The Struggle to Reconcile Precarious Work and Parenthood: The Case of Italian ‘Precarious Parents’

Abstract

This research is about parents in precarious employment, as the intersection of parental responsibilities and paid work represents a privileged site from which to explore the process of precarisation within a wider social context. Social reproduction is then interrogated in order to conceptually frame parents’ everyday struggles for stability. The dyad use-value and exchange-value is mobilised to make sense of parents’ activities in the domestic sphere as well as in paid work, so that the outcome of this research marks a conceptual shift from the metaphor work–family balance to the tension between useful activities and the monetary valorisations that these parents need to obtain. The research suggests then that these parents produce social wealth at a number of different levels, but their activities need to meet their exchange-value because monetary valorisation represents the way to get their livelihood. This research aims to conceptualise the antagonism of ‘precarious parents’ as their ‘normal life’ is distorted by daily struggles to achieve these means.

Keywords

critical theory exchange-value parenting precarious work social reproduction struggle use-value

Introduction

This article explores the social practices of parents in insecure employment (‘precarious parents’) in order to better understand in what ways precarious work is situated in social life. Following the recent issue on ‘precarity’ in Work, Employment and Society, precarious work is framed as a social process, rather than an employment status which affects individuals (Alberti et al., 2018). ‘Precarisation’ is then linked to contractual employment insecurity, but also to a social form of life which reproduces old class inequalities (Smith and Pun, 2018) based on the re-commodification of labour (Greer, 2016; Rubery et al., 2018), rather than establishing new inequalities (Standing, 2011).

Official reports from Ipsos Mori (2013) in Britain and from the Istituto Nazionale Previdenza Sociale (INPS Osservatorio sul precariato, 2017) in Italy, not to mention the claims around the ‘crisis of care’ in the USA (Fraser, 2017; Pugh, 2015), all point to the adverse effects that precarious work is having on people with caring responsibilities. The case of parents in insecure jobs allows an interrogation of issues around paid work and unpaid domestic work in a way that calls into question both domains. What can be defined as ‘work’ is at the conceptual centre of this approach. Thus, this article investigates daily practices of parents in insecure jobs, framing precariousness in the realm of ‘social reproduction’ (Alberti et al., 2018). For the analysis proposed here, the context of social reproduction means that work can be taken as human activity which generally aims at producing use-value (for example, a parent, who is a precarious teacher, cares for her children as well as teaching her pupils). However, this use-value needs to go through monetary valorisation (the teacher-mother needs a wage). In siding with parents in precarious work and their struggles, the article proposes a conceptual shift: rather than ‘balancing’ home life with precarious work, these parents are struggling against the monetary valorisation of human activities in order to make their home life and their work life useful for themselves as well as for others. Framing precarious work within social reproduction, through the conceptual dyad use-value and exchange-value is an original conceptual move, which has not been attempted elsewhere.

The research took place in Italy. There, the precarisation of labour has developed also as a consequence of two major pieces of legislation in 1997 and 2003, after which the ‘Great Recession’ further destabilised the employment status of many Italian workers (Murgia and Armano, 2014). For the last 10 years, short-term recruitment has often been the rule, and not even a good level of education (e.g. university degree) provides a safety net (INPS Osservatorio sul precariato, 2017). Thus, a whole new generation that is now entering the labour market grew up and decided to form intimate links within precarious labour conditions. The process of precarisation has been particularly harsh in Southern Italy (Giannini, 2016). However, households in the regions of Central Italy (where the research took place) were able to absorb some of the negative effects of unemployment and underemployment because of historically accumulated private savings (Fumagalli, 2014). The lack of a proper system of social welfare policies, and the familialistic assumptions of the Italian state, exacerbate the circumstances for mothers (Giannini, 2012; Morini, 2012), where the social conditions of female workers are assumed to be in line with neoliberal ideals of the ‘family responsibility paradigm’ (Luxton, 2006). This social landscape is important for the relative lack of social mediation from the welfare state. Italy is also a significant case because social movements resisted precarisation and managed to make this issue very public, to the point that the word ‘precariousness’ is part of a politicised way of framing employment relations (Murgia, 2010). These themes constitute an important social landscape for the analysis of parents struggling through insecure jobs.

Framing precarity and parenting

Parents in insecure employment are part of the social landscape of ‘precarisation’, whose issues are not confined to the world of paid employment. As precarity is not just a form of wage insecurity, but also social insecurity (Pugh, 2015; van Dyk, 2018), recent studies suggest that it should be framed in the realm of social reproduction (Alberti et al., 2018: 452).

