Rethinking Economic Security in a Precarious World

Introduction

The concept of precarity has taken on a new significance in scholarly and popular debates during the last decade, especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession that gripped key economies across the world until the early 2010s. Precarity has become ubiquitous across the social sciences (Lambert and Herod, 2016), to the point that its usage and status among critical scholars perhaps now rival other epochal concepts like globalization and neoliberalism. The concept is widely used in sociology as well as globalization studies (Castelein and Ieven, 2012), anthropology (Kasmir, 2018), critical psychology (Biglia and Martí, 2014) and other fields. As with other ubiquitous concepts, precarity is commonly mobilized in order to understand the transformation of social and economic life since the 1980s.

However, there is ongoing tension over the best term to deploy – precarity, precariousness, precarious work – and, relatedly, what social and economic phenomena these concepts are meant to analyse. There are different views about which of these conceptual signifiers is best applied to different empirical or analytical categories; whether, for example, precarious work refers primarily to features of paid employment, to ‘work’ more broadly or to particular job types (Kalleberg, 2011), whether the focus should be on ‘precarious workers’ as individuals whose vulnerability to social and economic insecurity is sharpened by their gender, ethnicity, citizenship status, age, etc. (Anderson, 2010), or whether the ideal concept should be ‘precarity’ as a generalized condition of vulnerability or insecurity which is applicable to myriad social contexts (Butler, 2011), or an equally widespread condition of risk-shifting within society (Beck, 1992; Hacker, 2006) (for overviews of contrasting approaches, see Campbell and Price, 2016 or Clement et al., 2009).

The release of Guy Standing’s (2011) work on the topic, which described the emergence of a new ‘precariat’ class-in-the-making, was a key driver of the proliferation of precarity scholarship. Standing identified several elements of risk faced by the precariat including job insecurity, exposure to low and volatile wage incomes, shrinking opportunities for career development and upward social mobility, and limited access to collective representation. However, his claim that individuals with these characteristics represented a distinctive social class has been subject to powerful criticism (Breman, 2013; Paret, 2016). Most scholarly interventions on this topic have called into question the compression of individuals with often radically different experiences and material circumstances into a single class category as an ‘over-stretching’ of the precarity concept (Alberti et al., 2018). While this term has previously been adopted within European social movements, few thinkers in this oeuvre have framed the precariat as a separate class with separate material interests in Standing’s manner (Jørgensen, 2016).

At the same time, even a strong critic of Standing’s argument such as the late Erik Olin Wright conceded that ‘in some rhetorical contexts calling the precariat a class could help elevate the status of the issues connected to precariousness and serve as a way of legitimating and consolidating a program of action’ (Wright, 2016: 135). Standing’s book also helped to cohere a focus on work, the workplace and employment relations in precarity scholarship. ‘Precarious work’, and in particular, the growth of contingent employment arrangements, has become a crucial element of understanding class relations and economic life in the post-Fordist era (Kalleberg, 2011).

More recently, interest in the idea of precarious work has inspired a concern to redeploy precarity and precariousness as more general concepts in empirical fields beyond the formal workplace. Much recent innovation is reminiscent of the original idea of precarity as a more general condition of risk or vulnerability, as discussed in Bourdieu’s (1963) early work on Algerian workers and, later in French sociology, as the risk of families falling into poverty as well as the characteristics associated with particular forms of paid work (Barbier, 2002).

In recent years, the contrast between work-based precarity and the older idea of a more general, socialized precarity has been redefined as a contrast between precarity-in-work and precarity-in-life.

Biglia and Martí, for example, contrast the literature in ‘labour precarity’ and ‘life precarity’. They define the broader notion of ‘life precarity’ as ‘being flexibly involved in a network of social groups and (im)material, continuously moving, contingent realities’ (Biglia and Martí, 2014: 1489). Biglia and Martí argue that a broad approach to precarity is more useful because of the very limited experience of non-precarious work, particularly for women and marginalized groups of people. This view builds on a common strain of critique, especially from feminist scholars, that non-precarious work was an anomaly enjoyed post-Second World War by (mostly) white male workers in a limited number of wealthy economies (Chun, 2016; Vosko, 2010).

