood, and construct their identities as workers in new ways in an environment where full-time work is not available to all. The new identity for many is a liminal one, stuck between identities and worlds.
In his conclusion, Spyridakis refers to Marxist and anthropological viewpoints and the historical context of the processes of identity creation through paid work and community formation. Flexible production and flexible accumulation are the emerging modes of working life for his respondents. Rather than the rise of new forms of emancipatory practices for workers, an increasingly liminal situation, characterized by absolute flexibility, is creating new identities while generating huge material inequalities in contemporary society.
In the brief final chapter, Spyridakis reiterates several key points made throughout the text, but the underlying structures for these arguments are not explored in sufficient depth. He argues convincingly that the exploitation of vulnerable groups is not a new capitalist feature, but part of a cyclical economic practice, and that in Greece liminality is the contemporary manifestation of this trend. However, he fails to fully elaborate on the explicit relationship between austerity measures, labour market reforms and the pivotal role of welfare-state provision, and of the cause and effect inherent in this relationship. Furthermore, a strong conclusion that presents a possible route of resistance or future improvement for workers and the labour market in Greece is lacking. A more lively debate, and presentation of potential alternative futures, rather than reiterating the state of liminality, would have given this text a more politicized, and politically explicit, conclusion.
The Liminal Worker is the product of an extensive period of research and data accumulation. The book is clearly and succinctly written, tying together theory and methodology in a way that is not cumbersome nor overly academic. It reflexively incorporates respondents’ perspectives regarding their motivations, choices and perceived agency. It also raises a valid critique of the inadequacies of the welfare state in providing support and retraining, and the social and cultural realities that work is embedded in, as well as the issues individuals face in a changed societal landscape. Spyridakis makes valuable contributions to the conception of work in a European market economy and to the body of knowledge that relies on ethnographic methods to produce knowledge that acknowledges agency and reflexivity and the complex fluidity of roles.