Introduction
Nowadays, “precarious work” is a highly controversial topic in the political and economic debate concerning labour matters within national and international institutions and organizations, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO). In recent decades, a growing number of surveys and studies have shown that precarious work has become one of the main social issues worldwide, particularly for younger generations, less protected workers such as migrants, and the female workforce. According to the ILO, the global economic crisis of 2008 heightened the level of labour insecurity worldwide, entrapping more and more categories of workers in what is increasingly labelled precarious jobs, both in the Global North and the Global South.Footnote 1 The academic debate on precarious work in the four decades considered in this article has been influenced by the spread of the phenomenon of precarious work and its perception by social actors, who started to mobilize against it in the new millennium, adopting resourceful and often pioneering forms of resistance.Footnote 2 Before the early 2000s, precarious work was hardly considered as a subject of investigation, due to the conceptualization, by neoliberal economists and politicians, of “flexibility” and “flexible labour” – important aspects of precarious work – as positive challenges to capitalist systems, deemed necessary to increase employment levels and business competitiveness. Until this time, the use of the precarious work concept had remained limited to the academic debate, as it had been regarded as a contested and highly “politicized” term.Footnote 3 The 2008 global recession led to a change. Since the outbreak of this economic crisis, a growing number of studies have been produced independently within academia as well as under the aegis of institutional bodies, especially the European Union (EU). The 2016 study on Precarious Employment in Europe, commissioned by the European Parliament, testifies not only to the increasing concern of EU institutions about the phenomenon of precarious work, but also to the final adoption of the concept as a relevant and accepted analytical tool.Footnote 4 In the past few decades, social scientists, economists, and legal experts mainly considered precarious work a new phenomenon and a characteristic feature of post-industrial society, emerging in the 1980s after the breakdown of Fordism.
More recently, however, several historical studies have questioned the novelty of job precarity, showing how forms of precarious work have characterized the entire history of industrial capitalism, both in the Global North and the Global South. According to some interpretations, precarious work is the “norm” of capitalism, while the so-called standard employment model, characterized by full-time, long-term employment with a single employer, should be viewed as a historical exception, predominant throughout Western countries only in the third quarter of the twentieth century.Footnote 5
By adopting a gendered global perspective, this article challenges the still hegemonic Western approach prevalent in the literature and seeks to contribute to the understanding of precarious work as a historical phenomenon characterizing different phases of industrial capitalism. First, it shows that the model of capitalism prevailing in the literature is the Western European and North American one, and that other models are being generally ignored. Secondly, it points out that the debate on precarious work has focused predominantly on wage work and has not related it to informal work, which is crucial to understanding the very existence of job precariousness in the Global South. Thirdly, it underlines the fact that the forms and the extent of precarious work in economic sectors other than the Western industrial sector are still under-researched. This has prevented an understanding, for instance, of the long-existing nexus of precariousness and informality in a key sector such as agriculture. Finally, this article argues that, by concentrating on the Western European and North American path as the hegemonic one, the implications of the concept of “variations of capitalism” in determining different trajectories of precarity/stability across time and space have rarely been taken into account.Footnote 6 A global gendered approach is crucial to understanding how precarious work affected male, female, and child labour differently across time and space, thereby challenging the idea of precarious work as a new, recent phenomenon. Moreover, it demonstrates that the very existence of job precariousness was not perceived and conceptualized as such until it started affecting the Western male breadwinner in core industrial sectors during the far-reaching process of deindustrialization experienced by European and North American countries in industrial capitalism.Footnote 7
The first part of the article addresses the multiple origins, definitions, and conceptualizations of precarious work in the history of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, taking into account selected contemporary sources as well as studies conducted by historians and social scientists. The first subsection examines how precarious work has been conceptualized in, and vis-à-vis, nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial societies, while the second subsection provides a selective overview of the studies addressing the resurgence of precarious work in post-industrial societies after the economic crisis of the 1970s. As language is particularly significant in this context, the relationship between job flexibility and job precariousness is investigated.
The second part explores the contributions provided by different approaches, such as feminist scholarship and Global South studies, in gendering and globalizing the precarious work debate. The first subsection shows how the intersection of gender, class, race, and citizenship has played a crucial role in the variations of precarity and stability in the history of industrial as well as post-industrial societies. The second subsection investigates the influence of transnational studies, the informality debate, and Global South perspectives on globalizing precarious work. The latest stage of globalization, as well as its critics, have impacted the precarious work debate and have produced a shift from the still hegemonic Western conceptualization towards a broader perspective, which includes the consideration of the former Communist countries jointly with the Global South.
Figure 1 Postcard for the exhibition “Illegal, temporary and precarious states of being: migration” (Bangkok, Pridi Bhanomyong Institute, Feb. 15–28, 2010). IISH collection.
The conclusion seeks to explain and discuss the limitations of the available literature, while suggesting some additional perspectives and concepts to be included in the precarious work debate.
ORIGINS AND CONCEPTS OF PRECARIOUS WORK IN THE HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
Precarious work in industrial societies
Writing a “genealogy” of the concept of precarious work has attracted the attention of numerous scholars in the past two decades, especially sociologists.Footnote 8 Only a few of them, however, have placed the concept of precarious work in the longer history of industrial capitalism or in the pre-capitalist era. Indeed, the conceptualizations of precarious work provided by social scientists from the late 1970s onwards were mainly related to the spread of the so-called “flexible labour arrangement” in the Western labour market, conceived as one of the major changes occurring in the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism. Yet, the genealogy of the concept can be traced back much further, as suggested by contemporary sources and historical studies.
