Precarious Lexicon

by Alex Foti
From Greenpeppermagazine Precarity Issue

Precarity [Précarité/Precariedad/Prekärität/Precarietà]. Derived from the latin verb precor, precarity literally means being forced to beg and pray to keep one’s job. This neologism is a better translation than the synonym ‘precariousness’ for the social state of work and being in the age of high (and mortiferous) neoliberalism.

Cognitaire: somebody performing cognitive work – that is, working primarily for a salary or on a contract by ceding to the employer the whole product/creation of her/his language and knowledge skills; multiplied in their potency via formal and informal networking and computer processing. This process of private appropriation of a creative communality occurs during the time at work, and increasingly - thanks to cellphones, ubiquitous connectivity and sheer colonization of mindspace - during the time off work (if any is left). Cognitaires are typically employed in media, research, education, advertising activities. They tend to have individual market power yet little collective identity - and therefore low collective bargaining power. An equivalent and convenient, if blunt, term for cognitaire is BrainWorker.

Précaire: somebody performing flexible, and taylorized, service work - that is, she/he works for an hourly wage in large spaces physically proximate to other workers performing similar functions (but not necessarily having the same contracts, leaving extra room for the discriminatory and arbitrary practices of employers). Précaires work under the constant monitoring and supervision of management, in shifts and durations subject to change and stretch with little or no notice. Although information skills are essential for the job, it is relational skills that provide the most value to the company. Précaires are interchangeable by firms and possess low individual market power. But if organized into unions, syndicates or other social collectives, précaires possess tremendous bargaining power since they are situated in crucial and vulnerable intersections of social [re]production - such as product and service handling in consumption, distribution and transportation. To refer to the millions of uniformed and/or spied upon employees in chain stores, malls, supermarkets, warehouses, transportation hubs and call centers, we Milanese have coined the term ChainWorker - from which the webzine founded in 2000 derives its name (www.chainworkers.org). ChainWorkers are the unhappy successors of those working on the assembly chain and, earlier still, those chain-ganged into slavery, forced labor and indentured servitude.

Flex Workers: a good contemporary-English equivalent to the everyday-Italian precari or every-day Spanish precarios. Flex Worker is an expression that one finds in the daily press to loosely describe to the social reality of millions of service and information workers working under non-standard daily, weekly and monthly schedules, without secure tenure or social benefits. The call “Flex Workers of Europe Let’s Unite! There’s a World of Rights to Fight For” was used to open the declaration for EuroMayDay 2004.

Flexicurity: the flexibility minus the precarity - that is, a distant dream for the vast majority of European temps and partimers. Flexicurity captures the essence of a new welfare system we claim for all part-time, temporary and contingent workers across the EU. Only massive protests and conflict will force Brussels to grant a universal system of basic rights in which precarity, intermittence and joblessness are considered the norm rather than the exception. This means a eurowide minimum hourly wage, transeuropean organizing rights for all flexworkers, and - even more critically - universal paid maternity and health-care coverage, subsidized access to housing and transportation, and the free and public diffusion of technical and cultural knowledge.

EuroMayDay: a tight network of media and labor activists linking conflicts and protests of precarized workers across the metropolitan spaces of Milano, Barcelona, Paris, Venezia, København, Bologna, Madrid, Roma, Helsinki, Trieste, Stockholm, Bari, Ljubljana and other cities across ‘Neuropa’ - the futurist and slightly sinister term with which we refer to the enlarged and fractious Europe of the 21st century. This is the political space in which we intend to communicate, interweave and highlight to the world the many radical identities of precarized, outsourced, offshored, downsized, downgraded, impoverished, humiliated and plain stressed-out temp and flex workers across the land.

[Text found here.]