Strauss (2018), similarly, charts a stream of debate amongst geographers who contest the juxtaposition of supposedly new forms of precarious work against a prior stable, secure form of work, typified by the Standard Employment Relationship as institutionalized by the International Labour Organisation. This juxtaposition, Strauss argues, fails to acknowledge the impact of gender, legal or migration status and place on people’s experience of labour and life precarity. Earlier, Ettlinger (2007) advanced a broader concept of life precarity which acknowledged that precariousness may arise from other life conditions as well as the workplace. Ettlinger (2007: 319) developed an ‘expansive view of precarity over time and across space’ that identified multiple axes or ‘dimensions of precarity’. By doing so, Ettlinger was able to locate ‘precarity in the micro-spaces of daily life, in the spaces in which individuals think and feel and interact’ (2007: 324).

The potential for a rapprochement between these different ‘life’- and ‘labour’-based strands of precarity scholarship provides the inspiration for this special issue. Building on earlier debates in this journal, and related arguments elsewhere (Jørgensen, 2016; Shukaitis, 2013), we are interested in a multifaceted understanding of what precarity does in economic, political and social space. Rather than understanding the precariat as a class, the articles in this collection explore how precarity is experienced across classes, across geographies and in different subjectivities. Similarly to Jørgensen (2016), we are interested in how precarity may create new spaces for struggle and new political commonalties.

Despite concerns that precarity’s omnipresence has stretched the concept beyond meaningfulness and utility, the underlying assumptions for this issue are first, that breadth can be a source of strength and second, that the different strands and conceptual applications of precarity have the potential to speak to and learn from each other.

Breadth as Strength

Sympathetic to the proposition that breadth may be a strength for precarity scholarship, this collection considers a wide range of ‘dimensions of precarity’ (Ettlinger, 2007). In addition to precarious work and employment arrangements, the articles consider exposure to life-course risks such as managing welfare needs and retirement, and exposure to financial markets and debt. The articles are written through different and overlapping frames, including economic sociology as well as critical and feminist political economy. However, the volume also combines these theoretical concerns with ongoing attention to precarious work. This cofocus offers new insights into work-based impacts such as the body’s vulnerability to climate change and heat stress at work. The collection also considers the ways in which social and institutional factors inside and outside the workplace either enhance or reduce workers’ exposure to risk and insecurity. For example, degrees of precarity among retrenched workers newly entering precarious labor markets differ according to home ownership, relationship status and access to household wealth or non-wage income (see Barnes and Weller, this issue).

What emerges from these analyses of different dimensions of life precarity is that, while experiences are variegated, the ‘condition of vulnerability relative to contingency and the inability to predict’ (Ettlinger, 2007: 320) is not limited to those with precarious work arrangements. As the recent work of Bryan and Rafferty (2018) shows, exposure to risk, uncertainty and related social and economic impacts are widespread, even in wealthy economies. We increasingly find ourselves living in a ‘speculative life-world’ in which individuals are ‘condemned to decision making under uncertain levels of uncertainty, and to thus precarity and insecurity’ (LiPuma, 2017: 235).

The prevalence of the precarious life beyond ‘the precariat’ opens up greater possibilities for collective responses, organizing and political action. One of the features of this special issue is scholarship that poses and critically explores collective solutions to problems of precarious life, including research on mutual aid among precarious migrant workers (see Farrugia, this issue) as well as the Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to economic insecurity and under-employment in liberal welfare regimes (see Spies-Butcher, this issue). Taken as a whole, the collection of articles seeks to explain how people who experience precarity in different contexts also attempt to generate new forms of security out of the precarious situations they are compelled to navigate.

Introduction to the Articles

The articles in this collection primarily deal with manifestations of precarious life in different regions of Australia, where the authors are based. Australia provides a useful territorial lens for this inquiry. The features of precarity explored in this issue – from rising precarious work to financialized risk to punitive welfare regimes – have manifested locally in ways that depart from the North American or European experiences in novel ways. Australia can be portrayed as a liberal market economy in the Anglo-American mould (Hall and Soskice, 2001). Its institutions have been shaped by the forces of neoliberalism, including the decentralization of employment relations and rising precarious work (Campbell and Burgess, 2018), the devolution of financial risk from state institutions to households (Bryan and Rafferty, 2018) and the shift towards a workfarist welfare regime (Brodkin and Marston, 2013; McDonald and Marston, 2005). However, unlike in the USA or Britain, many of the key political and institutional shifts that have encouraged rising precarity occurred under social democratic governments – the Australian Labor Party (ALP) – in the 1980s and 1990s (Humphrys and Cahill, 2016; Pusey, 1991).

