Unpicking Precarity: Informal Work in Eastern India's Coal Mining Tracts

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores two widespread types of informal and precarious work in eastern India's coal mining tracts. It seeks to contribute to recent attempts to disaggregate the umbrella notion of precarity and the related concept of ‘classes of labour’ in the context of the global South. It does so by illuminating the more nuanced yet significant relative distinctions between different forms of precarious coal-related work as perceived and experienced by labourers. The article illustrates how labourers evaluate such forms of work in relation to one another in terms of relative stability, autonomy, tempo and gender dynamics, which affect their livelihood decisions and activities. It thereby turns attention to differentiating dimensions of precarious work that are easily veiled in broad debates about precarity and ‘classes of labour’. Such dimensions are essential to probe — through comparative ethnographic study — to understand how people engage with different modalities of precarious work on the ground and how they configure their livelihood strategies in particular capitalist and social contexts.     

Moving stories: precarious work and multiple migrations

According to the United Nations over 3% of the global population or 232 million people currently live outside their country of birth. Their significance as a growing proportion of the labour force in many European countries is widely known. It is also evident that women – many of them young – are increasingly represented among economic migrants and asylum seekers. However, the longer term contribution of women, as migrants and as workers, is less well recorded. Here, I explore the connections between migration and employment, through the lens of oral histories undertaken with women who moved to the UK. Their life stories illustrate the growing diversity among female migrants as well as the changing nature of women’s employment. My key focus is, however, not on the work these women migrants undertook in the UK, but on precarious forms of waged work engaged in during the migration journey itself. I also reflect on oral history as a method and the problems of writing difference for feminist scholars working with and on women migrants.     

All aboard? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto's Junction

Despite early attention being paid to the connections amongst ‘gender, work and gentrification’ in the urban geography literature, there have been few attempts to examine the experiences of women as workers in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This gap leaves open critical questions about the nature of the links between the production of gendered work practices and the production of gentrified urban landscapes. In this article, I explore how women working in a variety of differently precarious situations – as struggling small business owners, self-employed workers and part-time workers – manage the tensions and contradictions of struggling for economic survival while attempting to support community-building efforts and social reproduction needs in a gentrifying area. Using data drawn from interviews and urban ethnographic methods in Toronto's ‘Junction’ neighbourhood, I argue that precarious conditions of work in the context of gentrification engender a variety of diverse economic and social practices – developed through immaterial and affective labour – that, in turn, produce particular, and often contradictory, social and economic landscapes of gentrification. I will explore the ways in which gendered vulnerabilities and insecurities are ironically produced, in part, by the feminized consumption landscape, which primes neighbourhoods for widespread gentrification. Through examining these dynamics, we can begin to theorize the structural production of precarity, and in particular, gendered precarity, through urban processes such as gentrification.     

Tracing the future of migrants’ labour relations. Experiences of institutionalised migrant precarity in Denmark and Greece

Restrictive migration laws, fracturing of citizenship and neoliberal labour markets intertwine with persistent migration flows to produce migrant precarity in the European context. This article examines the institutionalisation of precarious and unfree labour conditions for migrants in Denmark and Greece, through the enactment of laws and policy initiatives. The article situates itself in a literature regarding migrant precarity and its institutionalisation, unfree and informal labour and the production of immobility, which points to their interrelation as a constitutive element of modern European economies. In both cases, we can identify a retrenchment of rights and likewise the cases indicate that a fractured citizenship is instrumentalised in producing various types of immobility. The article concludes that despite differences between the European North and South we can identify a situation of unfree labour characterised by a lack of real or acceptable alternatives, within a setting of coercive geographies.     

