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- For a sociological view of labor conditions, see Precarious work
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Definition
Precarity is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. Edward Bellamy (March 26 1850 &ndash May 22 1898 was an American Author and Socialist, most famous for his Utopian Novel, Anthony "Tony" Neil Wedgwood Benn (born 3 April 1925 formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate, is a British Socialist Politician. Phillip E Berryman (born 1938 is the author of several books on both Liberation theology and the Christian experience in Latin America. Dorothy Day ( November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American Journalist turned anarchist, social activist Antonio ("Toni" Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist political philosopher. Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy ( –) (Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й, was a Russian Writer widely regarded Mary Ward may refer to Mary Ward (scientist, a multidisciplinary scientist who may have been the first fatality in a car accident Mary Ward Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, OP (born 8 June 1928 in Lima) is a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest regarded as the founder of The Catholic Worker Movement is a Catholic organization founded by the " Servant of God " Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933 The Christian Socialist Movement, or CSM, is a socialist society affiliated to the British Labour Party. Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Liberation theology is a school of Theology within Christianity, particularly in the Roman Catholic The Praxis school was a Marxist humanist philosophical movement Social justice, sometimes called civil justice, refers to the concept of a Society in which Justice is achieved in every aspect of society rather than Christianity ( Greek Χριστιανισμός from the word Xριστός ( Christ)is a monotheistic Religion centered on the life and teachings The labour movement or labor movement is a broad term for the development of a collective organization of working people, to campaign in their own interest for better New Unionism is a term which has been used twice in the history of the labour movement both times involving moves to broaden the union agenda The proletariat (from Latin la ''proles'' "offspring" is a term used to identify a lower Social class; a member of such a class is proletarian Social Movement Unionism is a trend of theory and practice in contemporary trade unionism Syndicalism is a type of movement which aims to degrade capitalist societies through action by the Working class on the industrial front Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the Means of production and distribution Timeline of Organized labor history 1790s - 1800s - 1810s - 1820s - 1830s - 1840s - 1850s Labor rights or workers' rights are a group of Legal rights and claimed Human rights having to do with Labor relations between Workers Child labor is the employment of Children at regular and sustained labour The 8-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement (aka the Short-time movement) had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where Occupational safety and health is a cross-disciplinary area concerned with protecting the Safety, Health and welfare of people engaged in Collective bargaining is the process whereby workers organize together to meet converse and compromise upon the work environment with their employers A trade union or labour union is an organization of workers who have banded together to achieve common goals in key areas such as wages hours and working conditions forming This is a list of Trade unions and Union federations by country This is a list of federations of Trade unions. Those federations listed under each country are also known as National trade union centres and are organisations formed Unions have been compared across countries by growth and decline patterns by violence levels and by kinds of political activity Inaugural Congress The founding and first congress of the ITUC was held November 1 - 3 2006 in Vienna TemplateInfobox Union for usage -->The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU was established in the wake of the Second Template talkInfobox Union for usage --> The International Workers' Association ( IWA) ( Spanish: Strike action, often simply called a strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal by Employees to perform work. The following is a list of deliberate absence from work related to specific working conditions ( strikes) or due to general unhappiness with the political order ( General strikes A general strike is a Strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city region or country A sympathy strike is a Strike action that is initiated by workers in one industry and supported by workers in a separate but related industry or profession A sit-down strike is a form of Civil disobedience in which an organized group of workers usually employed at a factory or other centralized location take possession of Work-to-rule is an Industrial action in which Employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of a workplace and follow safety or other regulations to Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, and also known as Joseph Hillström ( October 7, 1879 or 1882 – November 19, 1915 Dita Indah Sari is an Indonesian Trade union and Socialist activist For the Baseball player Walter Ruether see Dutch Ruether. Walter Philip Reuther ( September 1, 1907 – Sonja Davies ONZ ( November 11, 1923 &ndash June 12, 2005) was a New Zealand trade unionist peace campaigner and Member Eugene Victor Debs (November 5 1855 &ndash October 20 1926 was an American union leader one of the founding members of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Arthur James Cook (1883 - 1931 known as A J Cook, was a British Coal miner and Trade union leader Shirley GE Carr is a Canadian union leader who was the first woman president of Canada's largest labour organization the Canadian Labour Congress. Labor history (or labour history) is a broad field of study concerned with the development of the Labor movement and the Working class. The field of industrial relations (also called labor relations) looks at the relationship between Management and workers particularly groups of workers represented Labour law (also known as employment or labor law is the body of Laws administrative rulings and precedents which address the legal rights of and restrictions Precarious work is a term used to describe non-standard Employment which is poorly paid insecure unprotected and cannot support a household In common usage existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses but in Philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning and is often contrasted with Predictability (also called banality) refers to the degree that a correct Prediction or Forecast of a System 's state can be made either Security is the condition of being protected against danger loss and criminals The Philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is Matter, and is considered a form of Physicalism. Psychology (from Greek grc ψῡχή psȳkhē, "breath life soul" and grc -λογία -logia) is an Academic and The term has been specifically applied to either intermittent work or, more generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious existence.