Placing the phenomenon of job insecurity and parenting within Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) allows for developing an alternative interpretive framework. The radical insight of feminist political economy recognises that the ‘economic’ is not a natural part of society and that the work that goes into the production of the ‘economy’ is gendered and racialised work (Gottfried, 2013; Luxton, 2006). There is a call for the conceptualisation and the concrete analysis of the social subjects of the production and reproductions of social relations, the latter being the essence of the objectivised world of the economy and of the family (Luxton, 2006; Weeks, 2011). In challenging the binary economic production and social reproduction, the approach of this article focuses on the analysis of social practices (Mitchell et al., 2003: 417), so as to avoid structuralist pitfalls. Consequently, as feminist critique of the economy would find contradictions and conflicts in social reality (even within class and gender), rather than unity and harmony (Weeks, 2011), the approach proposed here will focus on the daily practices of parents in insecure jobs through the conceptualisation of their daily struggles.

In order to fully articulate precarious parents’ struggles with material insecurity, the use-value of their daily activities will be contrasted with the exchange-value of the same activities. In so doing, the study’s aim is to advance a conceptual shift from the dyad production/social reproduction and to uncover conflicts and contradictions. This distinction is criticised by van Dyk (2018: 537) in her discussion of communal social activities and the precarisation of labour. Structuralists in general reject this differentiation (in primis Baudrillard). However, here this distinction does not refer to two sets of values: use-value necessarily has to appear as exchange-value (Bonefeld, 2014: 42; Heinrich, 2004: 39). Use-value is formed through social practices and ‘work’ as a human activity happening in a social context. However, critical sociology also frames work as conscious life-activity (from Horkheimer to Holloway, 2010: 89) which develops into ‘labour’ as a value-producing category, where Weeks (2011: 7) highlights the historical and conceptual association of this category with gender differentiation and gender oppression.

The social reality of work can only appear if useful products or services find an exchange-value within the dominant social relations. This social reality is the world of exchange-value (Adorno, 1976). In order to frame the lives of people who are in precarious work and have parental responsibilities, it is then necessary to refer back to the double character of workers: they are free to sell their labour to any employers, but they are also free from any means of subsistence (Bonefeld, 2014; Radice, 2015). Therefore, their human activities as work need to find a monetary valorisation.

The notion of human activity as necessarily connected to wage-labour opens up the possibility of analysing the ways in which precarious parents operate and care inside, through and against economic constraints. It is important to anticipate here how this approach supersedes the problem of the subjective reconciliation of precarious work and family, while opening up the conflict between the creativity of precarious parents on the one hand and the economic system’s need for valorisation on the other. So, precarious parents represent a specific case of parents who are wage earners, in the sense that the former are more exposed to ‘freedom’ from the means of subsistence (Bhattacharya, 2017); at the same time, Italy as a social landscape is important because of the above-mentioned lack of major welfare programmes for unemployed or under-employed people with caring responsibilities. This freedom is actually the main feature of the class of wage-labourers (Marx, 1997: 121; Radice, 2015) and the precarious worker is closer to the gendered ‘ideal’ of pure labour-power (Ba’, 2018; Weeks, 2011). The concept of class will be elaborated according to this insight later in this section.

However, within this frame, is the dualism between production and social reproduction avoided? Following Dalla Costa (1995) and other scholars of SRT, the qualitative difference between productive and reproductive labour is not accepted: the difference between paid work activities and non-paid care activities of precarious parents is quantitative in the monetary sense. Use-value is produced in both domains, but the problem is represented by the need to monetise at least part of daily practices. This objectification is the result of the exchange-value character that human activities obtain in our societies. For Dalla Costa (1995: 10) this objectification produces an ‘insoluble contradiction in the feminine condition of being an unwaged worker in a wage economy’.

Understanding work as human activity, linked to use-value in the sense specified above, means that mothers’ care work is considered central to understand the social practices of parents in insecure jobs (Giannini, 2016: 102). The feminist reception of Adorno’s social theory (Heberle, 2006; Becker-Schmidt, 1999) conceptualises the sphere of the family as simultaneously separated and interrelated with the sphere of commodified labour relations (Becker-Schmidt, 1999: 115). This insight is fundamental for designing a ‘constellation’ (Lopez, 1999; Tischler, 2009) of concepts that include work both as creative activity and as subordinate to valorisation, in the same way that the feminist critique suggests that parenting practices feature intimacy as well as gendered care work (MacCannell, 1999).

