Draft of the talk I gave at the Anomalist roundtable connected to the OSU conference, a revision of this. I may have a more recent version somewhere, if so I’ll post it when I find it.

Why is there no precarity discourse in the United States?

First, we have to recognize that there are many precarities, not one. I’m not going to talk about those which are discussed by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciere, or others, as philosophical concepts and existential conditions. I’m specifically going to talk about those which have become a matter of discussion and mobilization in activist circles in Europe in recent years, both feeding into and growing out of the EuroMayday demonstrations and the trans-european networks involved. This precarity or precarities can be more properly characterized as precaritization, a becoming precarious.
There are several aspects here. I break these down, for the sake of convenience, into precarity on the job, precarity of welfare, and precarity of residency. Each of these precarities are distributed differently along a number of axes – race, gender, country, industry, company etc – such that each is itself a multiple. Each also has multiple components.

Precaritization on the job involves at least three aspects - erosion of workplace protections and worker rights, flexibilization, and casualization. Flexibilization includes tendencies toward weekend and evening or nighttime work, schedules which vary from week to week, part-time work instead of full time work, and so on – all the different aspects of when one works connected to an employer’s demand that employees "be flexible." Casualization includes a shift to shortening of the length of work contracts, and the growth of temporary labor, and other matters of how long one’s relationship with a given employer will last.  

Precaritization of welfare is the erosion of access to housing, healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, and other means of subsistence important for reproducing one’s life and labor power. This occurs due to rollbacks in welfare or social safety net policies, reduction in employer provided benefits, and reduction in wages which in turn results in difficulty purchasing means of subsistence.
Precaritization of residency refers to the conditions of undocumented migrants who are subject to harassment, discrimination, detention in concentration camps, expulsion, and differential treatment in labor markets and access to welfare. That is, precarity of residency status helps create precarity on the job and/or precarity of welfare for those who are subjected to it.

It’s my understanding that these precaritizations under way in Europe are part of the global capitalist offensive which is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism involves the lowering of the costs of variable capital – that is, reduction of payment for labor power – via worsening wage and benefit packages and the privatization of reproduction. It also involves easing restrictions on capital mobility without necessarily easing restrictions on labor mobility – in some instance at least, increasing restrictions on labor mobility. Buttressing this is the growth of police and military operations – operations in which police and military are sometimes difficulty to distinguish – in order to deal with social unrest against neoliberalism and its results. (Incidentally, both EZLN Subcomandante Marcos and former CIA director James Woolsey have referred to the present neoliberal order as "the Fourth World War" – the Cold War being the Third World War – though unsurprisingly the Marcos and Woolsey have different interpretations of and political responses to this analysis.)

So that’s precarity as I’m interested in it. Before returning to my titular question, I have a few observations. First, precarity in many of these senses is very old. Jacques Ranciere comments that precarity is the condition of the proletariat as such, and thus is at least as old as the proletariat under capitalism, and probably older. Second, precarity or security is always a relative matter. The relative security of the proletariat at different moments in history is the result of class struggle. Third, moments of relative security are rarely moments of security for the entire global proletariat. Rather, they are moments of security for certain sectors of the proletariat. While these changes are tremendously important, it’s not clear to me that these changes should be taken as defining new eras. The continuities for other sectors – often the majority – of the proletariat are just as important, for instance the long running precarity of those who perform the majority of the predominantly unwaged and feminized labors of reproduction. I’m a bit nervous that focusing on the newly precaritized – and treating all precarities as identical – will obfuscate some hierarchies and social stratifications invisible and thus render them harder to eliminate. Fourth, precarity as I’ve discussed it is not exactly of the labor process but rather is of the valorization process. That is, it is of labor power and surplus value, not of use value production. This is not an absolute distinction. Just-in-time production, for example, is a form of arranging the production process and one which is a sort of engine of precaritization, in order to make the workforce more malleable to just-in-time production demands. At the same time, just-in-time production is possible to some extent for nearly any type of product, though certain technical factors do impact the speed and coordination which is available. What I want to stress here, though, is that precarity is not a technical factor or the result of technical factors of production, but rather is a political condition – in the sense of class politics – which is the condition for capitalist production.

Okay, those observations aside, let me return to my opening question. Why is there no discourse on precarity in the United States? This is partly a rhetorical question, but a few years ago when I first started hearing about precarity mobilizations in Europe I took it very seriously. I have two answers to this question.

My first answer is to assert that there has been such a US discourse. Surely a discourse on something can exist without mentioning that something by the name it is known by in other circles. Why is there no discourse on precarity is a question akin to why is there no discourse on class. There is a discourse on class in the United States, several of them actually, though the word "class" and related terms which appear in academic discussions and leftist discussion of class do not often appear in this discourse. Similarly, there have been several discourses on precarity, which I’ll list.