Precarity in Europe
It is a term of everyday usage as Precariedad, Précarité, or Precarietà in a number of European countries, where it refers to the widespread condition of temporary, flexible, contingent, casual, intermittent work in postindustrial societies, brought about by the neoliberal labor market reforms that have strengthened the right to manage and the bargaining power of employers since the late 1970s. A post-industrial society is a society in which an economic transition has occurred from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy, a diffusion
Precarity is a general term to describe how large parts of the population are being subjected to flexible exploitation or flexploitation (low pay, high blackmailability, intermittent income, etc. ), and existential precariousness (high risk of social exclusion because of low incomes, welfare cuts, high cost of living, etc. ) The condition of precarity is said to affect all of service sector labor in a narrow sense, and the whole of society in a wider sense, but particularly youth, women, and immigrants.
While contingent labor has been a constant of capitalist societies since the industrial revolution, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued[1] that the flexible labor force has now moved from the peripheral position it had under Fordism to a core position in the process of capitalist accumulation under Post-Fordism, which is thought to be increasingly based on the casualized efforts of affective, creative, immaterial labor. Contingent work, also sometimes known as casual work, is a Neologism which describes a type of Employment relationship between an Employer Michael Hardt (born 1960 is an American literary theorist and political philosopher based at Duke University. Antonio ("Toni" Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist political philosopher. Fordism, named after Henry Ford, refers to various social theories. Post-Fordism is the name given to the dominant system of economic production, Consumption and associated socio-economic phenomena in most Industrialized There is scattered empirical evidence in support of this thesis, such as the growing share of non-standard employment on the overall labor force, particularly on new hires. For example, in Western Europe, between a quarter and a third of the labor force now works under temporary and/or part-time contracts, with peaks in UK, Holland, Spain and Italy.
More problematic is the fact that precarity seems to conflate two categories of workers that are at opposite ends of labor market segmentation in postindustrial economies: pink collars working in retail and low-end services (cleaners, janitors, etc. ) under constrictive but standardized employment norms; and young talent temping for cheap in the information economy of big cities around the world: the creative class of strongly individualistic workers illustrated by managerial literature. The creative class is a group of people that social scientist Dr
It also remains to be seen whether the insider/outsider division that economists observe in European labor markets means that the young, precarious, non-voting, and non-owning outsiders have fundamentally conflicting aims with respect to older insiders, who tend to work full-time, long-term contracts, enjoy relatively high pension benefits and who command a disproportionate weight in European public opinion and political debate.
