From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks
by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter
In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: ‘My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be’. Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour?
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The Rise of the Six Month Worker
by Chris Carlsson
In my experience as a temporary worker in downtown San Francisco, I have met many young people working in offices who have no pretensions about the importance of what they do. They seldom have any attachment to their work, though most are usually careful to do it right, and they don’t expect to keep the job longer than from a few months to a couple of years.
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I like some of this and disagree with some of it strongly. I’ll be commenting on it soon-ish, I need time for non-blogdimensional pursuits as well as some research for my respone.
An antibushist future for Europe: DEMORADICAL VS DEMOLIBERAL REGULATION
By Alex Foti
The answer to the party form conundrum seemed, for a while, to lie in the network. Now it looks like the network is being shoe-horned back into the party form. Here Alex Foti, former organiser of the ChainWorkers, advocates a pink, green and wobbly extension of the mayday network into a card-carrying transeuropean syndicate whose methods are majoritarian and vote-based and whose target is the production of a radical constitution for the EU formulated from below. Seems like the idea of a socialist supra-national state has never been so popular.
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The following text from Fassanito Network about "Movements and Struggles of Migration in and around Europe" was written for and distributed at the 4th European Social Forum (ESF), which took place between 4th and 7th of Mai in Athens/Greece and when migration became the first time an own thematic axis inside the ESF. (more…)
Precarity explained to kids (a medley)
Cut, Pasted and Articulated (somewhat) by Aviv Kruglanski
What does an immigrant worker and a downwardly mobile twenty-something have in common?
Pre-car-i-ous \pri-’kar-e-as\ adj [L precarius obtained by entreaty, uncertain—more at PRAYER] (1646)
1: depending on the will or pleasure of another
2: dependent on uncertain premises: DUBIOUS
3 a: dependent on chance circumstances. Unknown conditions, or uncertain develpoments
b: charactarized by a lack of security or stability that threatens with danger
Syn, see DANGEROUS
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I understand precarity to be a matter of the working class, defined as all those who sell their labor power as a commodity, with the important note that ’sell’ does not limit the working class to those who earn wages but includes nonmonetary or nonwage transaction in exchanges for means of meeting needs as well.
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July 27, 2006
It is a truism in Marxism that there is a formal legal equality in capitalism which masks a material inequality. The fiction is that workers and employers meet under equal terms in the marketplace as buyer and seller: seller of labor power as a commodity and buyer of labor power as a commodity. The material inequality behind the formal legal equality is the asymmetry of circumstances and consequences between the two. Quite simply, the results are get bad faster and are over all worse for workers should the exchange not take place. This is because the workers don’t have money. They sell labor power under compulsion, because there are only limited means to meet needs without money, and there are limited means to acquire money without the sale of one’s labor power as a commodity.
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There’s a lot of great stuff here to revisit and consider.
Even Without a Union, Florida Wal-Mart Workers Use Collective Action to Enforce Rights
by Nick Robinson
January 2006
Workers at Wal-Mart and other big-box retail chains—like workers in any mostly nonunion industry with low pay and tense, dreary working conditions—are generally a disgruntled lot. In central Florida, Wal-Mart workers are fighting and sometimes winning campaigns using collective action to solve both shop floor and larger industry-wide problems.
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The Starbucks organizing drive is something to continue to pay attention to. Starbucks workers fit under the term ‘precarity’ as it’s used in some locations, and an interview with someone from the Starbucks campaign featured in the Greenpepper issue on Precarity. Web resources for the campaign include:
The Starbucks Union website.
IWW web site’s news about the campaign.
I also want to start collecting media about this campaign.