From a linguistic standpoint, Jean-Claude Barbier places the origin of the terms “precariousness/precarious” in the common Latin root precor (pray) or precarius (obtained by praying), dating back to the late Middle Ages or the Early Modern era, depending on the specific country considered.Footnote 9 Also, historians like Marcel van der Linden have adopted the perspective of the longue durée, taking into account the categories of the casual poor and of casualized wage labour to trace the origins of precarity from Ancient Greece to the present.Footnote 10
Although the term “precariousness” is not new, according to Barbier, it started to be more frequently associated with employment and welfare matters in the major European countries only after 1945. But Marcel van der Linden shows that the concept was used to refer to workers’ conditions as early as 1840.Footnote 11 The French economist and sociologist Eugène Buret adopted the term précaire (precarious) in his book De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France.Footnote 12 With the rise of the social question in the nineteenth century, engaged intellectuals, especially from the socialist milieu, adopted the term as such or used a similar concept to draw attention on the precarious lives and work of the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat.
Looking at the Marxian tradition, evidence of the use of precarious/precariousness can be found in Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and even in Marx’s Capital. Footnote 13 The precariousness of workers’ conditions was explicitly mentioned by William Morris in 1883 in his Signs of Change. Footnote 14 Social reformers like Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth addressed in their enquiries the “precarious” working and living conditions of Londoners.Footnote 15 A series of articles published by the socialist journalist Adolphe Smith and the photographer John Thomson described the life of London’s street workers as “precarious”.Footnote 16 The concept was also used by Sidney Webb in 1887 in his Facts for Socialists. Footnote 17 In latecomer countries such as Italy, the concept of precariousness emerged as well in the enquiries conducted by the establishment and governmental authorities: by Franchetti and Sonnino concerning Sicily, Nitti, and Zanardelli concerning Calabria and Basilicata, and the Jacini investigations of the conditions of rural workers.Footnote 18
Contemporary observers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, hardly distinguished precarious working conditions from the precariousness of the working-class existence as such, and they closely associated the latter with the more general issue of pauperism. This was also the case of post-World War II social studies and analyses, as shown by Dorothy Day’s article on “Poverty and Precarity” (1952) in the United States or the parliamentary enquiry into poverty (1951) in the case of Italy.Footnote 19 Underemployment and low salaries were considered responsible for precarious working-class conditions even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when full and steady employment was a shared goal at a global level.
The initial attempt at a conceptualization of precarious work and precariousness came a while later, and it happened, somewhat ironically, in the 1960s, when job stability was beginning to be considered the norm of the “affluent society”. In 1964, the Italian economist Paolo Sylos Labini devoted an article to the analysis of precarious employment in Sicily, advocating the relevance of such a concept for studying developing countries and regions.Footnote 20 In his 1974 book on the social classes in Italy,Footnote 21 he associated precarious work with the Marxian concept of the lumpenproletariat, considering precarious work as a consequence of the Italian economic divide between the industrialized Northern regions and the underdeveloped Southern ones. Precarious workers were identified as low-income casual workers with a highly unstable employment relationship, usually working in small industrial shops, but also in agriculture and retail.
In the same period, Pierre Bourdieu, in his well-known study Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, used the concept of précarité to describe the conditions of “unstable” Algerian workers, whom he also associated with the lumpenproletariat.Footnote 22 In Bourdieu’s discourse, the condition of precarity and its opposite, stability, were associated with the capitalistic transformation of Algerian traditional society and the rise of a more dualistic labour market, formed by a minority of stable workers employed in the modern sector and a diverse group of unemployed or underemployed journeymen experiencing unstable working and life conditions.
Thanks to the development and institutionalization of social and labour history in the second half of the twentieth century, a growing number of historical studies focused on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century working class, revealing its structural precariousness.Footnote 23 Social and labour historians usually adopted concepts such as “unstable” and “casual” to address those working conditions that, today, are labelled “precarious”.Footnote 24 With the rise of feminist studies, female labour historians provided a crucial contribution to the understanding of the diverse levels of precarity (and stability) affecting the early working class by casting light on its gendered composition and diverse paths.Footnote 25 “Instability” became a crucial category of analysis to investigate women’s working conditions in the modern age, whereas the term precarious/precariousness was rarely applied until the new millennium.Footnote 26
On the theoretical level, studies by Immanuel Wallerstein, especially Historical Capitalism,Footnote 27 have underscored that the existence of an industrial proletariat, employed permanently and paid wages, on time, depended on both the needs of the employers in the different phases of industrialization and the nature of their products. Since the first industrial revolution, employers tended to organize the labour force according to their product market, trying to offload onto the weakest part of the labour force (i.e. women and children) the risks related to their entrepreneurial activity.
While neither the contemporary observers of the early working class, nor the twentieth-century historians provided comprehensive definitions of precarious work and job precariousness, historians from the 2000s onwards increasingly started to use these concepts to analyse workers’ conditions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial capitalism. The perpetuation of similar forms of precarious work from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, despite the changes in the organization of work and production, clearly emerges from the studies by Sophie Beau on the department stores of LyonsFootnote 28 and by Augusto De Benedetti on glove-making in Naples.Footnote 29 The same perspective is applied in the recent work of Marc Leleux, who retraces forms of precarious work in the industrial development of Northern France from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century.Footnote 30
The conceptualization of job precariousness and precarious work that we are familiar with has been mainly elaborated in contrast to the normative standard employment model of the affluent Western society of the 1950s–1970s.Footnote 31 It is not surprising, then, that few social scientists, historians, and even contemporary social actors adopted the concept of precarious/precariousness/precarity to investigate the working conditions during the Fordist era.Footnote 32 This was considered to be the main period of job stability in the history of industrial capitalism, as opposed to the generalized job instability of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 33
A relevant exception, never previously acknowledged, is the study published in the early 1980s by the Italian political scientist (and novelist) Valerio Evangelisti, who adopted the concept of the precariat (precariato) in identifying the rural proletariat of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as the “Fordist” industrial proletariat of the communist-led Emilia-Romagna region.Footnote 34 Evangelisti’s empirical study contributed to showing the existence of job precariousness within the allegedly “Fordist” working class, which more recent research has corroborated.
