Abstract
Given ongoing changes in the world of work that affect both developing and industrialized countries, we argue that it is time to bring the notions of informal and precarious work together. Work-related insecurities offer a conceptual umbrella for the conditions that a large number of workers in the global North and South experience. They emerge in the context of neoliberal globalization, intersecting with social and political marginalizations. This offers starting points for intervention. For instance, for precarious workers’ struggles to be successful, organizational strength needs to be combined with the forging of coalitions that transcend class identities.
Introduction
In January 2011, 26-year-old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi passed away after he had set himself on fire, protesting years of harassment and abuse by police officers (Herrera and Mayo, 2012: 72). Symbolizing the plight of millions of Tunisians, especially the unemployed youth, who were excluded from economic advancement, his death belied a pervasive crisis of livelihood and sparked the protests in the Arab uprising that started in 2011 (Chomiak, 2011: 70). During the same year, the Occupy Wall Street movement took off in the United States of America (USA) in protest of growing impoverishment of the working poor combined with exaggerated greed by the wealthiest elite (Biekart and Fowler, 2013: 530). The activisms that have emerged since 2011 were to a substantial degree triggered by the shared experience of increasingly insecure employment and livelihoods for large shares of the population in the global South and North (Lee and Kofman, 2012: 390).
Keith Hart identified such parallel developments 40 years ago in an article that signalled the start of a concern for and research into informal work. 2 He described workers in urban Ghana forced by the impossibility to make ends meet to combine several jobs or to supplement their wages with small-scale entrepreneurship as informally employed. Yet, while Hart pointed out that African urban workers’ situation was not unique and drew parallels to the working poor in the USA (Hart, 1973: 67), subsequent discourses on informality have had an almost exclusive focus on developing countries. 3 Comparative statistics on informal employment in the global South show that 30 to more than 80 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce are employed informally (ILO and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing [WIEGO], 2014: 10–11). In most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, casual—short term—employment has increased during the past decade (OECD, 2015: 281). The increasing ‘normalization’ of insecure forms of employment (Jütting and de Laiglesia, 2009; Rossman, 2013: 24), variously referred to as informal, casual and precarious, continues to be largely invisible in labour market statistics despite their numerical significance. Consequently, they remain poorly understood and largely unaddressed by policy makers and other actors.
This special issue on ‘Precarious Work’ 4 contributes to bridging the two closely related, but so far mainly separately developed academic and policy discourses by focusing on conceptualizations as well as causes of and responses to informal and precarious work. 5 We argue that work-related insecurities offer a conceptual umbrella for the conditions that a large and increasing number of workers in the global North and South experience. They emerge in the context of neoliberal globalization that intersects with marginalization based on social identity as well as with the denial of political rights. Such multidimensional causation of labour precarity offers starting points for intervention. For instance, for precarious workers’ struggles to be successful, organizational strength needs to be combined with the forging of coalitions that transcend class identities.
The special issue emerged from a lecture series organized at the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS) in autumn 2011. It brings together research on precarious work with a wide geographical spread—from industrialized countries in Europe (Pajnik on migrant labour in the European Union [EU]) and North America (Chun on trade unions in the Canadian healthcare sector) to developing countries in Asia (Mezzadri on labour contractors in India), Latin America (Ferreira conceptualizing precarious work in Colombia) and Africa (Webster on informalization in South Africa). The range of sectors and forms of labour precarity covered are equally diverse: Pape describes the international domestic workers’ movement’s successful struggles for recognition and rights. Besides, precarious work is identified and analyzed in manufacturing (Mezzadri and Webster), construction (Pajnik), care and domestic work (Chun, Pajnik and Pape), agriculture (Pajnik) and the security industry (Webster).
This introductory article aims to embed these diverse contributions in the discourses on informality and labour precarity and to highlight their connections. We sketch influential contributions on informal and precarious work in the following section. The third section offers an analytical summary of the contributions of this special issue. On this basis, we argue that, given ongoing changes in the world of work that affect both developing and industrialized countries, it is time to bring the notions of informal and precarious work together. The final section provides the contours of such an up-to-date conceptualization and offers an outlook for research and intervention.
