Precarity

The original meaning of the word "precarious" is "revocable", "uncertain" or "shaky". Nowadays however the term is used to describe the spread of insecure working and living conditions. Authors like Bourdieu (1998), Paugam (2000) or Castel (2000) view this as the very root of the social question of the 21st century.

The bottom line is that over the past decade the labour market in EU states has in fact been considerably affected by an increase in the number of flexible, mainly precarious jobs (Kok 2004). These include contingent work and temping, fixed-term contracts and forced part-time work along with mini- and midi-jobs, dependent self-employment or state-subsidised work schemes (e.g. one-Euro-an-hour jobs). The one thing all these forms of employment have in common is that although they enable people to stay above subsistence level, they cannot guarantee anybody’s livelihood on a permanent basis.

Gainful employment means social integration

Market-oriented policies regard this expansion in precarious employment as a desirable flexibilisation of the labour market and as a stepping stone for people to find a permanent job (Commission 1996). There are however empirical facts that refute such theories, such as the marginal upward mobility that characterises the precarious labour sector in Germany (Brinkmann et al. 2006: 36 ff.) What they mainly tend to ignore however is the fact that precarity weakens the ability of gainful employment to integrate people socially. During the post-war decades there was a stable link between wage-paid labour and certain safety mechanisms (e.g. pension rights, the maintenance of industrial health and safety standards, protection against unlawful dismissal, pay scales, co-determination) and this in turn created a "social property" (Castel 2005: 41 ff.) that enabled the majority of wage-earners to achieve a certain respected social status despite various ongoing inequalities. Contemporary financial-market capitalism is now dismantling this link.

Post-Fordist working society has now become divided into zones of varying levels of security. Although the majority of employees are still to be found in a zone of integration with regular working conditions and a more or less intact social safety net, there is in fact another zone that is growing all the time – the "zone of precarity". This zone is not only characterised by insecure working conditions, but also by a social safety net that is wearing thinner and thinner all the time. At the bottom of this hierarchy we find the "zone of disaffiliation" - a zone for groups of people who have no real chance of becoming integrated into the first labour market (Castel 2000). In the case of these "redundants" (Marx 1973: 660) of working society this exclusion from regular gainful employment is combined with a relative form of social isolation.

From flexibilisation to "flexploitation"

Castel’s zone model is a heuristic template whose relevance for the Federal Republic of Germany has in the meantime been substantiated by empirical research (Baethge et al. 2005; Schultheis/Schulz 2005; Dörre 2005). The most important findings from the field of precarisation research can be summarised as follows:

(1) Precarity is more and more becoming a living situation that is not only characterised by material deficits, insecurity, adverse working conditions and lack of recognition, but above all by dwindling possibilities for people to make long-term plans.

(2) Precarisation is not a phenomenon occurring only on the fringes of society. Alongside the permanent exclusion from gainful employment and the increase in insecure working conditions there is a third focal point – the fear of falling down the social ladder and losing status among those groups of people who still have "normal" regular jobs.

(3) There are some groups who see flexible employment as a means of enjoying more freedom. Such groups are in possession of financial resources and qualifications that release them from the worry of having to earn their livelihood on a regular basis. This does not apply to the masses of people in precarious jobs; for them flexibilisation means "flexploitation", in some specific groups of employees this means an over-exploitation due to a more concentrated form of insecurity (Bourdieu 1998).

(4) Depending on the age, type of household, sex, qualifications, region and nationality insecure employment is dealt with in very different ways. The younger and better qualified the employees are, the greater the hope of them managing to find permanent employment. The idea of integration by participating in a working process is replaced by a weak, mostly imaginary form of integration. The contingent worker or temp dreams of becoming a regular, salaried employee, but this dream only comes true for about 12% to 18% of these workers. That is why such a promise of "normalisation" is not realistic in terms of integration.

(5) Precarisation also affects those groups of workers who have to a large extent always been excluded from a normal, regular job (e.g. women, immigrants). Women working in what traditionally used to be female-dominated service sectors are now having to face competition from men. The precarisation of the working world of men often leads to a destabilisation of the situation of women as additional income earners (Mayer-Ahuya 2003).

(6) Precarious employment has a disciplining effect on those people who have supposedly secure jobs. When permanent staff are confronted with people in insecure jobs, they tend to become more "compliant" (Boltanski/Chiapello 2003:262).

Collective safeguards are necessary

This disciplining mechanism can promote right-wing populist tendencies (Dörre et al. 2006); it can however also be responsible for the coming into being of new workers’ movements (Silver 2005). In that respect then it can be said that precarity is really to be found "everywhere" (Bourdieu 1998: 96 ff.) – not however as an inherent necessity that people have to accept as their fate. For quite some time now it has been clear that the economically dysfunctional effects of this uncertainty can no longer be ignored. If one’s livelihood is insecure , "anxiety about losing one’s job – as repulsive as it may be – gets the upper hand" (Bourdieu 2000: 72). The social prerequisites for the innovation of processes and products disappear. At the same time loyalty on the part of the employees towards the company recedes, job motivation suffers and there is an increase in quality deficiencies (Detje et al. 2005). Such empirical findings are in stark contrast to the paradigms of market radicalism. The latter are targeted at a working community in which people act as "bosses of their own manpower", which is why collective security systems have more or less become superfluous. In this case they seem to have overlooked the fact that the acquisition of a future-oriented business sense requires "job security" and "a minimum regular income". When precarious employment prevents people "working out a rational plan for the way they want to live their lives", economically "rational behavioural dispositions" cannot develop (Bourdieu 2000: 17 ff., 109). The advocates of a purely market-oriented society are in this case then demanding behavioural dispositions from resource-deficient "precarians" who are in no way capable of acquiring them. In the end there can be no creativity, openness to innovation and flexibility without collective safeguards. Once people realise this, the way will then be paved for the politics of de-precarisation (Brinkmann et al. 2006: 85 ff.), which will also include an effective minimum wage and basic security, as well as measures to help "precarians" to help themselves.

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