In the past two decades, the concept of precariousness has also been used with a wider and more existential meaning, usually by adopting the neologism precarity. It was again Pierre Bourdieu who used the term précarité to address the transformation of society resulting from globalization and neoliberalism, stating that, in the given circumstances, everybody was precarious .Footnote 35 In Judith Butler’s view, the concept of precarity “focuses on the conditions that threaten life in ways outside of one’s control”.Footnote 36 The concept of the “precariat”, widespread after the publication of Guy Standing’s book,Footnote 37 is also part of the debate on precariousness at large. Defined as a class-in-the-making, whose members have insecure labour relationships and no long-term employment contracts, the very concept of precariat has been contested by scholars such as Jan Breman. The latter addressed the precariat as a “bogus concept” for several reasons, amongst them the North-centric approach, the artificial division between the proletariat and the precariat, the lack of historical perspective, and the very definition of the precariat as a class-to-be.Footnote 38
The subsequent attempts to provide a comprehensive definition of precarious work/precariousness have revealed to what extent the concept has played an increasingly important role in the debate of labour issues in the past three decades. The difficulty in reaching a shared and formalized definition of precarious work/precarious employment, however, testified to the institutional reluctance of adopting as a key concept a notion that was considered highly political, was related to social movements, and was contrary to the mainstream employment policies that were based on the paradigm of labour flexibility. The following subsection will reconstruct some aspects of this controversy.
(Re)Discovering precarious work in post-industrial societies
The economic crisis of the 1970s and its social consequences played a major role in triggering the debate, since the 1980s, on precarious work and job precariousness, first in Western Europe and later in the North American context. The conceptualizations of precarious work in the social sciences were closely related to the spread of the so-called flexible labour arrangement in Western labour markets, conceived as one of the major changes in the wake of the 1970s crisis. As pointed out by scholars such as Jan Breman, Marcel van der Linden, Ronaldo Munck, Brett Neilson, and Ned Rossiter,Footnote 39 the concept of precarious work was elaborated in contrast to the so-called standard employment model, which was considered to be the standard employment relationship in the West. The collapse, but also the resilience, of the standard employment model were closely connected with the spread of job flexibility and the (new) rise of precarious work in the literature of the 1980s and 1990s discussed below.
Both in Italy and Spain, the rise of job precariousness was mainly associated with the decentralization of industrial production and the spread of subcontractors, industrial homework, and undocumented work.Footnote 40 In France, the concept of precarious work could mainly be found in family and poverty studies, as “atypical” employment situations were seen as the primary source of precarious living conditions.Footnote 41 Between the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s, terms such as emplois précaires/précarité de l’emploi (French), lavoro precario/precarietà del lavoro (Italian), empleo and trabajo precario/precaridad laboral (Spanish) entered the academic debate in the respective countries. However, only from the early 2000s onwards were the terms “precarious work/employment” and “job/labour precariousness” frequently used, indicating that the precarious work debate was not yet as developed in the English-speaking countriesFootnote 42 as it was in the Mediterranean ones, with the significant exception of Canada.Footnote 43 In Germany as well, it was only around the beginning of new millennium that the concept of Prekariat/Prekarität and prekäre Arbeit became increasingly common in scholarly debates.Footnote 44
The importance of the flexibility model in the management of employees by enterprises,Footnote 45 and its part of the government employment strategy to reduce unemployment,Footnote 46 triggered a new strand of economic studies in the 1980s. The relationship between labour market (de)regulation, flexibility, and precarious work was explicitly addressed by the French economist Guy Caire in his 1982 article “Précarisation des emplois et régulation du marché du travail”.Footnote 47 Moreover, the volume La flexibilité du travail en Europe, co-edited by the French regulationist economist Robert Boyer,Footnote 48 and the paper Labour Flexibility: Cure or Cause for Unemployment?, written by Guy Standing,Footnote 49 at the time employed at the ILO, investigated the effects of job flexibility.
Since the mid-1980s, however, other attempts to conceptualize precarious work were made in Latin America, where the Inter-American Centre for Labour Administration (CIAT-OIT), an ILO facility in Lima, Peru, and the Argentinian Ministry of Labour and Social Security promoted the joint study El empleo precario in Argentina.Footnote 50 In 1980s Latin America, the conceptualization of precarious work was already very much related to the ideal of industrial wage labour and the standard employment relationship, in spite of the prevailing informality of labour relationships in the continent. The precarization process was addressed as a consequence of the labour market reform of the 1970s, promoted in Latin America under the influence of neoliberal economic policies during the various military dictatorships. Flexible labour arrangements, such as temporary work, part-time work, temporary agency work, sub-contracting, and undocumented work, including industrial homeworking, were considered to be the main forms of job precarity.