From informal sector to precarious work: A brief conceptual history
Hart coined the term ‘informal income opportunities’ in a conference paper about migrants in Accra, Ghana that was later published as an article (Hart, 1973). He already observed that informality not only refers to self-employment. The concept was taken up by the International Labour Organization (ILO) quickly and applied in the Kenyan context (ILO, 1972) as well as in a series of other large ‘employment missions’ under the World Employment Programme (WEP). The 1972 report advised the government of Kenya to take a positive approach to the informal sector (Sanyal, 1991: 49) and to support informal entrepreneurs contributing as they are to the gross national product (GNP). Hence, a shift in emphasis towards informal entrepreneurs already happened in 1972.
The discourse on development in the then called Third World was until that moment couched in economic terms focusing on employment, under- and unemployment. Subsequent writers on the informal sector referred to Boeke (1953) and Lewis (1954) who described an economy with a dual character (Breman, 1976; Peattie, 1980). Harris and Todaro (1970) formalized the idea of a dual economy in which rural–urban migration mediates between low productivity agriculture and urban employment, under-employment and unemployment. While their model did not directly address informality, it provided the foundation for subsequent theories of informal employment (Kucera and Roncolato, 2008: 323). Such dualist theories predicted withering of informality in the course of liberalization and growth of the economy.
Subsequent authors refuted this dualism. Breman (1976: 1874) criticized the possibility of a ‘harmonious co-operation on the basis of mutual advantage’ between the formal and informal sectors. Referring to Leys (1975), he warned that encouraging local capitalism ignores that this is based on ‘cheap and exploited labour’ (Breman, 1976: 1874). Later, Moser (1978) identified a structural link between the two sectors: a link of exploitation of labour and goods. Indeed, by the end of the 1970s, the static dualist expression of two sectors, formal and informal, coexisting next to, but not with, each other was relegated firmly to the past. It was not yet clear what should replace this duality.
In a different development, De Soto (1989), based on research in the 1980s in Peru, postulated that the informal sector consisted of budding micro-entrepreneurs who escaped the bureaucratic red-tape regulations of the state, stifling economic development. Chen et al. (2004: 17) labelled Moser’s approach ‘structuralist’ and that of De Soto ‘legalist’. Considering the heterogeneity of informal activities and actors, Chen et al. conclude that ‘an integrated approach [is needed] that looks at which elements of the dualist, legalist and structuralist school of thought are most appropriate to which segments and contexts of informal employment’ (2004: 19).
The ILO (1972) report contrasted characteristics of informal activities with those in the formal sector, for example, as easy entry, family owned, small scale, low technology and labour intensive. This initial attempt at description did not evolve into a widely accepted definition. With a reality of informal work that would not wither away (as the dualist school would have it), policy makers were forced to include informality in their considerations. For this, comparative data were required and, so, the need for a shared definition appeared on the agenda of labour statisticians. In 1993, this led to a definition that puts the enterprise centre stage, at the expense of workers’ status (Hussmanns, 2004: 1).
As a result of critiques of the ‘[…] increasingly hazy frontiers between the formal and informal sectors’ (Abramo and Valenzuela, 2005: 382) and conceptual work by the ILO, the International Expert Group on Informal Sector Statistics (called the Delhi Group) and the global network WIEGO (Chen, 2014: 400), however, for the 2002 International Labour Conference (ILC), the discussion document ‘Decent Work and the Informal Economy’ was prepared (ILO, 2002). The focus of its expanded concept of informal employment was not only on the unit of production, but also on the status in employment. Subsequently, in 2003, the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) adopted this definition (ILO, 2003). This new definition recognized that informality is also prevalent in the so-called formal sector. Informality implied work that was not registered, neither recognized nor protected within legal and regulatory frameworks (ILO, 2002). Enterprises increasingly employ a number of workers on flexible arrangements or even externalize their labour supply altogether. In global production networks (GPNs), informalization and outsourcing have become dominant manufacturing strategies. Standing (1989) and Carr and Chen (2002) were among the first to highlight how gender intersects distinctly with these processes, leading to a high concentration of women in informal employment. It became clear that the ‘standard employment relation’ (SER) characterized by full-time, continuous employment with one employer, a stable workplace and entitlements to social security (Vosko, 2010: 1) was not a standard phenomenon—neither in the small formal sectors of developing countries nor in the global North where it was historically reserved for male, ethnic majority workers (Vosko, 2010).