Following Smith and Pun (2018), the ‘precariat’ is not considered a homogeneous class. Stable wage labourers and insecure wage labourers belong to the same diversified working class (Alberti et al., 2018: 449), therefore precarity is better understood as a field of social relations whereby stable workers ought to feel the pressure of insecurity (and freedom) in order to conform to an established understanding of work as competitive individual business (Bonefeld, 2014). Here, precarious work as competitive individual business will also frame class as a tension between a fragmented state of individual/family struggles and a wider class situation marked by the necessity to obtain daily subsistence. Luxton (2006: 37) explains how class needs to be redefined through fundamental social processes linked to the necessity of ‘the majority of people [to] subsist by combining paid employment and unpaid domestic labour’. This broader understanding of the working class, facilitated by SRT, puts then an emphasis on the process of class formation, specifically on struggle (Weeks, 2011: 19). In this research, a set of individual and family daily struggles for money (exchange-value) will be linked to the valorisation of their own activities producing use-values. The fragmentation of these experiences of class will be conceptualised in the broader context of class formation and struggle, as mentioned above.

This framing of precarious workers within wider processes around social reproduction, with a specific focus on use-value and exchange-value to bypass the duality of production and reproduction, has not been attempted before. In their studies on how US parents work and care for their children in precarious conditions, Cooper (2014) and Pugh (2015) list a series of ways through which parents, mainly mothers, ‘sacrifice’ themselves for the well-being of their families, with little time to devote to themselves (Cooper, 2014). Through an immense commitment (Cooper, 2014), mothers erect a ‘moral wall’ between the world of (insecure) employment and that of intimate relationships, in order to protect the latter (Pugh, 2015). In these studies, the ‘struggle’ through which precarious parents try to achieve decent standards of life is considered, although not centralised. Pugh individuates an ‘insecurity culture’ which the social actors need to deal with, through ‘resources’ determined by their class, gender and race. One of the key questions she asks is: ‘what is the effect of stable employment on how people approach commitment, at work and in their intimate lives?’ (Pugh, 2015: 134). This framing focuses on the broader social landscape of precariousness; along these lines, in this article, the intent is to criticise normal conceptions of employment, showing the social character of unequal relations and so to give voice to the antagonism of precarious parents.

The literature on work–family conflict (WFC) identifies a key term: ‘insufficiency’ (Edgell et al., 2012); that is, the insufficient wages of families in precarious work for covering living expenses (Gregory et al., 2013; Richardson, 2010; Roeters et al., 2009). However, while the basic positivist approach of WFC studies (Ba’, 2017) focuses very well on the ‘subjective experiences of insufficiency’ (Edgell et al., 2012: 1017), these experiences then are quickly turned into abstract observations of how the social actors negotiate with ‘work’, implicitly represented as a phenomenon divorced from social relations (e.g. Gregory et al., 2013; Richardson, 2010).

Studies combining the critical concept of work, understood in the dialectical sense of human activity and waged labour, indicate a fundamental term to investigate the social conditions of precarious parents: entrepreneurialism (Wilson and Yochim, 2015). This concept is used as a critique of neoliberal ideology (Fraser, 2017) to analyse the internalisation of faith in the market, which produces intrafamilial bonds as well as adaptation (Wilson and Yochim, 2015). Being a mother through precarious employment is then analysed as having an ambivalent meaning: on the one hand, this condition is associated with the agency of mothers, active in exploring alternative options on how to succeed in the labour market; but on the other hand, the final result seems to be the substantial adaptation to the status quo (Wilson and Yochim, 2015: 669). The contrast between adaptation and resistance will be explored here, as linked to the daily struggle for social reproduction, or even class struggle, although not necessarily politically organised (Bhattacharya, 2017: 86). Indeed, in feminist political economy, the concept of ‘precarious work’ describes the feminisation of labour markets as well as the gendered division of care work (Strauss and Meehan, 2011).

Framed within the conceptual ‘constellation’ of use-value, exchange-value and daily struggles for social reproduction, the phenomenon of precarious parents does not appear to have been fully investigated. The present research therefore proposes to explore how parents in insecure jobs constitute social practices at home and in paid employment while struggling with the logic of money.