Social Policy and Gender Divisions of Domestic and Care Work in France

A number of cross-national comparisons of gender divisions of paid and unpaid labour have highlighted the mismatch which exists in France between on the one hand a narrow gender employment gap due to the full-time and continuous nature of women's employment, supported by extensive state-provided or subsidised childcare, and on the other hand, the persistence of an unexpectedly traditional gender division of domestic and care work. This results in high levels of work–life conflict for French women, and particularly for mothers. In much social policy analysis, the question of how policy might influence the extent to which domestic and care work is shared within the couple has been largely overlooked in favour of discussions of how the state facilitates and encourages the employment of mothers of dependent children. This article therefore focuses on why and how state policy in France, whilst being successful in bringing women and particularly mothers into the labour market, has not brought about a fairer gender division of unpaid domestic and care work in the home.     

Radical equality,care and labour in a community economy

The reproductive and care work predominantly undertaken by women has historically been undervalued in traditional measures of the economy. However, calls for more work, or better work for women (and men) doesn’t necessarily solve the issues surrounding waged labour such as zero hour contracts, the ‘double work day’, and other forms of increasing precarity and competition. In this article I explore how alternative forms of labour exchange in the Wellington Timebank provide one way in which subjects can partially operate outside the waged economy. I draw on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of how a radical equality underpins a democratic politics to explore the everyday negotiations around labour that occur in this alternative economy. I connect work being done by the Community Economies Collective to ideas of radical equality and a feminist ethic of care to show how embodied and everyday practices like timebanking enable subjects to challenge the inequalities of waged work and in Rancière’s terms, partially construct alternative ‘distributions of the sensible’.     

Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime: Exploring the intersection of welfare state restructuring and labour market policies in the UK

This article deconstructs New Labour's emerging workfarist regime to reveal the complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work–welfare policy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it traces the deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changes initiated by this process. Noting, in particular, how the ‘feminisation of the economy’ is connected to the changing characteristics of employment and women's socio-economic positions, the article identifies the manner in which the growing labour market participation of women is serving to (further) entrench gender inequality. Against this background, it proceeds to raise issues regarding the increased expectation to enter the labour market observed within programmes such as the New Deal for the Unemployed, which stipulates that the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input. The crux of analysis is on the policy and political discourses that award priority to paid work in the formal labour market, whilst simultaneously neglecting the gendered divisions of labour around unwaged care work and domestic tasks. In suggesting that gender remains a key form of political-economic organisation in the contemporary period of after-Fordism, this article argues that (further) attention must be given to the ways in which its socially constructed properties are manifest within work–welfare policy and the ramifications of this embedding for social and economic equality.     

Multi‐scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

Integration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency. Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rights. The global production networks (GPN) approach facilitates examination of commercial value chains, their interaction with institutionally and societally embedded labour markets, and potential leverage points for labour contestation transcending local, national and global scales. This informs analysis of commercial/societal articulations as contested processes opening space for multi‐scalar labour agency within global production networks. This article examines how tensions between global commercial and societally embedded dimensions of global production networks drive precarious work, and seeks to understand the implications for emergent forms of multi‐scalar community‐based labour agency. These questions are explored through an examination of labour casualization and contestation in South African fruit production in 2012–13, using the GPN approach. The authors find that multi‐scalar channels of labour agency leveraging both global commercial and government actors can enable reworking by unorganized community‐based labour to bargain for better pay and conditions, but if the underlying global commercial logic is to be challenged, more systemic strategies are required.     

Making labour mobile: Borders,precarity, and the competitive state in Finnish migration politics

This article explores how the multiplication of labour migration categories relies upon strategic territorialisations of borders to differentiate between workers' nationalities, worksites, and skills in Finland. We argue that for certain categories of workers, migration policies encourage workers to become mobile in ways that make them more precarious. We analyse worksites that show the different ways that labour is made mobile: the internationalization of higher education; Finnair's labour outsourcing and offshoring practices; and the recruitment of forest berry-pickers from Thailand. We first trace contentious migration politics in Finland, revealing conflicts over labour protections, universal labour rights, the state's obligations to create employment, economic competitiveness, national identity, and the precarisation of work. We show how practices of legal, procedural, and spatial differentiation particularise the conditions of work and argue that, even for skilled workers, the strategic territorialisation of borders works to differentiate between workers and work sites. This differentiation works to make labour mobile in multiple ways and, due to the selective territorialisation of labour protections, the political geographies of migration in Finland tend towards the precarisation of labour for skilled and unskilled workers alike.     