This recognition could have made it easier to connect the literatures on poor labour conditions across the North and South divide. Mainly focusing on the global North, a scholarly literature had emerged around the notion of precarity. While from a trade union perspective, precarious work was commonly considered the flip side of the SER, academic voices also highlighted uncertainty, low income and lack of entitlements (Rubiano, 2013: 135–36). Rodgers (1989: 3), for instance, went beyond the association of labour precarity with a short contractual time horizon. According to him, precarious workers also lacked control over working conditions as well as social protection—be it by law or through collective labour organizations. Finally, he saw low-income jobs as precarious if they were associated with poverty or insecure social inclusion. Standing (1999: 167–207) further refined the association of labour precarity with insecurity. He formulated a framework around labour-related insecurities on which he later based his definition of the precariat (2011: 10). It is typified by a combination of inadequate income-earning opportunities and—associated—insecure income, employment insecurity, job insecurity, insufficient protection against accidents at work, the inability to gain skills and use competencies, as well as representation insecurity (i.e., lack of a collective voice in the labour market). Munck (2013: 751–54) rejects Standing’s (2011) idea of the precariat as a ‘new dangerous class’ that frightens the ruling classes into transformation. Yet, he considers precarity a key feature of the working classes in the global North and South (2013: 751). While relating precariatization to the single motive of capital accumulation, he acknowledges the heterogeneous expressions that labour precarity takes. They range from the lack and loss of labour and employment-based social rights to impoverishment through the commoditization of subsistence, for example, through privatization of water (Munck, 2013: 756–57).
Bourdieu (1997: 1)—one of the earliest theorists of precarious work—raised doubts about the possibility to mobilize the precariat due to their loss of faith in a positive future and the dominant experience of competition for jobs and on the job. Reality has refuted his scepticism. In Europe, precarity has been used as ‘a possible point of mobilization’ (Waite, 2009: 413) by labour and other social movements since the turn of the millennium (see Waite, 2009: 417–18 for a concise review). More recently, trade unions and their federations, such as, IndustriALL and the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), have developed global strategies to stop precarious work (Evans and Gibb, 2009: 53–55; Holdcroft, 2013; International Metalworkers Federation [IMF], 2010; Munck, 2013: 760–61; Rossman, 2013).
Overall, work-related insecurities have become a common denominator when defining precarious work. While acknowledging the global relevance of such growing insecurity, scholarly contributions on precarious work have focused on industrialized countries (e.g., Kalleberg, 2009, 2011; Standing, 2011; Vosko, 2010; Vosko et al., 2009). It is only recently that precarious work has been further developed as a global concept (Hewison and Kalleberg, 2013; Kalleberg and Hewison, 2013 and the contributions to their special journal issues, Lee and Kofman, 2012). Hewison and Kalleberg (2013: 395–96) emphasize that the insecurities experienced by precarious workers in South and Southeast Asia are the result of policies and interventions that shift risks from businesses and governments to workers. These policies that rely on a flexible labour force are seen as the orthodoxy for delivering ‘progress’ and ‘development’. They show how in the countries covered by their special issue, market-friendly re-regulation of the economy has aggravated existing labour precarity in the name of increased global competitiveness. In addition to this role of macroeconomic governance, Arnold and Pickles (2011: 1615) bring out how precarious employment at the Thai–Burmese border results from immigration regimes that grant migrant workers ‘partial border citizenship’ only. Their labour and wider social precarity is sustained by mobilizing anti-Burmese sentiments. Their findings reflect the constitutive role of social location, for example, terms of workers’ gender or citizenship, that Vosko (2010: 2) emphasizes in her analysis of precarious employment in the global North. More generally, such social categorization (Tilly, 1998) may explain the concentration of women, young and migrant workers as well as of people with disabilities in precarious employment (Demaret, 2013: 14), features that mark all contributions to this special issue.