In the late 1980s, Gerry and Janine Rodgers’ book Precarious Jobs in Labour Market Regulation provided the most influential and long-lasting conceptualization of precarious work, introducing the concept of precarious work for the first time to the English readership.Footnote 51 The volume was the result of a seminar jointly organized by the International Institute of Labour Studies, an ILO research facility in Geneva, and the Free University of Brussels. Gerry Rodgers, a development economist at the ILO, conceptualized as precarious jobs “with a short time horizon or for which the risk of job loss is high”; for the same reason, irregular jobs were also considered to be precarious. Job precariousness, in his view, involved “instability, lack of protection, insecurity and social and economic vulnerability”.Footnote 52
Since the mid-1980s, comparative studies on labour law exploring the changes in labour contracts and labour legislation in a West–East perspective have increased, revealing well before 1989 a shared concern across the Iron Curtain regarding the new hiring and dismissal practices developed in the capitalist West as well as in the communist East.Footnote 53 Although the topic of precarious work was not explicitly addressed, the spread of flexible contracts,Footnote 54 the changing regulations on dismissals and, more broadly, labour law deregulation were dealt with, indicating the early concern of labour law scholars concerning the possible dismantling of the standard employment model.Footnote 55 The major changes that occurred in the Soviet labour market under perestroika were discussed immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall under the ILO umbrella, which, in 1990, organized a conference in Moscow entitled “Towards Labour Flexibility and Employment Reform in the USSR”.Footnote 56 The new labour legislation promoted in the second half of the 1980s, together with the potential role of the flexibility paradigm, lay at the heart of the analysis by scholars under the leadership of Guy Standing. Unlike the explanation of precarious work developed with regard to Western Europe and Latin America, where the process of precarization was clearly seen as an effect of the introduction of flexible labour arrangements, the Soviet Union’s labour market was regarded as a system that needed to be more flexible. Although the potential spread of precarious work was not a real concern of those scholars, the risk of falling into periods of labour insecurity did emerge in the analyses.
In the 1990s, the debate on precarious work became highly polarized. Orthodox economists saw job flexibility as an opportunity and a necessity in order to create new employment, usually avoiding the very concept of precariousness. This position was fully endorsed by the European Employment Strategy launched in 1997.Footnote 57 An increasing number of sociologists, however, started emphasizing the close connection between job flexibility and precariousness, explicitly using the term. French socio-economic scientists were the first to further elaborate on job precariousness, adopting the concept of précarité extensively.Footnote 58 Robert Castel, in his book Les métamorphoses de la question sociale, addressed precariousness as a destabilizing force for society as a whole.Footnote 59 Along the same lines, Serge Paugam and Pierre Bourdieu elaborated on the impact of job precariousness at the social level, in the wake of the hegemony of the flexibility paradigm.Footnote 60 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiappello, in their well-known book Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, looked at the spread of precarious work as an effect of the increasing labour market segmentation and the major changes that had occurred in the capitalist system since the crisis of the 1970s.Footnote 61
Since the late 1990s, more and more studies in Western countries have explicitly addressed precariousness as the social and individual costs of labour flexibility.Footnote 62 Books such as Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Characters or Luciano Gallino’s Il costo umano della flessibilità are clear examples of this approach.Footnote 63 In Italy, the 1970s debate was not followed by any significant studies until the second half of the 1990s,Footnote 64 when several scholars such as Andrea Tiddi, Roberto Rizza, and Federico Chicchi started adopting the category of precariousness and precarious work as key concepts in their analyses.Footnote 65 In the United Kingdom, the studies on precarious work in the 1990s were fewer and more limited in scope, usually adopting key words such as “insecurity” and “vulnerability” instead of precariousness as such.Footnote 66 The most relevant comparative study of the 1990s, the so-called Supiot Report, written by an interdisciplinary group of experts established under the patronage of the European Commission, also analysed the changes occurring in the European labour laws with a specific focus on the consequences of the spread of flexible labour arrangements.Footnote 67 Several studies investigated the process of precarization in conjunction with the spread of job flexibility also in non-European Western countries such as Canada and Australia.Footnote 68 Few of them dealt with non-Western countries, and if they did, then again it was mainly with Latin America.Footnote 69
Figure 2 “Precarious Mayday” Demonstration, Brighton May 1, 2017. Photograph by Callum Cant at PoliticalCritique.org, available at https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/precarious-couriers-are-leading-the-struggle-against-platform-capitalism/2017/08/24
Since the early 2000s, the academic debate on job precariousness has become topical, involving a larger number of scholars in the socio-economic sciences and humanities all over the Western countries and beyond. In addition to economists, sociologists, and legal experts, anthropologists, psychologists, gender scholars, and political scientists became increasingly involved in the analysis of precarious work, together with scholars in the humanities, who discovered a wide range of artistic, literary, and cinematographic products based on the topic.Footnote 70 A real iconography of precarity,Footnote 71 depicting precarious workers as a proper group, often with recognizable features, evolved, along with studies addressing precarious workers as the core workforce of the knowledge/digital society of twenty-first-century capitalism.Footnote 72 It is not surprising, then, that more than a dozen special issues devoted to precarious work and precarity at large have been published over the past decade, across a wide range of academic journals, ranging from sociology, to feminist studies, labour law, management studies, social movements studies, drama and art studies, and history.Footnote 73
With the launch of the Italian Mayday parade (2001) and later on EuroMayDay (2005) – the transnational protest promoted by precarious (and migrant) workers on May Day – an increasing number of studies started analysing precarious workers’ mobilization in Western Europe, especially in the Mediterranean countries, where protest levels were higher.Footnote 74 Due to the expansion of the European social movements’ campaign against precarious work and the subsequent involvement of European and even international trade union federations – e.g. the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) and the European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions (EFFAT) – in the mid-2000s, the concepts of precariousness/precarity/precarious became popular not only within academia, but also in the general public debate.Footnote 75 It is worth mentioning that several academic studies were indeed conducted by scholars belonging to the génération précaire, who combined political commitments towards a condition they themselves were experiencing with the necessary scientific skills to contribute substantially to the study of the topic in a variety of disciplines.Footnote 76