Precarity and the Antiglobalization Movement
Around year 2000, the word started being used in its English usage by some antiglobalization activists (Marches Européennes contre le chômage la précarité et les exclusions - European Marches against unemployment, precarity and social exclusion), and also in EU official reports on social welfare. " Anti-globalization " is a term that encompasses a number of related ideas The European Union ( EU) is a political and economic union of twenty-seven member states, located primarily in "Social welfare" redirects here For other uses see Welfare A social welfare provision refers to any program which seeks to provide But it was in the strikes of young part-timers at McDonald's and Pizza Hut in the winter of 2000, that the first political union network emerged in Europe explicitly devoted to fighting precarity: Stop Précarité, with links to AC!, CGT, SUD, CNT, Trotskyites and other elements of the French radical left. Leon Trotsky ( Russian:, Lev Davidovich Trotsky, also transliterated Leo, Lyev, Trotskii, Trotski, Trotskij [2]
In 2001 Italian antiglobalization collectives and networks, as they were preparing for the Genoa counter-summit just months away, inaugurated in Milan a new kind of first of may, MAYDAY, spelling it like the international call for rescue, and explicitly centering it on the street representation of the so-called "precarious generation. Genoa ( Genova, ˈdʒɛːnova in Italian; Zena in Genoese and Ligurian; Genua in Latin and archaically in English Milan (Milano Milan (listen) is one of the largest cities in Italy, located in the plains of Lombardy. " It employed carnival-like techniques of agitation (allegorical wagons, media subvertising, colorful actions etc. Carnival is a festival season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February and March ) in imitation of gay prides and love parades of the 1990s. LGBT pride or gay pride refers to a world wide movement and philosophy asserting that LGBT ( Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Italian activists meant it as a revival of the wobbly traditions of May Day, and consequently as a break with traditional union representation and social-democratic compromise that had allowed precarity and social insecurity to spread unchecked to reach critical levels in all of Europe, thus repeating the experience of UK and US economies with a few years' lag. The Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW or the Wobblies) is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati Ohio, USA May Day occurs on May 1 and refers to any of several Public holidays In many countries May Day is synonymous with International Workers' Day, or Labour
By 2003, the event had grown exponentially in size, and Catalan antiglobalization activists participated as non-neutral observers. In 2004, activists in Barcelona joined the Mayday efforts, as delegations of French Intermittents participated as guests of honor in both mayday parades. Barcelona ( Catalan bəɾsəˈlonə Spanish baɾθeˈlona is the capital and most populous city of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia The same year saw the launch of the icon of San Precario, patron saint of the struggle against precarity. An icon (from Greek εἰκών eikōn, "image" is a religious work of art most commonly a painting from Eastern Christianity. The patron saint of a particular group of people is a Saint who would protect and 'love' the group and its members The religious imagery proved very popular in Italy and elsewhere, and would colonize the mainstream mediascape in the following years. Italy (Italia officially the Italian Republic, (Repubblica Italiana is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest By virtue of all these developments, Mayday 2004 drew 80,000 young protesters from all over Italy. This attracted attention from other parts of Europe.
San Precario
February 29 is the day of San Precario, the patron saint of precarious workers. S/he was created by the Chainworkers at the Milanese space Reload where the 2004 EuroMayDay was organised with others including the Critical Mass group. Milan (Milano Milan (listen) is one of the largest cities in Italy, located in the plains of Lombardy. RELOAD is a JISC -funded project developing tools to facilitate the use of emerging Learning Technology Interoperability specifications such as those produced by ADL EuroMayDay is a political day of action against Precarity promoted by a network of Feminist, Anti-capitalist and Migrant groups and collectives A critical mass is the smallest amount of Fissile material needed for a sustained Nuclear chain reaction. The Milan Critical Mass already had its own patron saint, Santa Graziella (Graziella is the name of a bicycle firm).
San Precario was originally convceived as a male saint (Romano, 2004). ChainWorkers then did a hoax in 2005 during the Milano Fashion Week, by using a fictive stylist who was in fact an anagram for San Precario (the Saint's first pubblic appearance was at a Sunday supermarket opening on Feb 29, 2004) called Serpica Naro.