Methodology

This research was conducted in Central Italy (Umbria and Tuscany) during summer 2016 using qualitative methods, specifically semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Nineteen mothers and seven fathers took part in this research. The disproportionate number of mothers reflects how in Italy precarious work is feminised and how fathers are reluctant to talk about family life (Murgia and Armano, 2014). The participants were all either married or cohabiting, apart from seven single mothers (three of them widows). They presented themselves as heterosexual. The majority of them had one child (17), seven of them had two children and two participants had three children. Most participants’ children were of pre-school or primary school age; there were nine adolescent children. The interviews were carried out in Italian. Each of the participants was interviewed in their home for approximately one hour. The criteria for taking part in this research were: (1) being responsible for at least one minor; and (2) having a non-standard, fixed-term, seasonal or ‘occasional’ contract. Crucial to the recruitment process was the support from a Job Centre and a Caritas Centre (Catholic Charity) in a medium-to-large town in Umbria. Table 1 illustrates participants’ demographics. Pseudonyms are used in this article.

Table 1.

Participants’ demographic characteristics.

	Occupation	Gender (female/male)	National origin	University degrees
a.	Technical personnel of Job Centres	7 F 5 M	Italian	9
b.	Supply/substitute teachers	7 F	Italian	All
c.	Factory workers, care assistants, cleaning staff	5 F 2 M	2 Italian 5 North African	3
Total		26 participants26 interviews	21 Italian5 North African	19 out of 26

These participants do not represent a homogeneous social group. Even in this small qualitative sample, people of North African origin are concentrated in less well-paid jobs which are more physically onerous than the others. In the following sections, differences in gender and ethnic group will be analysed. Conventional differences between a middle class that felt the bite of the Great Recession (especially in category ‘a’) and the conventional working class (in category ‘c’) could be highlighted; however, it was decided to present participants’ accounts in a coherent way because of their common struggle against the imposition of precariousness as ‘economic objectivity’. This move matches SRT’s plea ‘not to skip class’ (Bhattacharya, 2017), in the sense that all the participants can be seen as part of a wider working class (see previous section on class) whose activities in the production of use-value need to go through powerful mechanisms of monetary valorisation.

The context for this research was informed by the approach of ‘co-researching’ (Alquati, 1993): co-research is about developing issues with participants in a way that allows them to be in charge of the research process. In line with feminist methodological principles, all those involved in the research process are considered active agents in constructing knowledge (Fonow and Cook, 2005). Among the participants, there are a few committed to trade union activism against precarious employment, which matched the non-neutral approach taken by this research. Those non-union activists were either part of the unions or aware of and sympathetic to the request of ‘stabilisation’ (then enacted in law, with D.Lgs 75/2017). Thus, following the insights of critical race methodology, the collection of counter-narratives was key (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). The interview schedule was devised to cover three broad areas: (1) becoming a precarious worker; (2) becoming a parent; and (3) parenthood and job insecurity, and specifically how they mix together.

The critical approach followed here requires that the interpretation of the narratives should be conducted through the data, rather than on the data (Alquati, 1993), since qualitative research offers the possibility of collecting ‘images’ that capture the ‘objectivity’ confronting the participants (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Tischler, 2009). Thus, considerations on the margins, glosses, exaggerations, even vicious circles of reasoning and extra-interview rituals (e.g. offering a coffee to the interviewer) are considered as providing explanations and images that reflect the antagonism to the economic objectivity in which they are immersed. So, if a participant narrates about a ‘giant’ as a personalisation of the closed and anonymous system that stands in front of her, this image is used to indicate the moment of crisis of this system (Tischler, 2009: 29): the subject who confronts it in an antagonistic way.

Parents in and against ‘precarity’

The starting point for illustrating the findings is the ‘richness’ of the participants; their accounts can be interpreted as pointing to their daily struggles for producing use-value at home and in the workplace. It is their work that continually creates use-value both for members of their family and for the beneficiaries of their paid work. Clearly, they also produce value for employers, but this represents the essential problem of how, in the current economy, their activities should find valorisation in monetary terms, as their work (at home and in the workplace) is not exploitable outside the exchange mechanism (Becker-Schmidt, 1999). This starting point may seem paradoxical, given the conditions of insecurity in which they live and the ‘meagre’ (Carlo: technical personnel, married, father of one child) salary they earn. Most of the participants report serious difficulties ‘in getting to the end of the month’ (Nella: cleaner, single mother of one child). It should be emphasised that this research refrains from celebrating forms of resilience from ‘below’ or of creative spontaneity, through which allegedly autonomous subjects are able to react and navigate in a difficult economic environment. It is important to start from the social and human richness (Holloway, 2016) that such parents are able to produce because it is a starting point that sheds crucial light on the data and reverses the perspective that precarious people may simply represent subjects for welfare state policies, but rather recognising that the problem is to be found in the monetary valorisation of human activity (Bhattacharya, 2017).