An important part of the European debate from the early 2000s until the onset of the economic crisis of 2008 focused on the conceptualization and implementation of the so-called flexicurity model, based on the idea of merging managerial flexibility and employment security. This debate was at first led by Scandinavian scholarsFootnote 77 and acquired a European scope when flexicurity was adopted as an explicit goal in the renewal of the European Employment Strategy.Footnote 78 In this debate, however, critical approaches also emerged, as flexibility was considered to be a possible driver for a new wave of precarization on the global scale.Footnote 79 Scholars such as Ruud Muffels, Peter Auer, and Frank Tros pointed out the difficulty in balancing employment instability with highly diverse systems of social security that were based on the differing financial capabilities of European states. This was increasingly discussed from 2007/2008 onwards, when critical studies on the financial sustainability of the flexicurity model were published.Footnote 80 In the 2010s, in addition to the ILO’s the and EU’s studies,Footnote 81 Romke van der Veen, Mara Yerkes, and Peter Achterberg’s research, as well as Toomas Kotkas’s and Kenneth Veitch’s study, address the relationship between welfare regimes, labour market flexibility, and job precariousness at large, advocating a new basic floor of social rights.Footnote 82
GENDERING AND GLOBALIZING PRECARIOUS WORK IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CAPITALISM
Women’s history and feminist scholarship
The literature on precarious work became much more global and gendered in the new millennium, overcoming the Eurocentric perspective and the gender blind approach of the debate in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2010, the European Parliament approved a resolution on “precarious women workers”, which stated that the “gender nature of precarious work” and gender discrimination underlie the prevailing spread of job precariousness.Footnote 83 The relationship between gender and precarious work has been analysed with increasing attention since the 2000s, even though, in some countries, the feminization of atypical contracts has been studied continuously since the 1990s.Footnote 84
In the new millennium, several scholars, adopting the category of gender and intersectionality, have framed precarious work in the history of (gendered) capitalistic relations of production. For example, Angela Mitropoulos’s essay of 2005 and Leah Vosko’s study published in 2000 criticized the novelty of the phenomenon from a feminist point of view.Footnote 85 Andrea Komlosy explicitly links the analysis of capitalism, labour relations, and precarious work. In questioning wage labour as the dominant labour relationship of historical and contemporary capitalism, she conceived precarious work as a labour relationship by itself, which has characterized the capitalist system throughout its history.Footnote 86 The concept of intersectionality, introduced in the early 1990s by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw,Footnote 87 has proven to be relevant not only for feminist scholarship, gender studies, and women’s history,Footnote 88 but also for labour history.Footnote 89 Addressing the intersection of gender, class, race, ethnicity (and citizenship) in analysing precarious workers and recurring forms of job precariousness seems indeed particularly relevant, as shown, for instance, by Annette Thörnquist and Åsa-Karin Engstrand’s study on precarious work in Sweden.Footnote 90
Eileen Boris stresses that single women, African Americans, migrants, and domestic and agricultural workers were never fully integrated in the steady employment codified in the United States by the New Deal.Footnote 91 Along the same lines, Sean Hill has recently analysed precarity in its relationship with the political and theoretical conceptualization of “Black Lives Matter”, launched by the homonymous movement in 2013. By emphasizing how black Americans experienced precariousness well before the rise of neoliberalism, Hill openly contests Standing’s concept of the precariat as a new class, claiming that black Americans have been part of a possibly “eternal precariat”.Footnote 92
Drawing from Butler’s theory, Isabelle Lorey points out that the allegedly new neoliberal precarity has a long tradition in industrial capitalism, which has excluded women and migrants from social security provisions also in Western countries.Footnote 93 The article by Saffia Elisa Shaukat on Italian seasonal workers in Switzerland clearly illustrates how job precariousness has characterized the working and living conditions of Italians who have emigrated beyond the Alps since the 1950s.Footnote 94 My own studies on Italian women workers over the past sixty years have shown to what extent the sexual division of labour and sex-based discrimination have been at the heart of the gendered nature of precarious work, which has characterized women’s working conditions in all economic sectors in both industrial and post-industrial societies.Footnote 95 Additional studies on North America have revealed the existence and relevance of temporary employees, labelled “Kelly Girls” for being mostly female, in the Canadian and US labour markets in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the so-called temporary help industry, those women experienced working conditions that would today be labelled precarious, as Leah Vosko’s and Erin Hatton’s studies have suggested.Footnote 96
In Mediterranean countries, feminist scholars such as Adriana Nannicini, Cristina Morini, Silvia Federici, and Laura FantoneFootnote 97 have contributed to revealing the gendered transformation of the capitalist system in the so-called neoliberal age, which increased the level of precariousness in women’s working and living conditions. Women’s activism against precariousness has been dealt with in regard to Italy and Spain, where specific feminist groups such as Precarias a la Deriva were formed, becoming themselves a subject of investigation for feminist scholars.Footnote 98 In addition to Spanish and Italian feminists, German feminist scholars have contributed to addressing the relationship between precariousness, freedom, and self-determination.Footnote 99 The nexus of reproduction and job precariousness has been dealt with at various levels, mostly concerning the Global North.Footnote 100
A virtual round table coordinated by Jasmine Puar shows the diverse possible conceptualizations of precariousness and precarization in the feminist milieu. In addition to the economic aspect, feminist thinkers address the existential dimension by examining the relationship between precarity and the female body, precarity and reproduction, as well as the various precarious identities.Footnote 101 Feminae Precariae is the definition recently proposed by Alyson Cole and Victoria Hattam to understand the gendered precarization of neoliberal capitalism, explored from several perspectives in the 2017 Fall/Winter issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly.Footnote 102 In Cole and Hattam’s view, “the feminine form highlights the gendered fragmentation of production, reproduction, and citizenship; the plural conjugation signifies how precarization, which is embedded in the project of increasing individual capital, is widespread and yet undermines collectivism”.Footnote 103
In the crisis years, the books edited by Judy Fudge and Rosemary OwenFootnote 104 and Leah VoskoFootnote 105 focused on the gendered nature of precarious work and the growing percentages of precariousness among women, questioning eventually the alleged positive relationship between the feminization and flexibilization of work at the global level. By analysing the relationship between precarious work and changing legal norms, Fudge and Owen establish to what extent national laws and policies had historically reinforced gender roles, according to which women, when they worked, were usually employed temporarily in more unstable and precarious jobs. Vosko shows how the erosion of the standard employment model did not help to reduce the gender inequalities in the labour market or women’s level of precariousness, and she advocates a new employment relationship.