Creating a life: the role of symbolic and economic structures in the gender dynamics of Swedish artists

This article examines the prevalence of parenthood among professionally practising artists in Sweden. The overall aim of the article is to employ feministic and sociological perspectives to provide a theoretically-based understanding of the problems of balancing work and family life in the arts. Data are presented that reveals that female artists are more frequently childless compared to their male counterparts and women in the overall population. Male artists, however, are less frequently childless than men in general. The article develops a theoretical explanation focused on the effect of economic resource structures, which leave women artists to cope with lower incomes with which to pursue careers in the arts, and symbolic structures, which present creative work as difficult to combine with everyday domestic work. Given that motherhood continues to be associated with more comprehensive caring responsibilities than fatherhood, women are more frequently confronted with a choice between starting a family and pursuing their artistic calling.     

Who we are at work: millennial women,everyday inequalities and insecure work

Based on research with millennial women in Canada, this article examines the process of workplace identity, or (un)conscious strategies of identity management that young women employ at work. First, despite increasing labour market participation from women, young women’s experience of the workplace can be one of precarity and insecurity. Many millennial women have responded with a ‘positive front’ – saying yes to all work tasks while highlighting their likability and acceptance of the status quo. This is not seen as a permanent strategy, but rather one that gets you into the workplace and ‘liked’ until your work speaks for itself. Second, and operating at the same time, young women also use tactics to confront intersections of ageism/sexism in the workplace. While some employ conscious strategies to be ‘taken seriously’ through dress, small talk, even taking on stereotypical traits of masculinity to be recognized as competent, others explicitly confront inequality through ‘girlie feminism’ with a pro-femininity work identity that challenges the masculine-coded norms of how a successful workplace operates and what it looks like. In jobs of all types, who we are at work is a constantly shifting negotiation between how we are treated and seen by others, the workplace as a social space, our past experiences and our own expectations. Considering young women’s work identities reveals how power and privilege operate in the workplace, and the possibilities of young women’s agential challenges to inequitable workplace norms and a precarious labour market.     

The problem of power: Partial electrification in Northern Uganda

This article considers the relation between infrastructural development and precarious work in the context of the electrification of a village in Northern Uganda. The case of a welder illustrates how partial electrification creates precarious conditions for work and how flexibility and creativity are used to mitigate its effects. In looking beyond precarity at the strategies employed by small-scale business owners in Northern Uganda, this article aims to shed light on how people relate to infrastructural realities and play an active role in shaping the affordances and impact of infrastructures in the Global South.     

Gender Ideology and the Domestic Division of Labor in Middle-class Chinese Families in Hong Kong

Despite being engaged in full-time paid work, middle-class women continue to be responsible for the majority of housework and childcare. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 Chinese professional married women, this article explores their subjective perspectives, values and beliefs toward paid and unpaid work. The evidence shows that traditional gender ideology and a patriarchal familial structure, deriving from a Confucian culture, influence perceptions and allocation of housework and childcare, which women are expected to carry out or supervise. The employment of female domestic helpers further reinforces the traditional sexual division of domestic labor in the family. Women in Hong Kong continue to deal with the strain and contradictions of living their lives amidst countervailing modern and traditional forces.     

Shift Work,Childcare and Domestic Work: Divisions of labour in Canadian paper mill communities