The groups claim that the name functions like a multiple user name or myth such as Luther Blissett and quote the Wu Ming collective in giving theoretical coherence, although it is mostly seen as a Catholic detournement of the concept. Luther Blissett may refer to Luther Blissett (footballer, Jamaican/English footballer Luther Blissett (nom de plume, a nom de plume Wu Ming (extended name Wu Ming Foundation is a Pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community Catholic is an Adjective derived from the Greek adjective '' / 'katholikos' meaning "whole" or "complete". In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message often one opposed [1]
Precarity and EuroMayDay
In October 2004, libertarian and syndicalist collectives from across Europe gathered at Middlesex University at "Beyond ESF" (a critical reference to the European Social Forum that was being held in London at the same time) in order to give life to a unified European May Day of precarious and migrant workers: EUROMAYDAY, which involved a dozen Western European cities in 2005, and about twenty in 2006, with Milan, Paris, Helsinki, Hamburg, and Sevilla among the most lively nodes. The European Social Forum (ESF is an annual conference held by members of the Alter-globalization movement (also known as the Global Justice Movement) Western Europe at its most general meaning means 'all the countries in the West of Europe ' In 2006, the mayday process was launched in Brussels on Good Friday with a few hundred activists from Belgium, France, Italy, and Germany protesting against pro-business lobbies in Europe: "no borders, no precarity: fuck the new inequality!". Brussels (Bruxelles pronounced; Brussel pronounced) officially the Brussels Capital-Region, is Good Friday, also called Holy Friday or Great Friday, is the Friday preceding Easter Sunday ("Pascha"
The EuroMayDay network has gathered several times across the EU to discuss in its assemblies common actions against precarity and mobilizations against the persecution of immigrants, and particularly the segregation of undocumented migrants in detention centers all over Europe. EuroMayDay is a political day of action against Precarity promoted by a network of Feminist, Anti-capitalist and Migrant groups and collectives EuroMayDay demands the full adoption of the EU directive on temporary workers being blocked by the Barroso Commission, as well as a European minimum wage and basic income. The Barroso Commission is the European Commission that has been in office since 22 November 2004 and is due to serve until 31 October 2009 Cyber and queer rights are also part of the mayday deliberations and activities.
 Poster Euromayday 004 |  Poster Euromayday 005 |  Poster Euromayday 006 |
Rebelling against Precarity in France, Denmark, and the US
A core constituency of mayday has been the movement of Intermittents, the French expression to refer to stage hands and showbiz personnel. In 2002-2005, the Intermittents captured the French imagination and filled the press with their inventive rebellious tactics (e. g. they famously disrupted live TV news programs and the 2004 edition of the Cannes festival) denouncing precarity in the form of cuts to their unemployment benefits (they counterproposed an alternative reform of the system which was so well crafted that put French élites and union leaders in an awkward position). Unemployment benefits are payments made by Governments to unemployed people
In the early months of 2006, French youth rejected the CPE, the first-job contract introduced by the government who made it easier to fire workers under age 26. Clashes with the riot police, as it reclaimed Sorbonne from occupying students was the signal that something major was happening, as the university had been the epicenter of social insurgence in 1968. Year 1968 ( MCMLXVIII) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Four decades later, France was again paralyzed by huge student demonstrations and solidarity strikes called by the major French unions, as well as the more militant unions and organizations. With the vast majority of French universities occupied for more than a month, and the whole nation on strike, the Villepin government was forced to withdraw the provision, in a test of force with democracy in the streets that weakened the presidency itself. Dominique de Villepin (born Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin (dɔminik də vilpɛ̃ &mdash) on 14 November 1953 in Rabat, Morocco Le Monde commented that "précarité" was going to be a central issue in the upcoming 2007 presidential elections.
A few months before, France had been rocked by generalized rioting of the French youth of Arab and African descent in its suburban ghettos (cités), who sought to express angst at racial and economic discrimination that they were experiencing from the rest of French society. Although expressions of the same national malaise and social anguish, banlieue rioters and student protesters did not really share tactics and demands. The French explosion of 2006 against precarity was followed a few months later by a lengthy general strike in Denmark to protest against welfare cuts especially discriminatory with respect to young people. The Kingdom of Denmark ( ˈd̥ænmɑɡ̊ (archaic ˈd̥anmɑːɡ̊ commonly known as Denmark, is a country in the Scandinavian region of northern Europe All universities were occupied, and the right-wing government was forced to withdraw the provisions that had to do with student subsidies and other welfare benefits for young people, although it retained pension cuts for older employees.