Some feminist scholars adopting a Global South perspective also provided a crucial contribution towards understanding the relationship between the current wave of precarization and the global feminization of labour, commonly understood as the increase of women’s participation in paid work worldwide but also as the extension of traditional female working conditions to the workforce as a whole.Footnote 106 Fatima El-Tayeb points out that precarity is not a symptom of a crisis of late capitalism, but rather a long-term structural element of the modern capitalist system, stressing how populations outside the West had been the main subjects of a process of precarization.Footnote 107 Encarnacion Gutiérrez-Rodríguez and Nicole Constable deal with the relationship between precariousness, feminization of work and migration, something which several scholars have contributed to developing in regard to specific sectors, such as domestic and care work, call centres, and farm work.Footnote 108
Women’s history and feminist scholarship have provided a crucial contribution to understanding precarization as a continuous process and precariousness as a defining condition of women’s employment in the long run, something underlined also by the few studies taking into account the early modern era. The special issue Flessibili/Precarie (Flexible/Precarious) of the Italian women’s history journal Genesis revealed how precarious and flexible work could be conceptualized also in the pre-industrial era with regard to several feminized sectors.Footnote 109
Research on industrial homeworking is particularly relevant for understanding the persistence of specific forms of traditionally highly feminized precarious work, usually closely connected with informal and undocumented work.Footnote 110 Since 1997, women’s informal work has been addressed also by the global research-policy-action network Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), which has contributed to expand the knowledge of the quantity and quality of informal work worldwide with a specific focus on feminized highly precarious groups of workers (home-based workers, street vendors, domestic workers, waste pickers). The relationship between informal and precarious employment has been addressed, within the wider debate on the quality of employment. Footnote 111
Another relevant contribution has come from the studies on mobility and pluriactivity, which have revealed the multiple strategies adopted by male and female “contingent”, “casual”, or “seasonal” workers to face their structural conditions of job and life precariousness. How job precariousness has historically shaped not only male and female behaviour, but also the households’ social and economic strategies and their gender division of labour is particularly relevant in a diachronic perspective. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century proletarian and sub-proletarian families, studied by Ad Knotter,Footnote 112 can be compared to the twenty-first century precarious ones, both in the Global North and in the Global South.Footnote 113
Transnational studies and perspectives from the Global South
The onset of the global economic crisis in 2008 played a relevant role in popularizing and globalizing the precarious work debate.Footnote 114 The relationship between precariousness and globalization became one of the main strands of research during the crisis years,Footnote 115 also thanks to the role of the ILO, the Eurofound, and the European Commission, which funded several transnational research projects and conferences on this topic.Footnote 116 A special issue of the ILO’s International Journal of Labour Research featured some of the contributions to a 2011 symposium, held by the ILO’s Bureau for Workers’ Activities (ACTRAV), entitled Meeting the Challenge of Precarious Work: A Workers’ Agenda.Footnote 117 The articles addressed the relationship between precarious work and the ILO’s standards, including the 2008 “Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization” and the 2015 Recommendation concerning the “Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy”. The ILO’s role in establishing stable employment relationships across the globe up to the crisis of the 1970s is explored, along with the current need for new standards to protect precarious workers in the twenty-first century.Footnote 118 In 2016, the ILO issued the report Non-Standard Employment around the World, after hosting a tripartite meeting on the same topic in 2015. The effort to increase the knowledge about the impact of “non-standard employment” worldwide was part of the “Future of Work Centenary Strategy” launched by the Director-General. Although the concept of precariousness was mentioned, “non-standard employment” was preferred to emphasize the decent work deficits as well as the main areas of insecurity experienced by workers in non-standard employment, which should be addressed by policiesFootnote 119 . The relationship between precarious work and human rights has become another relevant topic in the international debate on precarization and globalization, which has also seen the involvement of international trade union federations.Footnote 120