Precarious parents between valorisation and useful activities

This section discusses how the occupations of the participants can be presented as a conflict between the necessary valorisation of their work and the accomplishment of activities whose practical aim is usefulness. Participants’ occupations are divided into three categories (see Table 1).

Technical personnel (TP) of Job Centres

Job Centres are funded and directly managed by the Italian state. These participants contest being institutionally categorised as ‘technical personnel’, rather than ‘experts in career advice’, which would imply a different employment rank. One of the reasons is that most of them have university degrees, rather than college qualifications. They all have been in precarious employment for many years. The majority of the accounts suggest an ‘extra’ (Milena: married, mother of two) that these precarious workers give to their job. For example, four of the participants provided strategic direction for the setting up of new services, becoming the main promoters of ‘fundamental activities for the organisation and provision of services’ (Carlo: seen above). According to their accounts, these strategic activities facilitated their local network of Job Centres to be recognised as ‘excellent’, receiving official certificates from the Government’s institutions (Carlo).

Another example involves the Specialist Career Services, where five participants report that they ‘systematically do more’ than their job description actually demands from them (Sara: married, mother of one). This ‘extra’ that they perform on a daily basis is about considering their work not as ‘mere office work’ (Franca: divorced, mother of one), rather, it is about becoming an ‘irreplaceable point of reference’ for service-recipients, interacting with them on a very personal level (Sara). All of these participants narrate developing an awareness of working with ‘human beings [in] difficulties’ (Milena), so their daily duties are also about ‘passion’ in meeting the service-recipients’ needs. From these accounts, it is clear that the ‘extra’ mentioned is provided on a voluntary basis, yet it becomes part of their standard services. However, not only is this extra not paid, but it is not even recognised as proper work. There is therefore an incongruity between the extra work carried out by the participants and monetary remuneration not received: the unpaid extra. This is clearer in the gendered type of work done by the female TP, where gendered skills like empathy and understanding are implicitly valued and exploited by the organisation (Gottfried, 2013).

Supply/substitute teachers

The supply (substitute) teachers (all mothers) interviewed for this research had an occupational trajectory that led them to teaching. The most representative case is that of Arianna (married, mother of two) with a PhD in Biochemical Sciences. After years of working in insecure jobs in research, she accessed teaching jobs in middle-high schools, in the hope of gaining stable employment. Yet at the time of the interview, Arianna had already been in fixed-term contracts for four years. The other participants narrate a similar trajectory. Three of them are Special Education Needs (SEN) teachers:

I am supporting children who (…) have SEN. I felt emotionally close to them … then, even once my contract expires, I usually go to the same school to see them … just to stay in touch … I’ve even got their phone numbers … (Maria: cohabiting, mother of one)

In this regard, Maria says that the parents of these children were so happy with her work that they requested the continuation of her employment in the same school, sending letters of appreciation to the head teacher:

My last experience, when I was called to support SEN children … has been a life experience, rather than a work experience. (Cleo: single, mother of one)

As in the case of the TPs, participants narrate an explicit involvement of their person in the work that needs to be performed. Teachers in precarious employment mobilise something extra to accomplish their job in a way that exceeds what is expected from them. For this category, as well as an overflow of commitment to the support of children’s learning, there is also an extra addition of qualifications or skills that these teachers bring to their job.

Factory workers, care assistants, cleaning staff

In this last category, the work of the participants is clearly the object of exploitative mechanisms. Their cases are evidence that precarious workers buffer the prolonged crisis, allowing employers to rely on cheaper labour costs: ‘the new industrial reserve army’ (Fumagalli, 2014: 54). In this category, there are factory workers made redundant and now employed on a casual basis, as well as former small artisans who had to close their activities following the Great Recession, now employed as cleaning staff or care assistants on short-term contracts. The case of two sisters of Tunisian origin is an example. The younger sister, Dani (single, mother of one), has managed to find a certain stability through her specialisation in tailoring. Nida (widow, mother of one), with a degree in Humanities, has had a tortuous employment history, through the agricultural and textile sectors, finally arriving at the role of care assistant. Nida works very long and heavy shifts, up to 12 hours, for a wage that she says is ‘very low’, barely enough to cover the essentials. Dani similarly states that, with her wage, she ‘cannot get to the end of the month’, despite all the praise given to her by the managers of the factory for her dexterity. These participants give accounts about the hardship they endure in the workplace and they refer to living expenses which drain money out of their pockets. In their case, it seems then apparent that paid labour is not related to the remuneration of what they do at work, but the wage simply covers the cost of their social reproduction (Bonefeld, 2014). Given the disproportionate presence of parents of North African origin in this category, this qualitative research confirms the tendency toward the racialisation of precarious work in low-paid sectors (Bhattacharya, 2017; Luxton, 2006).