The growing prevalence of shift work and non-standard working hours is challenging many taken-for-granted notions about family and household life. This article examines how rotating shift schedules shape household strategies with regard to childcare and unpaid domestic work. In 1993-94 in-depth interviews were conducted with 90 predominantly male newsprint mill-workers and their spouses living in three communities located in different regions of Canada. The analysis in this article is based on these interviews as well as data collected in a questionnaire survey administered to a much larger sample. The article focuses on the effects of rotating shifts and the extent to which household strategies differ between households with one or two wage-earners. The findings reveal that the onus for adjusting to shifts fell mainly on the spouses of mill-workers, who felt constrained in their own choices regarding employment and childcare by the demanding regimen of their partner's shift schedules. In the vast majority of households a traditional division of labour predominated with regard to both childcare and domestic work. When women quit paid employment to accommodate the schedules of shift-workers and ensure time for the family to be together, traditional values reassert themselves. Surprisingly, a high level of satisfaction with current shift schedules was found, despite the significant adjustments to family life they had necessitated. By comparing families employed in the same industry but living in three very different communities, the analysis underscores the importance of local circumstances in mediating the strategies households deploy in coping with shift work, especially with regard to childcare.     

Constructions of Rural Women's Voluntary Work

This article examines the nature and circumstances of women's voluntary work in rural communities. Drawing on original research conducted in two villages in Avon, England, it focuses on three main themes. Firstly, it considers theoretical debates on the conceptualisation of rural women's labour, arguing that traditional divisions between public and private forms of work provide an inadequate basis for understanding either women's labour participation or their domestic lives. The notion of voluntary work as a third sphere is discussed as it relates specifically to the rural labour market and community. Secondly, the article examines voluntary work in terms of the empowerment of women. It addresses issues of women's role and status in the rural community, questioning whether the state's use or reliance on voluntary work in rural areas represents an exploitation of women's position or an opportunity for women to gain influence and power. Thirdly the article evaluates the contribution of women's voluntary work to the conceptualisation and representation of rurality. The focus here is on the way in which voluntary activity supports a particular form and image of the rural community and, in turn, the implications this has for gender divisions and women's identity in contemporary rural England.     

Art as a diagnostic: assessing social and political transformation through public art in Cairo,Egypt

Since January 2011, Egypt has undergone several waves of political upheaval in order to craft a new form of governance. Central to this process has been the role of art. This article argues that artistic interventions that engage with the idea of public space and that take place in the public space of the city engender interactions that illuminate the complexities and difficulties currently facing Egyptian society. More so than serving as documentation of what has taken place or as acts of protest, public art can serve as a diagnostic of issues that simmer underneath the surface of national politics. Based on interviews, focus groups, and observations conducted between 2011 and 2013 with Cairo-based artists and arts advocates, the paper explores the way in which public art has signaled tensions regarding class, gender and increasing political polarization. By exploring the relationship between art, artists and urban space, this paper extends analyses on political transitions to take account of the effects produced by forms of artistic expression within the public sphere.     

Making a Life: Getting Ahead,and Getting a Living in Aboriginal New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographically grounded examination of the intersections between work, employment and identity for Indigenous people living in a country town in far western New South Wales, Australia. It argues that work, employment and labour are locally deployed categories that meet mainstream discourse in a precarious fashion and, that this disjunction has clear material and ideological repercussions. For most Aboriginal people in Wilcannia, you are who you are, not by virtue of what you have ‘become’ in any economic, professional or educational sense. Who you are is not a becoming, it is established at birth. These genealogical forms of being through kinship see a construction of self which in many ways is at variance to the standard ‘autonomous self‐regulating individual’ (Sennett 1998:215). This sense of self, for most, is not determined by engagement in the capitalist division of labour; indeed, the greater the engagement in the capitalist economy, the more problematic and fraught a sense of self and of belonging can become.     

‘Shit is hard,yo’: young people making a living in the creative industries

ABSTRACT

Contemporary social science research on the creative industries demonstrates inequities in accessing good work in this field. Nonetheless, youth still increasingly are seeking to create careers in these fields. However, economic indicators that register growing employment in the creative industries may not fully register the participation of youth. The Young People Making a Living in the Creative Industries research project sought to document the multiple income streams that youth draw on while attempting to make a living in creative fields, mapping the areas of challenge and success in the entry years to creative work. Respondents in the research project articulated an informed knowingness and resistance to the norms of unpaid work in the creative industries and forwarded gender and race as structural categories that impact the experience of entry-level creative work. Respondents also articulated forming communities of care to respond to these challenges, including collectives, support groups, and other forms of networks, while highlighting the challenge of balancing community-based and economic motivations for creative industries work. The study highlights the role of community youth arts programmes on creative industries career incubation for youth, and the need to hear from youth themselves to better map youth participation in the creative industries.     