In the crisis years, precarious work also became a relevant issue in the former Communist countries. Eastern Europe has been included in recent comparative studies with a European scope, while research projects funded by the EU, such as “Precarious Work and Social Rights” and “PRECARIR”, included or were about Eastern Europe, too.Footnote 121 Additional studies have been published also in regard to Russia and former Yugoslavia.Footnote 122 In the latter, precarious work is often related to the restructuring of the industrial system during the transition from planned to market economies, which frequently led to a process of deindustrialization, as Chiara Bonfiglioli’s studies show.Footnote 123 The privatization and closure of previously state-owned enterprises has led, according to these studies, to a generalized process of precarization and informalization.Footnote 124
In addition to covering former communist Eastern European countries, an increasing number of studies have addressed the informalization and precarization of working conditions in twenty-first-century China, at times comparing contemporary labour relations to the ones existing in Mao’s era when the “iron rice bowl” model granted job stability to the Chinese workers in the massive state sectors.Footnote 125 Other studies investigate the changes that occurred between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s in Chinese labour law and employment policies, which led to the rise of temporary staffing agencies as a solution to regional unemployment. The key role of those agencies in making the labour market more flexible and increasing the level of Chinese labour force precarization is discussed by Feng Xu, who points out how flexible employment in China is linked more to informal labour arrangements than in Western countries.Footnote 126 Thanks to the work of Heidi Gottfried and Anne Allison, the breakdown of the post-war system of employment stability and the increasing spread of precarious work in post-1991 Japan have also been addressed, revealing a rather similar path to that of Western Europe and North America.Footnote 127 Precarious labour in contemporary Japan, according to Allison, has reshaped social relations and increased the sense of loss and insecurity compared to the steadiness of the previous family-corporate system.Footnote 128
Asia at large, Africa, and Latin America entered the debate on precarious work in the crisis years, fuelled by Guy Standing’s controversial book, The Precariat.Footnote 129 The debate saw the involvement of a number of scholars working in the Global South or conducting research on it. Among them, Ronaldo Munck contested the novelty and relevance of Standing’s concept of the precariat, providing an interesting contribution to understanding the role of precarious work in the history of capitalism beyond Western countries.Footnote 130 He stressed the relevance of the informality debate and informal work to understand the historical and contemporary forms of labour precariousness in the Global South, where Fordism and the standard employment model had never been the norm.
However, the discussion on the informalization of labour relations as a global process has a longer tradition, dating back to the 1990s.Footnote 131 Ulrich Beck coined the expression “Brazilianization of the West” at the end of the 1990s to stress the informalization of Western labour conditions and the unexpected convergence with informal/precarious labour arrangements already existing in the peripheral economies of the Global South,Footnote 132 something he had already envisaged to some extent in his study on the Risikogesellschaft in 1986.Footnote 133 In the early 2010s, Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden corroborated the idea of a convergence of Western countries and the Global South insofar as the spread of informality and precarity was concerned, claiming that the “West is more likely to follow the Rest than the other way around”.Footnote 134 Along the same line, Andreas Eckert has claimed that a process of convergence between the Western and African labour arrangements has occurred in the light of the normalization of precarity in the West.Footnote 135 Sara Mosoetsa, Joel Stillermann, and Chris Tilly – in their introduction to the special issue of International Labor and Working-Class History devoted to “Precarious Labor in Global Perspective” – argue for a global convergence in labour relations as well, interpreting the recent spread of precarious work as a “return”.Footnote 136
Scholars adopting a Global South and post-colonial perspective have emphasized the need to connect the debate on the informalization of labourFootnote 137 with the discourse on job precariousness to fully grasp the normality of precarious work outside Western countries in a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The relationship between precarization and informalization has become a crucial driver in expanding the precarious work debate in the Global South as a whole in the 2010s.Footnote 138 Several scholars have claimed, providing empirical evidence for their arguments, that Africa, Latin America, and Asia have experienced worsening labour conditions since the second half of 1970s, which had interrupted previous attempts of creating a more formalized and regulated labour market. A new wave of informalization/precarization, according to these studies, started also in the Global South in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote 139
Figure 3 Industriall affiliates in Pakistan, PCEM, demonstrates against Shell in Karachi, October, 7 2017. Pakistan Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General Workers Union – PCEM. Used by permission. Photo available at http://www.industriall-union.org/unions-take-action-against-precarious-work-at-shell.