Understanding the globalizing precariat: The contributions of this special issue
The contributions of this special issue help bridging the closely related, but so far separately developed discourses on informal and precarious work by characterizing and explaining as well as laying out responses to insecure work.
Converging concepts: Precarious as insecure work
In terms of their reference to the terms informality and precarity, the contributions to this special issue fall into two categories. While Chun and Pajnik predominantly refer to labour precarity, Mezzadri, Pape and Webster by and large focus on informality. The two categories are associated with the geographical focus of the respective article. Mirroring the conceptual tradition, precarious work is the notion of choice of authors concentrating on labour markets in the global North, while informal work is the key concept employed by most authors referring to the global South. Ferreira, whose article proposes a definition and operationalization of precarious work for the context of Colombia, is an exception from this pattern.
Despite different conceptual origins, among this issue’s contributions, the similarities between the conceptualizations of informal and precarious work dominate. They indicate a convergence of the two concepts in the era of globalizing labour markets governed by neoliberal policies. Paralleling recent contributions on labour precarity, both informal and precarious jobs are characterized as insecure, as associated with poor material conditions as well as with the decline of the SER (if ever existent). As a result, other than in the legalist informality debate of the 1990s, both informal and precarious work are regarded as a social bad.
The view of informal work as (associated with) insecurity brings the concept close to Standing’s (2011) characterization of precarious work. Chun’s equation of precarious jobs in the Canadian healthcare sector with poor material labour conditions, such as low wages, job security and benefits, resembles it implicitly, while Ferreira’s conceptualization of precarious work in Colombia explicitly builds on the work-related insecurities described in Rodgers (1989) and Standing (2011).
The focus on workers’ poor material conditions also forms the starting point for Pape’s review of the struggles for an international convention for domestic work. She illustrates this with her description of domestic workers’ long working hours, low pay and the common exposure to physical and sexual abuse.
Several contributions point out that precarious work emerges with the demise of the SER and its replacement by flexible contractual relations. The flip side of workers’ flexibility is employers’ perception of precarious workers as ‘disposable’.
Over and above this conceptual congruence, the notion of labour precarity goes beyond informality in the following three ways.
First, the notion of precarious work highlights workers’ dignity more. Chun, for instance, describes how privatized healthcare workers experience employers’ perception of workers as ‘disposable’ as a major violation of their dignity. She emphasizes the lack of demonstrated respect as a key aspect of workers’ precarity alongside poor material conditions of their work.
Second, the notion of informality centres around the workplace, while labour precarity transcends it and interacts with workers’ wider livelihoods and social locations (Vosko, 2010: 2). This reflects Arnold’s (2013: 468) point that ‘[…] precariousness not only affects labor markets and employment relations but also is a simultaneously enabling and undermining social condition’. He labels this condition ‘social precarity’. Mezzadri points out that the process of informalization exposes an increasing number of Indian workers to higher degrees of precariousness, as informal workers do not have employment security or employer-provided social security. In this sense, informalization produces precarity. Yet, simultaneously, she describes how Indian garment workers’ marginal status, for example, on the basis of their gender, lowers their bargaining power vis-à-vis their employer. This way social precarity results in precarious working conditions.
A third extension of this issue’s contributions’ joint focus on workers’ insecurity concerns the roles of state and market. Commonly, informality is seen as resulting from a lack of regulation, emphasizing a protective role of the state. However, Ferreira shows that coverage with regulation does not necessarily imply protection. Therefore, she proposes to use precarious work as a more effective lens to identify insecure labour conditions. In line with Hewison and Kalleberg (2013), the authors of this special issue associate precarious work with labour commoditization, underlining the role of the market. Pajnik relates precarity to ‘processes of marketization of migrants where they are reduced to disposable agents for the (global) market’ (p. 4). State actors are not innocent outsiders in such processes. Rather, they are actively shaping flexibility regimes through legislation and policy. Pajnik, for instance, argues that precarious migrant labour is the result of restrictive EU immigration governance as well as of employment policies that marginalize workers’ rights and shrink their social security entitlements. In Chun’s case study, healthcare workers’ labour precarity is the result of public sector restructuring in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Outsourcing of public sector work was backed by a provincial act that granted public employers the right to outsource services.