In this section, job insecurity is not framed as an economic phenomenon with an objective reality in itself: the social relations that constitute ‘precarity’ must be investigated through this alleged objective reality that lies outside the subjects. These social relations do not simply feature the subjection to an external economic mechanism. On the contrary, participants themselves constitute and are involved in social relations that create an ‘extra’ for the system, in which they exchange their work (labour-power) for (insecure and low) wages.

Parenting, caring and (precarious) valorisation

This section examines participants’ narratives on family life. These narratives refer to daily activities as a form of intimate, care and domestic work, in a way that matches the concepts of ‘life’s work’ (Mitchell et al., 2003). Social practices constituting personal and family life are useful activities in the same sense as the activities seen in the previous section, but their relation to monetary valorisation is different. Mothers narrate daily activities that constitute domestic, care and intimate labour as well as the ‘joy’ of being in the presence of their children. This contradiction is compounded by the necessity of having to deal with exchange-value in the sense proposed in the theoretical section. Participants are acutely aware that their livelihood needs to rely on the constant flow of wage. Indeed, wage as a social relation is intended to cover their livelihood, rather than what they do in the workplace (Bhattacharya, 2017; Bonefeld, 2014). When asked about the meaning of becoming parents, participants always associate the anxiety of the future with the joy of having children in the present. Most of the participants had their children when they were already in precarious employment.

Interviewer:

What happens when you become a parent?

Carlo:

You are aware of having a great wealth at home and being able to (…) get rich from the human point of view … your life is completely turned upside down … It is also a source of worry because … everything is amplified at the maximum level, from joy to worry. [our emphasis]

Many narratives refer to the joy of ‘seeing my own child growing up’ (Milena). This narrative is important and not generic, since seeing their children growing up leads to a sense of having achieved something, of having created morally and materially the life of a human being, who is totally dependent on the adult. It symbolises a success in the face of the economic forces standing against them and the result of efforts aiming at creating something useful:

I was not one of these people who wanted to become mother at all costs (…) Quite the contrary: I was scared and I felt unsuitable for that … then, it happened out of the blue and my life has changed, completely … Before, the priority for me was buying a dress, now … first of all [it’s] Monia [her daughter] and it is not actually a sacrifice (…). (Cleo)

Gendered codes about the moral obligation of mothers are in operation here: mothers’ narratives reveal a greater involvement in tasks traditionally attributed to the female gender. Research on WFC reveals how gender is declined and used in contemporary economic formations (Gregory et al., 2013; Roeters et al., 2009). In this sample, mothers kept referring to their care work more often than fathers did, while the latter implicitly referred to traditionally established male privileges (e.g. McDowell et al., 2014; Stier and Yaish, 2014), especially for tasks such as cleaning and cooking. This is consistent with previous findings in the Italian context (Giannini, 2012; Murgia, 2010). Nonetheless, when the couple is removed from their relatives’ support network, then the father tends to be more involved in the everyday caring routines. For example, Alberto (married, father of one) narrates that he does the morning routine with his five-year-old son before taking him to nursery, and he prepares the meal in the evening while his partner cares for their son.

The social practices constituted by precarious mothers are not simply about reconciling precarious work with care commitments, but rather about struggle: mothers who are objectified by care and domestic work are at the same time creative subjects able to negate the invisibility imposed on this type of labour. The following is an account from Nella, a single mother employed in the informal market as a cleaner:

The most beautiful thing [about being a mother]? unfortunately … when you are in a situation like this [no support from relatives and extremely unpredictable and insecure work] you cannot even see the bright side … it’s very hard to detach yourself from your situation because you are always worried and you don’t even enjoy the moments you could.

The experience of reproduction of social life as daily classed, gendered and racialised struggle (Bhattacharya, 2017: 86) is also present in Dani’s accounts. Single mother of a two-year-old daughter, factory worker of Tunisian origin, she narrates that she was frightened by the prospect of motherhood and actually found it very hard. When asked how she manages work and caring for her daughter, she replies: ‘I look at my daughter … I try to go ahead’. This narrative could be taken superficially. Neoliberal interpretation could praise the natural sense of responsibility of a mother and celebrate her determination to look after her child in difficult circumstances. Instead, here ‘responsibility’ means the daily struggle to reach a decent standard of living; it means facing up to the danger of being crushed by economic necessity. The symbolism of looking at the child and moving forward recalls the ‘steadfastness’ of the actors of class struggle to which Benjamin (1981[1955]: 76) refers in his thesis on the philosophy of history. Following her accounts, it is a struggle to avoid being imprisoned by classed, gendered and racialised misery, by simply setting up a series of small routines to care for her daughter.