The levels and forms of precariousness affecting South, South-East, and East Asian labour markets have been addressed by scholars such as Arne Kallenberg and Kevin Hewison, who link the expansion of precarious work in those contexts to the development of global production chains under “neoliberal globalization”. Precarious workers are labelled differently from country to country, experiencing a diverse degree of instability in East Asian countries (Taiwan, South Korea, China, and Japan) or in southern and southeastern Asian ones (Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and India) .Footnote 140
Jan Breman and Rina Agarwala, in analysing the Indian context, have shown the relevance of addressing the relationship between informal labour and precarious work, due to the prevailing informality of Indian labour relations in the twentieth century and its increase in the formal economy of the new millennium. The expansion of outsourcing, subcontracting, self-employment, and export-led factories has been fuelled by the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s, according to Agarwala’s study on the textile and garment sectors, resulting in the spread of informal and more precarious labour arrangements.Footnote 141 More recent empirical analysis has provided additional evidence of the features of such a spread and its consequences.Footnote 142
In addition to the Indian context,Footnote 143 an increasing number of studies in English, Spanish, and Portuguese have been investigating precarious work and informal work in the urban economies of twenty-first-century Central and Latin American metropolises. Job and life precariousness appears as intertwined in the life of the urban poor, such as street vendors, waste pickers, sex workers, and other informal workers of Argentina, Brazil, and other countries.Footnote 144 The relationship between urban economies, informality, and precarity has been investigated with regard to different cities in the Global South,Footnote 145 including urban Africa at large.Footnote 146 In addition, urban precarious (and informal) workers – ranging from street vendors to self-employed workers in the handmaking or creative sectors – have been studied in such cities in the Global North as New York, Detroit, and Milan, revealing to what extent the condition of precariousness could be shared by professionals and the homeless in twenty-first-century capitalist cities.Footnote 147
Franco Barchiesi, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, and Bridget Kenny have shown the nexus of precarity and informalization in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa, pointing out how the race system influenced the level of stability and precarity in both periods, but also the extent of the more recent wave of informalization/precarization.Footnote 148 The latter has also been explored in Southern African countries by Oupa Bodibe, who addresses the phenomenon with regard to Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, stressing the role of multinational companies.Footnote 149
Other studies have recently noted the relevance of connecting precarious work and the free/unfree labour debate.Footnote 150 Christian De Vito’s research on colonial and post-colonial Latin and Central America suggests addressing the relationship between precarity and workers’ control to understand how the different degrees of precarity could be connected to workers’ autonomy.Footnote 151 Some studies point out the lack of freedom experienced by some precarious workers, namely migrants and undocumented workers, and the long-existing coexistence of forced labour, exploitation, and precarity up to the contemporary forms of modern slavery.Footnote 152 The intersection of precarity, free/unfree labour, and migration has been analysed as a relevant subject of investigation as well.Footnote 153 Increasingly, studies are looking at the conditions of migrant workers as precarious, underlining the gender implications as well as the racial ones. Among others, Carl-Ulrik Schierup offers new findings to understand the relationship between precarious work and migration at the global level and in the long run.Footnote 154
The historiography on the role of intermediaries in the labour market, moreover, shows how the diverse recruitment methods could contribute to the expansion of precarity and unfree labour conditions as well.Footnote 155 The resurgence of the figure of the gangmaster in the agricultural sector, explicitly and repeatedly banned in the British as well as the Italian contexts, has increased the degree of precariousness of rural workers in the twenty-first century, and they have often been obliged to accept exploitative and unfree labour conditions to hold onto their jobs.Footnote 156 In addition to gangmasters, labour brokers and middlemen in general have played a significant role in increasing the nexus between precarious and unfree labour in the Global South as well as in the Global North.Footnote 157
CONCLUSION: HISTORICIZING PRECARIOUS WORK IN GLOBAL CAPITALISM
The debate on precarious work in the past forty years has become increasingly interdisciplinary and international, involving all the social sciences and humanities worldwide, including history. This article has shown that precarious work and job precariousness frequently started to be addressed in the nineteenth century and never disappeared altogether from social enquiries and the social sciences literature, including the studies conducted during the Fordist era. A strictly Euro-centric perspective was dominant in the debate until the 1990s, leading to the universalization of the Western capitalist model and the adoption of its standard employment relationship as the norm compared to which precarious work was considered an exception (and a novelty). In the new millennium, feminist scholarship and Global South perspectives have contributed to gendering and globalizing the precarious work debate, criticizing Euro-centric approaches. The relevance of allowing for different models of capitalism in the precarious work debate has become apparent, along with the importance of connecting precarious work and informal work to understand precariousness in particular in non-Western countries, but also increasingly in the Global North.
Several strands of research can contribute to a better understanding of the historical role of precarious work in the history of industrial and post-industrial global capitalism. Following the feminist and post-colonial critique, studies deconstructing the meaning of work, usually understood only as wage labour, could be useful to pinpoint the crucial role of other forms of work in the home-based and subsistence economy. Research adopting the categories of gender and intersectionality, as well as Global South perspectives, have played a crucial role in criticizing the mainstream periodization and in rethinking the role of precarity/stability in the history of industrial and post-industrial capitalism beyond Western countries. Studies of the effect of the transition from state socialism to a market economy are particularly useful to understand how the socialist model of stability has been disrupted after the demise of state socialism and how, in the former Communist countries, similar forms of precariousness have developed. Research addressing informalization and precarization as intertwined phenomena could suggest further historical routes, which might provide additional evidence of the key role of precarious workers in the history of global capitalism. Moreover, migration studies are particularly relevant to understand the precarity/freedom/citizenship nexus.
From a conceptual point of view, historicizing precarious work in the history of global capitalism implies acknowledging job stability as an exception and job precariousness as its norm. The concept of “waves of precarization” is relevant for comparing forms of precarity at different times and in various places, but also for mapping the existence of precarious workers and their features in different economic sectors over time. The diverse waves of precarization have probably been generated by international macro-economic events (e.g. the capitalist crisis), influenced by global political dynamics (e.g. the bipolar Cold War order and its end), shaped by economic theory (e.g. Keynesianism vs. neoliberalism) and production models (e.g. Fordism vs. post-Fordism), and opposed by labour actions, social movements, and progressive labour laws.Footnote 158 Rereading the history of industrial and post-industrial capitalism through the opposite concepts of stability/precarity enables us to reconstruct not only the development of the working class and its path towards growing levels of stability in Western countries, but also to retrace the changes in the labour conditions of the so-called peripheral/marginal subjects, among them women, migrants, children, and Global South workers as a whole. Comparing the enduring figures of precarious workers in their manifold manifestations (e.g. industrial homeworkers, street vendors, farmhands, domestic and sex workers) could reveal how subsequent waves of precarization have improved or worsened the labour and living conditions of marginalized subjects across the globe and in different periods.