Triple causation of precarious work: Marketization, social categorization and the ambiguous role of the state
Overall, the contributions to this special issue identify three broad dynamics that cause precarious work: first, emphasis is put on the role of the market. More specifically, the geographic dispersion of production of goods and services in GPNs is identified as a crucial determinant of precarious work. Second, these global processes take place alongside and interact with the reproduction of labour precarity through workers’ social categorization on the basis of, for example, their gender, ethnicity or migratory status. Third, the state plays an ambiguity in these dynamics. While state-led marketization has contributed to the rise of labour precarity, the state also intervenes to support and protect precarious workers.
Webster identifies a crucial role for increasing informalization in GPNs. Drawing on Theron (2010), he distinguishes informalization from above and from below. Both are caused by the cost competition opened up by liberalization of trade and capital flows. As a result, employers bypass labour laws, triggering a process of ‘informalization from above’ through outsourcing. Workers’ retrenchment can be another effect, leading to the creation of survivalist-type jobs or ‘informalization from below’.
Outsourcing of labour supply to contractors underpins this reproduction of precarious work. It enables the ‘disposability’ that is crucial for the functioning of GPNs. Subcontracted workers are often bonded to the contractor through advances or debt. Mezzadri describes how this interlinkage of labour and credit markets guarantees Indian labour contractors’ flexibility in retaining and expelling garment workers from their networks. She describes that this process has distinct gender dimensions in that advances are often offered on the basis of skill and more to men than women. Female workers in peri-urban or rural areas are already tightly socially controlled by local contracting masters. They therefore do not need to impose other forms of economic attachments on them. Hence, interlocking markets can be an economic alternative to labour control through social categorization.
Besides interlinked markets, Mezzadri’s article makes visible another mechanism of economic subordination aimed at guaranteeing a flexible labour supply, namely, the lack of job alternatives. She points out that the power of contractors over rural women homeworkers is considerably higher than over male workers in urban spaces as Indian women’s mobility is restricted.
This exemplifies that the mechanisms of economic subordination transcend the economic sphere and connect with workers’ wider livelihoods and social identities. Chun argues that social inequalities along gender as well as race and immigration status have created historical divisions between more desirable and precarious forms of employment. For the Indian context, Mezzadri shows how the instrumental employment of social identities can support capital accumulation. She describes, for instance, how the restricted mobility of women homeworkers is rooted in social constructions of women’s decent behaviour in the context of North India. Integrated into the chains of garment production, this social regulation weakens women’s bargaining power and, as a result, their income and employment security, which benefits their employers. The contributions to this special issue affirm such observations for a wide range of geographical and sectoral contexts and deepen the analysis of the nexus between social location and precarious work. Domestic work is another poignant example. Pape points out that constructions of gender have been important in segregating women into domestic work. The occupation’s lack of social recognition and material reward has been explained by its perception as an extension of unpaid female domestic responsibilities at home.
Besides women, a large group among the precariat made visible in this special issue are migrant workers. The majority of informal workers in the Johannesburg clothing industry that Webster’s article discusses are migrants. The same holds true for many domestic workers. Pajnik concludes that migrants’ labour conditions are emblematic for the ‘new typical employment relations’ (p. 2).
The strength of Pajnik’s contribution is her emphasis on connections between precarious employment and immigration status. Her investigation brings to the fore a contradictory role of state regulation: contributions taking the ILO’s definitions of informality as a starting point emphasize the protective role of regulation. Yet, for instance, the restrictive governance of immigration in the EU weakens migrant workers’ bargaining position vis-à-vis their employers and reproduces their precarious conditions. Hence, on the one hand, labour precarity is exacerbated by indirect employment arrangements that complicate workers’ ability to access existing labour rights protections. On the other hand, state policies, for example, in the area of increasingly restrictive immigration governance but also laying a legal foundation for indirect employment relations, actually create the conditions for labour precarity.