The cultural practices of Europeans

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a rapid rise in “atypical”, precarious forms of employment in all European Union states, and the political significance of the issue of “employment in the cultural sector” has increased noticeably. There are several reasons for this. One is the change from a post-industrial economy to a cultural economy and a forced process of economisation of societal welfare-state fields such as health, education and culture. The “marketisation” of culture and the “culturalisation” of the market means that on the one hand “high” culture is becoming increasingly commercial and, on the other, cultural content is increasingly shaping commodity production. These processes run concurrently and are part of a general trend in post-modern society.

The article follows the thesis of a recently published EU study on job potential in the cultural sector [MKW Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH / Österreichische Kulturdokumentation. Internationales Archiv für Kulturanalysen et al., (2001). Exploitation and development of the job potential in the cultural sector in the age of digitalisation (Brussels: European Commission DG Employment and Social Affairs) (summary: http://www.kulturdokumentation.org/eversion/rec_proj/potential.html)] which identifies a new type of employer and/or employee—the “entrepreneurial individual” or “entrepreneurial cultural worker”—who no longer fits into previously typical patterns of full-time professions of the European welfare state system.

The former “cultural worker” has been transitioning into a “cultural entrepreneur” or—as others put it—into a “sole service supplier in the professional cultural field”. According to the historian Heinz Bude's argument, western European societies find themselves in a process of “transformation into flexible, digital capitalism, away from the Keynesian welfare state to a Schumpeterian performance state and a ‘variable geometry of individual incentives’”. What is developing here is the guiding concept of the “entrepreneurial individual”, i.e. individuals who do not follow prescribed standards but who (have to) try out their own combinations and assert themselves on the market and in society. In this context, the creative cultural sector is of broader interest for new labour market concepts and strategies. In addition to the general change, new technology is leading to the emergence of new job profiles in the creative cultural sector so that the image of artists and creators is changing fundamentally. The new creative workforce is meant to be young, multiskilled, flexible, psychologically resilient, independent, single and unattached to a particular location. The article stresses the argument that these new realities of work and labour have to be recognised more extensively in up-to-date labour market strategies and cultural policy concepts. Western societies have to learn to cope better with these new general working and living conditions which affect a continuously increasing number of cultural workers/entrepreneurs—people who have to make their living from micro-entrepreneurialism. The article argues that cultural and employment policies should find innovative ways to accommodate the ambivalent efforts and needs of cultural workers/entrepreneurs (without capital). In conclusion, it will point out that the knowledge-based society has also given birth to historically new forms of employment not yet represented in the traditional canon of the political representation system (political parties, interest groups, etc.). Cultural policy-makers should take this into account in thinking about adequate social security schemes for their clientele, and labour policy-makers should be more aware of the major employment potential of the cultural sector on the one hand and, on the other, of the often precarious working and living conditions currently prevailing in it.     

Momentarily immobile: Backpacking,farm work,and hostels in Bundaberg,Australia

The Working Holiday Maker visa encourages young people from 44 nations to live and work for up to three years in Australia, contributing immensely to the temporary migrant workforce in regional areas. However, the conditions they experience while completing 88 days of mandatory ‘farm work’ to apply for visa extensions often place them in vulnerable situations and states of immobility that are counter to the perception of backpackers as mobile. Types of accommodation specifically for temporary migrant farm workers are known as working hostels and in some cases the ways in which they are administered have perpetuated the precarious and immobile situations in which backpackers find themselves. This article explores the lived experiences of backpackers who have undertaken farm work in the Bundaberg region, a new ‘hot spot’ for seasonal migrant labour. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 35 working holiday makers, the article advances the suggestion that recent shifts in hostelling accommodation practices and increased competition for agricultural jobs in the region place individuals in increasingly precarious states of immobility.