Australia also has a distinctive institutional tradition that has shaped contemporary precarity in novel ways. For most of the 20th century, Australia’s political economy – the ‘Australian settlement’ – was based on a system of centralized wage-fixing at an industry level, compulsory arbitration for industrial disputes driven by a system of industrial courts and a ‘White Australia’ immigration policy, which attempted to reproduce the country as a white European imperial outpost (Castles, 1988). The phase of neoliberal capitalism that began in the 1980s reshaped these historical features – for example by decentralizing the employment relations system and selectively encouraging skilled migration in major cities – but this institutional legacy, and the steering role of social democratic politics through the ALP and the trade union movement, meant that Australia did not follow the North American or European paths in a pure sense. Distinctive features remain, including a relatively strong system of public healthcare (Medicare) and public education, widespread home ownership, high minimum wages and a private pension system based on compulsory contributions from employees’ wages (known as superannuation).

These systemic features interact with situations and processes of precarity in ways that can either sharpen or mitigate risk and insecurity for workers and households. For example, home ownership and superannuation can mitigate the impacts of precarious work (see Barnes and Weller, this issue) whereas the punitive functions of workfarist income support can exacerbate the precarious circumstances of low income householders (see Banks and Bowman, this issue). It is within this dynamic context that authors in this special issue explore cases from Australian workplaces, households, communities and policy domains.

In a beautifully evocative article that is firmly grounded in the stories of immigrant women in Sydney’s western suburbs, Claire Farrugia’s ‘Making Sharing Work’ opens this special issue by exploring different dimensions of life and labour precarity. The African women at the centre of this research negotiated their collective and individual experiences of precarity at work, through migration, at home and in many other places and spaces through sharing practices. These overlapping experiences of precarity, and women’s responses through sharing and developing networks of mutual aid, are situated within the political and institutional context of a reconfigured nation-state. Funding for state agencies to support new migrants is increasingly channelled into private sector non-government organizations which rely heavily on aid recipients to fill gaps in service provision. Farrugia explores how the sharing practices of migrant women, who support each other to survive through challenging circumstances, interact with the welfare state. Farrugia’s work reveals many different dimensions and sites of precarity, and the contradictions as individuals, collectives and organs of the state respond to these.

In ‘Bad Timing’, Marcus Banks and Dina Bowman expose the crucial role of competing temporalities in driving insecurity in labour, welfare and financial markets. Drawing on empirical findings from interviews and fortnightly diaries from 70 working class households in Melbourne in late 2016, Banks and Bowman argue that disjointed temporalities are a key source of risk exposure and distress for those managing daily subsistence through a combination of contingent work, welfare and debt.

The authors employ the innovative concepts of ‘timescapes’ and ‘riskscapes’ to demonstrate the function of these clashing temporalities in generating turmoil for people in low-income households. Banks and Bowman show that risk and uncertainty are relative across time and space, meaning that which is not necessarily risky may become risky in a particular assemblage of circumstances. The findings of the study show that differing schedules for debt repayments, welfare payments and wages, along with uncertainty and inconsistency in wage payments linked to precarious work, are fraught with risk and stress. Banks and Bowman’s work reveals myriad dimensions of precarity and the ways in which precarity bleeds into multiple areas of everyday life, with implications for health, housing and family cohesion.

Tom Barnes and Sally Weller’s research into the post-retrenchment experiences of automotive manufacturing workers in the cities of Melbourne and Geelong reveals a link between finance, welfare and people’s variegated experiences of precarity in the workplace and labour markets. Like others in this collection, their article demonstrates the function of different subjectivities and particularities in differentiating people’s experience of, and response to, precarity. Barnes and Weller’s research highlights the importance of household wealth and family structure in managing the post-retrenchment transition from relative security to precarity.

Based on interviews with retrenched workers and jobseekers in 2017, Barnes and Weller find that there is great variation in the resources available to different households managing the challenges posed by precarious work. The central finding from their work is that it is impossible to understand precariousness without understanding household-level circumstances. Key factors included family structure and spousal income; the extent of financial assets, especially home ownership; access to severance payments; and capacity to move to different locations in search of work. Barnes and Weller argue that while frameworks for measuring the experiences and dimensions of precarity have developed significantly in recent years, there remains a gap in relation to the interplay between precarious work, household provisioning and wealth.