Protecting the precariat
The responses to insecure work that the contributors identify centre around two actors: workers’ organizations and the state. This contrasts with early contributions on informality, such as those which had emerged from ILO’s interventions like the WEP. Informed by a dualist perspective on work in the informal economy, they put more emphasis on capacity building of informal entrepreneurs and business development services (BDS). More recently, the ILO proposed a broader policy framework, summarized in the ILO Recommendation No. 204 on the transition from the informal to the formal economy. It combines emphasis on the role of BDS with a concern for an appropriate macroeconomic environment that generates quality jobs as well as the guarantee of informal workers’ labour rights.
Paralleling an emergent literature on informal workers’ organizations (e.g., Kabeer et al., 2013; Mather, 2012), the contributions to this special issue see workers’ collective agency as a key to precarious workers’ protection. At the same time, question marks are put behind trade unions’ capacity to take on this role. Hitherto, most traditional industrial unions have neither integrated nor effectively reached out to precarious workers (e.g., Schiphorst, 2011). Chun and Pape’s contributions highlight the possibilities of a new type of workers’ organizations that take precarious workers’ actual labour process rather than the SER, their real social identities rather than an implicitly assumed male, white citizen as well as workers’ community bonds as starting points for organizing.
Pape points out that the insecurities that domestic workers experience are related to the specificities of their occupation’s labour process. This includes its location in the private home as well as the common expectation from domestic workers to be at their employers’ disposal 24/7. Effective organizing has to take this into account and, hence, has to find alternatives to the traditional organizing at the workplace. Chun shows that successful organizing strategies explicitly take precarious workers’ social identities into consideration, for example, by recruiting organizers with relevant language skills or by using migrant festivals for outreach.
Furthermore, the connection between precarious work and livelihoods has implications for workers’ collective responses to precarity. Chun’s case study highlights the effectiveness of social movement unionism as forms of unionism that mobilize worker and community opposition against social and economic injustice. This model of organizing foregrounds the importance of geography over class and community over workplace. It might be of special importance in an environment where class is not a marker of identity and where the relationship between reproduction and production takes more heterogeneous forms than the male breadwinner model. Chun describes the link made in union campaigns between insecure labour conditions at the workplace and the struggles to make ends meet in the sphere of reproduction. According to her, this gave precarious workers’ struggles credibility among non-union partners and translated into a moral and symbolic power particular to social movement unionism.
The union strategies that Chun describes contain a strong emphasis on sharing workers’ emotional pain due to the experience of downgrading or loss of employment through public storytelling as a way to give voice to precarious workers. Pape, too, stresses the importance of enabling domestic workers to speak for themselves during the 100th ILC in order to negotiate the convention for the protection of domestic workers on equal terms. Precarious workers’ demand for the guarantee of their material rights as well as respect possibly also explains the greater role that emotions played in domestic workers’ struggles.
In the age of globalization, community bonds may take on a broad spatial meaning. While globalized production may contribute to the causes of informality and labour precarity, other dimensions of globalization, such as greater possibilities for transnational civic society networking, actually offer opportunities to combat insecure work. The domestic workers’ international campaign that Pape describes is an example for a ‘boomerang pattern’ (Keck and Sikkink, 1999) in transnational labour advocacy, catalyzed by globalization: given the invisibility of domestic workers to their national governments and many traditional unions, lobbying at the level of the ILC was used as an organizing tool in order to put more effective pressure on national actors subsequently. Besides, the collaboration between ‘old’ and new unions with local and transnational groups, that also comes to the fore in Webster and Chun’s pieces, seems to be typical of precarious workers’ struggles. Brookes (2013) calls such a ‘capacity of workers to expand the scope of conflict by involving other, nonlabor actors willing and able to influence an employer’s behavior’ ‘coalitional power’.
In addition to the possibility of new coalitions, globalization also implies new targets for precarious workers’ campaigns. For Indian or South African workers producing garments for GPNs, for example, the final accountability for guaranteeing their labour rights becomes blurred. According to Webster, workers’ organizations therefore have to assess where their structural power—rooted in workers’ location within the economic system (Wright, 2000: 962)—resides. In the case of informal clothing production in Johannesburg, he identifies the source of workers’ power in their connection with buyers placing orders. From this perspective, the national level (alone) does not offer an appropriate scale for intervention.