I grew up just behind so-called Generation X. I remember reading and hearing about the idea that for the first time in a very long time Americans in general were going to start achieving less than their parents did in terms of economic success and comfort. While I do want to note that this "Americans in general" excludes many people who didn’t experience the levels of success equally, this phenomenon certainly speaks to my own experience and that of many friends of my same age. The Generation X discourse was a type of discourse on precaritization without using the word "precarity." There are also magazines like TempSlave and Processed World, which addressed aspects of precaritization without using the term, and I’m sure there are many others which I don’t know about that addressed the growth of part time and temp labor. There is also the attention and concern over part time and temp labor as well as the shift to a so-called service economy, which has been addressed in the mainstream media as well as been attended to in mainstream union circles in the US. There is also the recent debates and mobilizations over immigration, which is intimately bound up with precaritization. Debates over NAFTA and the FTAA might also be considered in part discourses on precaritization, along with perennial discussion on the disappearance of the middle class. A fair amount of popular culture also deals with issues of precaritization.

To list a few more, precarity was briefly discussed at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, it was discussed under a number of discourses on so-called "bums", "tramps", and "hobos", and in discussions on migrant and so-called "casual" laborers. More recently, precarity was discussed in the 1990s the Love and Rage Anarchist Federation, an important national political organization which dissolved just prior to the cycle of antiglobalization protests but which shaped the anarchist wing of that cycle. Love and Rage had a standing committee focused on what they called "anti-austerity" work, essentially work against precaritization, and had an extensive discussion of what they called "reproles", short of "reproletarianized", strata of younger workers who were in precarious positions that they considered to be more proletarian than their parents had been. Love and Rage theorists saw their groups social base as drawn from the precarious "reprole" sector. What I mean to do with this litany of examples is to show that in an important sense there is or has been a precarity discourse in the US. The absence of the word "precarity" alone is not enough to say there is and has been no such discourse.

You might agree with this but say I’ve missed an important point – there have been discourses on precarities in the US. But there have been mass mobilizations in Europe with no analog in the US. Bracketing the recent immigration mobilizations last May Day, let’s assume this is true. Why is this so? I contend that this is so because many of the processes of precaritization opposed currently in Europe have long been the case in the United States. The welfare state in the United States never reached the level of the welfare state in Europe, and attacks on the welfare state in the US in the 80s and 90s eroded it further. Thus, what I called precaritization of welfare has existed in the US for a long time. Many aspects of precaritization on the job have long been the case as well. Labor law in the United States has been weaker than that in other countries in many respects for at least the majority of the 20th century, with the doctrine of "at will employment" predominating. Recent European and Australian reforms in labor law are characterizable as the "Americanization" of their labor law. Furthermore, the enforcement provisions and resources of the relevant state administrative bodies that oversee labor law have never been strong in the US.

What is in common between the US and Europe is the growth of casualization - part-time and temporary work, and "nonstandard" work hours. Other changes in the US have accompanied changes in Europe but they have been less drastic, because conditions that serve as bulwarks against precarity at the institutional level were never as advanced in the US as elsewhere. In Europe recently there has been a more drastic set of changes, more widely operating precaritization processes. Anti-precarity movements have had more to crystallize around as a result.

I should note that institutional factors are not the only conditions creating relative security or precarity. At least as important is an organized working class. Laws routinely go unenforced in many US workplaces because employees are not aware of the law, or do not have the power to enforce the letter of the law. In other US workplaces, collective organization has been able to impose better conditions and wages which create relatively greater security. [FOR EXAMPLE, THE TROQUEROS] Overemphasis on institutional factors has been a problem in some parts of the European anti-precarity movements [CHAINWORKERS, DEMORADICAL STUFF], which amounts to a renewed social democratic project dressed up in a new idiom. If this project is able to achieve gains it will be as a result of the mobilizations and organization which occurs, not because of the demands themselves.

Okay, so my first response to my titular question is to say that there is a US discourse on precarity. My second response is to translate the question into what I think is really behind it, at least the way I used to ask it, which is "why are the US discourses on precarity not more like the European ones?" This isn’t so much of a question as more of a lamentation. It parallels older questions about the US working class, lamentations masked as interrogatives over the absence of a powerful national socialist or communist party in the US. In my view, this lamentation is well intentioned but misguided. Precarity has long been the case in the US. There is a long history of organizing within and against precarity here. While it is important to build ties between US and European and other global antiprecarity struggles, it’s not productive to look wistfully to European anti-precarity movements or to presume an inferiority within the US context. If anything, it’s more productive to look to the histories of struggles in the United States and elsewhere as sources of lessons and inspiration for antiprecarity struggles today.