The accounts on family routines and daily housework can be conceptualised as practices oriented towards social reproduction. Their anxiety about the future with its economic uncertainty can be linked to the lack of monetary valorisation of these practices. Following the insight of Luxton (2006), the social production of goods and services and the social reproduction of life belong to the same context. Thus, these conceptualisations should be translated as expressions of the contrast between the ability to perform useful activities on the one hand, and economic pressure in the form of wage labour on the other, rather than a ‘balance’ between (precarious) work and parenting. It is the contrast between useful activities that participants know how to perform in their daily life and the need to valorise them in monetary terms. The next section will explore in more depth how this contrast is linked to daily struggles.

Reconciling or struggling?

Parents in insecure employment talk about reconciling the insecurity of the job with their care obligations. However, it would not be correct to frame this issue in terms of a ‘spill-over’ (Ba’, 2017) of insecurity from their precarious work into their private life. To do so would be to naturalise wage labour. Similarly, domestic and care work cannot be taken for granted. Domestic activities represent as much a source of non-monetary wealth as a source of gender discrimination; female participants do not appear to be fully aware of this gendered condition; however, they are aware that the hectic life they lead is due to this double burden. In their accounts, these contradictions are set in motion by the issue of ‘money’.

When asked about the main obstacle to them fully employing their capabilities and enjoying the fruits of their activities, the answers they give are about lack of financial resources. Money (and wage) is a social relation: the social practices of parents in insecure jobs have to be framed within this critical concept. Money is a problem because their social practices have to go through the process of monetary valorisation. Precarious parents present ‘normality’ as a daily struggle: these parents adapt to an insecure life, but their adaptation does not exclude the antagonism toward precarious employment:

The struggle … right now we are struggling every day to keep our job … we always hope for the renewal of the contract, an annual renewal … (Franca: seen above)

Many of the participants have been in insecure jobs for many years and, for most of the participants, the struggle is the struggle ‘to get to the end of the month’ (Dani) and to ensure a minimum of stability and security for themselves and their children. It is precisely when they answer the question about the future that most claim to make only short-term decisions:

I am still struggling to get a permanent contract in my job. There is something really wrong about it, because if you are in your 20s or 30s, I could understand that … but when you are in your 40s or 50s, absolutely not! (Milena)

The participants present a contrast between the present and the future. The present features their activities and their knowledge about these activities. Talking about her occupation, Milena says: ‘We know what we have to do – we have been doing it for years’. On the other hand, the future is represented as enveloped by ‘fog’ (Franca). The contrast is then between the future as obscure economic temporality (Giannini, 2012) and the present as the time of caring for children and struggling against precariousness. In their narratives, there is indignation against the type of precarious conditions they must endure:

First of all, you have no certainty … you are always at the mercy of … the decision of your boss. One day … he can call you and – out of the blue – he says: ‘All right, from tomorrow, we’ll do it like this … either this way, or you are out’. (Katia: telemarketer, married, mother of one)

The lack of dignity is linked to a lack of ‘decent contractual employment’ and to the awareness of being ‘exploited’ (Katia). The awareness of being caught up in a long-term struggle derives from the discrepancy between the ‘mad runs’ (Milena) they have to do for the smooth running of home life and the insecurity of their employment conditions. ‘Money’ can be then interpreted as a social relation linked to their daily struggles:

(…) but is it possible that I must repeat the same thing every year and every month … that I have a contract that expires! (…) It feels like being a beggar in the street! (Milena)

What a person is capable of doing is only worth something if it is exchangeable in the free market. It is when she cannot exchange her labour-power that her daily struggles get harsher. The analysis of accounts around ‘normal daily life’ and ‘adaptation’ to the harsh conditions of job insecurity reveal the ambiguity of normality for the participants: for instance, when asked how she endures precarious work, Arianna says: ‘It looks like normality; however, from a personal point of view, your dignity (…) well, it is profoundly affected’. They can adapt to a normal situation, but the precarious condition is not accepted as normal, rather it is judged difficult or tough and rejected as a workable solution for their lives. So, their accounts suggest that adaptation is not simply the opposite of struggle. These parents do not simply adapt, they construct family life actively and they struggle in order to do so.