Finally, despite the acknowledgement of its ambiguous role mirrored most strongly in Pajnik’s contribution, the state has returned as an actor with the power to protect the precariat. Pape demonstrates this cautious optimism when she argues that national ratification and enforcement of the Domestic Workers Convention would ‘lift millions of domestic workers out of informality’ (p. 14).
Outlook: Conceptualizing and countering precarious work
In the preceding sections, we have shown how conceptualizations of informal and precarious work have shifted during the past four decades, reflecting a more serious analytical and policy concern with decent work for precarious workers. We argue that, given ongoing changes in the world of work affecting both developing and industrialized countries, it is time to bring the notions of informality and labour precarity together. This section provides the contours of such an up-to-date conceptualization and offers an outlook for research and intervention.
On the basis of the above discussions, we make a case for a shift away from regulatory coverage as the defining criterion for precarious work. As Ferreira’s contribution more clearly demonstrates, workers might be covered by labour legislation; however, they still experience extreme forms of insecurity in terms of, for example, their employment or income. This relates to Arnold and Bongiovi’s (2013: 295) point that workers’ insecurity is the result of uneven power relations rather than the regulatory framework. The contributions of this special issue show that work-related insecurities offer a more fertile starting point.
Such labour precarity goes beyond material conditions of work. It also threatens workers’ human dignity, a link powerfully made in early definitions of decent work (ILO, 1999: 3). Furthermore, labour precarity transcends the workplace and affects workers’ wider livelihoods. There are parallel feminist debates here. Feminist economists have long argued that labour markets are operating at the intersection of productive and reproductive economies (Elson, 1999). The articles of this special issue sharpen this argument by vividly illustrating the mutual interdependence of work-related insecurities and vulnerabilities related to poverty and other forms of marginalization.
The scale at which precarious work is identified requires reconsideration for another reason. Globalization has been shown to be an important cause of precarious work, most forcefully through workers’ ‘adverse incorporation’ into GPNs (Phillips, 2011), hence widening the analytical lenses for understanding labour precarity. Global economic change is not the only factor for the rise of precarious forms of employment. As demonstrated, marginalization based on social identity as well as the denial of political rights, for example, on the basis of immigration regimes, intersects with economic forces and contribute to the (re)production of precarious work and livelihoods.
This special issue’s emphasis on structural causation of labour precarity contrasts with the opportunities for workers’ collective agency to challenge insecurities experienced in their work and livelihoods that are being identified. De Soto’s (1989) heroic informal entrepreneur, whose economic contributions are interpreted as individual acts of resistance against excessive state regulation, is joined by a diverse crowd of many no less heroic precarious workers who negotiate their livelihoods in the adverse context of exploitative employers and states that deny them citizenship-based rights. Yet, it is not their economic survival that is being re-labelled as success here, but the ways in which they exert their agency and challenge these marginalizing structures through organizing and lobbying.
Couched in Wright’s (2000: 962) terms, opportunities for workers’ agency to challenge their labour precarity emerge first and foremost from their associational power, resulting from the strength of workers’ organizations. It can be enhanced significantly if workers’ organizations take ‘atypical’ labour processes and workers’ social identities into account, but also where they join hands with communities and transnational advocacy networks, building coalitional power. A shared understanding of globalized processes that spread precarious labour conditions in the global South and North might open spaces for solidarity and joint solutions.
Possibilities to counter precarious employment conditions also emerge from workers’ structural position within the economic system: for instance, in the context of just-in-time production in GPNs, firms are more vulnerable to disruptions in the flow of production (e.g., Selwyn, 2008).
In addition to these sources of workers’ power, Chun highlights an intangible, but potent force, namely, the moral and symbolic power particular to social movement unionism. It is rooted in recognition and community benefit and can be communicated through the informal logic of public storytelling.
These contours of a new conceptualization of precarious work and related interventions have implications for research. The causation of labour precarity through an intersection of the roles of the (globalized) market, social identity and state policy calls for an interdisciplinary approach. While quantitative research is crucial for the comparative investigation of precarious workers’ material labour conditions, other dimensions of labour precarity, such as (violations of) their dignity and emotions, lend themselves for in-depth qualitative study. Finally, the threats as well as opportunities of globalization for workers imply that the global scale cannot be neglected in research on precarious work.