In a different context, May Day 2006 was also a historic day of protest for U. S. immigrants, mostly of Latin-American origin, who mobilized in all major American cities to protest against a punitive anti-immigration bill being discussed in Congress. Hundreds of thousands of people from San Francisco to Chicago celebrated the first of May by taking the streets against increased repression of undocumented immigrants by the Bush administration. Grassroots and community organizing, helped and funded by the progressive wing of North-America's organized labor — which had already been behind the successful Justice for Janitors campaign, narrated by Ken Loach in Bread and Roses, that has organized many legal and illegal immigrants in Los Angeles — were crucial for the media attention and social impact of the demonstrations. Justice for Janitors is a Janitor organization movement and part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU Kenneth Loach (born 17 June 1936) known as Ken Loach, is an English television and Film director.
Catholic Origins
In its English usage, Precarity was first used by Léonce Crenier, a Catholic monk who had previously been active as an anarcho-communist. Léonce Crenier ( 1888 - May 10, 1963) was a Catholic Monk who promoted the theological / political concept of MONK is a Monte Carlo software package for simulating nuclear processes particularly for the purpose of determining the neutron multiplication factor or k-effective In 1952 the term was used by Dorothy Day, writing for the Catholic Worker Movement:
- "True poverty is rare," a saintly priest writes to us from Martinique. Year 1952 ( MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Dorothy Day ( November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American Journalist turned anarchist, social activist The Catholic Worker Movement is a Catholic organization founded by the " Servant of God " Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933 "Nowadays communities are good, I am sure, but they are mistaken about poverty. They accept, admit on principle, poverty, but everything must be good and strong, buildings must be fireproof, Precarity is rejected everywhere, and precarity is an essential element of poverty. That has been forgotten. Here we want precarity in everything except the church. (. . . ) Precarity enables us to help very much the poor. When a community is always building, and enlarging, and embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for the poor. We have no right to do this as long as there are slums and breadlines somewhere. [3].
See also
- Casualisation
- Catholic social teaching
- Christian anarchism
- Defunct First Employment Contract (CPE)
- New Employment Contract (CNE)
- Directive on services in the internal market, also known as "Bolkestein Directive". Catholic social teaching encompasses aspects of Catholic doctrine relating to matters dealing with the collective welfare of humanity Christian anarchism is any of several traditions which combine Anarchism with Christianity. The contrat première embauche ( CPE) translated first employment contract, was a new form of employment contract pushed in spring 2006 in France Contrat nouvelle embauche (abbreviated to CNE, New Employment Contract aka New Recruitment Contract or sometimes New-job contract in English The Directive on services in the internal market (commonly referred to as the Bolkestein Directive) is an initiative of the European Commission aimed at creating
- Prekariat - the social class, not necessarily poor or members of a particular underclass, disposed towards precarity. The prekariat is the post-Fordist analogue of the proletariat (in German)
References
- ^ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press, 2004. The proletariat (from Latin la ''proles'' "offspring" is a term used to identify a lower Social class; a member of such a class is proletarian
- ^ Abdel Mabrouki, Génération précaire, Le Cherche Midi, 2004.
- ^ Poverty and Precarity by Dorothy Day
External links
- http://www.euromarches.org
- http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/publications/2003/ke5103471_en.html
- http://www.euromayday.org/
- http://www.chainworkers.org/
- http://www.yomango.net
- http://www.cip-idf.org
- http://www.greenpeppermagazine.org/process/tiki-index.php?page=Precarity+Issue
- http://www.metamute.org/en/node/415
- http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704
- http://adbusters.org/blogs/Big_Ideas_Precarity.html
- http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/neilson_rossiter.html
- http://www.republicart.net/disc/precariat/index.htm
- http://helsinki.euromayday.org/index2.htm
- http://berlin.euromayday.org/
- http://www.maydaysur.org/
- http://www.maydayfr.org/
- http://www.actupparis.org/
- http://www.generation-precaire.org/
- http://www.ac.eu.org
- http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/04/france_the_prec.html
Dictionary
precarity
-noun
- a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare
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