This conceptualisation of normality has the advantage of calling into question the well-established dyad of production and social reproduction at a double level: participants (especially mothers) are the agents of practices that produce social wealth, but they do so by adapting to mechanisms of monetary valorisation that privilege the sphere of production.

The findings about daily struggles resonate with the conceptualisation of struggle advanced in SRT (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2012) and refer to people struggling to build livelihoods from ‘below’, in the sense that struggles for social reproduction are struggles with classed, gendered and racialised content and not merely personal (Luxton, 2006). Therefore, struggle and adaptation are not mutually exclusive concepts, but terms that allow a ‘concrete determination’ (Adorno, 1976) of their collective experience of insecurity. It is then important to stress that ‘normality’ is ‘precarious normality’, which finds its opposite in dignity: ‘we are in a situation which is rather humiliating’ (Franca), and: ‘I have never lived with this precarity with anxiety … rage, I always had rage inside me’ (Milena). There would not be such strong statements unless there was the negation of their dignity behind them.

In one account, a participant uses the metaphor of struggling against a ‘giant’: Sara refers to an anonymous system, which has the power to crush her, but which also needs her in order to extract that ‘extra’ which is discussed in the previous section. Sara does not refer to it as a heroic struggle: it is more of a necessity. She talks about her efforts to expose an alleged murky embezzlement of EU funds for the provision of Job Centre services and gives an account of contacting local newspapers to make public what she thought was a scandal. However, once the story was out in the press, she says that her bosses called her in and ‘invited’ her to ‘keep quiet’. Sara ended up being ‘destroyed by that experience’.

Thus, this research uncovers gendered and racialised subjects who are active in trying to determine the material conditions for their lives and for the lives of their children, subjects whose dignity is negated and whose livelihood is under threat from the insecurity of the social relations underpinning their paid work life. The conceptualisation of their narratives reveals that their activities, their struggles, their dignity are part of these social practices. Thus, these social practices signify antagonism towards a state of humiliating necessity and concrete critique of precarious work as a blackmail of valorisation against the reproduction of human life. Work as commodity objectifies their capability to operate in social life.

Conclusion

This article presents an investigation of the social practices of parents in precarious work. The aim is to reverse the perception that precarious parents may simply represent subjects for employment or welfare policies. Parents in insecure work are capable of accomplishing social practices producing wealth, in the sense that they are able to perform useful activities in their daily life, whether at home or in their (insecure) workplace. This is something that must be highlighted, particularly given the dominant assumption that paid and unpaid work is something that occurs naturally. The article reframes the concepts of use-value and exchange-value to show how the daily struggles of these parents are about the necessary efforts to give monetary valorisation to their social practices. The very concept of ‘adaptation’ is shown as being ambivalent, in the sense that their adaptation to ‘normality’ is akin to struggle, as their normality is precarious normality and not accepted as such. It is a struggle with gendered and racialised characteristics as Italian and North African women are usually the protagonists of insecure jobs (as elsewhere: Strauss and Meehan, 2011) and mothers are still the main providers of care in the Italian familial context (Giannini, 2012).

The main outcome of the research is that precarious parents, rather than reconciling insecure jobs with caring responsibilities, struggle to reconcile the useful practices they accomplish in their daily life with the monetary valorisation set in motion by the economic system. Indeed, precarious parents narrate an ‘extra’ they are able to realise in their jobs, which is not paid. The fact that most of them report difficulties ‘in getting to the end of the month’ represents in itself an indictment to this economic system, which shows its ‘prehistoric’ face (Benjamin, 1981): the wage that barely covers workers’ livelihood. The type of resistance they put in place however is not ‘radical’ in the sense that they do not want to revolutionise the system; indeed, contractual stabilisation is the main priority for many of them. Nonetheless, their accounts show awareness of being exploited as well as excluded from ‘normal’ social life.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: this research was made possible through the Leeds Trinity University Research Leave, which allowed me the time and money to research parents in insecure employment in Italy, summer 2016.

Stefano Ba’ is a Lecturer at Leeds Trinity University. He has a dual national academic background (a taught doctorate from University of Perugia, Italy and a PhD from University of Manchester, Great Britain) and researches family life, children and job insecurity. He is a sociologist who has grounding in Critical Theory and has published in Capital & Class. He has also contributed to the following peer-reviewed journals: Sociological Research Online, Community, Work & Family and Quaderni di Teoria Sociale [Social Theory Notebooks]. He has also published his study on the work-family in: A Cultural Study of the Work and Family Balance (LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2017).

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