Helen Forbes-Mewett, Allegra Schermuly and Keiran Hegarty explore competing perspectives on precarity and security in Bowen, a regional town in the Australian state of Queensland. Their article uses Jørgensen’s concept of ‘what precarity does’ to make sense of the politics and social relations underlying a stalled industrial development. Qualitative interviews reveal individual experiences and perceptions within the local community, both of historical instances of work and development, and hopes and expectations of the proposed development at the centre of the study. The authors find that, despite recognising the changes in economic and social structures that impact on growing precarious work, people interviewed in Bowen were likely to present themselves as adaptable and optimistic about the prospects for a new development to improve their quality of life. This research enriches understandings of the politics and sociality of economic development and labour markets in regional Australia.

Turning to urban labour market dyanamics, Freya Newman and Elizabeth Humphrys investigate the experiences of heat stress amongst construction workers in Sydney, Australia’s largest city, and how these experiences intersect with dimensions of precarity. The article is based on original research findings from a survey of construction workers in July 2018. The article’s novelty lies in its exploration of climate-induced factors as a dimension of precarity as well as its adaptation of precarity to the problem of worker agency in responding to heat stress in the workplace. This research is particularly pertinent given the context of Australia’s recent heatwaves and deteriorating air quality due to climate change-induced bushfires across the country.

The authors investigate the relationship between heat stress and workplace precariousness, particularly through the question of taking action regarding heat stress incidents. Although the majority of their respondents were full-time male workers with permanent contracts, workers identified several obstacles against taking action which can be linked to both generalized and specific forms of precarity. The underlying drive to maintain productivity and ‘get the job done’ despite climatic pressure is a persistent limitation on workers taking protective action against heat stress. The authors also found that the prevalence of precarious employment conditions (including contingent employment contracts, work intensification and transience in the workforce) created barriers to taking action. This was due to greater managerial prerogative and power in decision-making, as well as fear in the workplace and workers’ tendency not to assert themselves. Crucially, they find that workers were more likely to have taken action on heat stress if they felt more secure in their employment.

Building on the scholarship of everyday financialization, Claire Parfitt explores how precarity as risk-shifting is impacting on spaces of political action. As risks are shifted at the state, workplace and household level, financial ways of thinking and being filter into daily life. One manifestation of this is ‘ESG integration’, which is the focus of Parfitt’s argument. ESG integration is the practice of integrating environmental, social and governance risks into investment decision-making. Parfitt explores the ways in which ethical debates about a wide range of social and political risks are captured by financial markets. This raises a number of questions about how risk and uncertainty are distributed and negotiated, and about which ethical issues are prioritised The author argues that ESG integration is based on a reductive and derivative logic of ethics.

Finally, addressing the contemporary welfare state, Ben Spies-Butcher responds to the proliferating popular and scholarly debates about the UBI. As welfare becomes increasingly conditional, and risks are shifted from states and employers to workers and households, a stable and adequate income for all has great appeal. Looking for ways to respond to this increasingly risky economic environment, the UBI has become a focus of many policy reform projects. Spies-Butcher acknowledges the many criticisms of UBI, including its potential to undermine existing welfare regimes, and suggests a policy pathway through which a progressive UBI might be implemented.

Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, where flat-rate welfare payments are the norm, Spies-Butcher considers the possibility of adopting an affluence-testing based methodology for UBI. Appreciating the importance of institutional and political contexts, Spies-Butcher speculates on the productive potential of contestation within liberalization for generating hybrid approaches to welfare policy. While other papers in this collection consider micro, individual or local responses to precarity, Spies-Butcher takes the analysis to the national, and even transnational, macro-policy level.

This special issue has its origins in a workshop organized by scholars of economic sociology, work and labour under the umbrella of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) in November 2018. The aim of the workshop was to provide a space, particularly for early-career researchers, to critically explore the economic manifestations of precarity, such as those related to work, housing, credit/debt, and the withdrawal of collective (state-based) provision for economic security. Our rationale was that, while there was a great deal of research regarding the negative impacts of increasing insecurity and precarity, there was also a space for interventions regarding responses, policies, programs, forms of resistance, conflict, contradiction and struggle arising from these new forms.

The resulting collection of articles aims to both broaden the conversation about precarity in economic life beyond the workplace, and to render the conversation more specific through a focus on responses and reactions to precarious life. While work remains a key element of the collection of articles presented here, we aim to be part of a growing field of scholars who want to broaden this discussion.