I’d be keen to see the Precarias a la Deriva and folk with a similar outlook respond to Federici. 

MayDay for Freedom and Lives - Mondo MayDay for the Precariat 2007 in Tokyo
 

- Value everyone’s right to life!
- End wage slavery! We demand decent wages for decent lives!
- We won’t let society shut us out!
- War is murder. End all wars NOW!
- We will be heard on May first!

Day and time: April 30th, 2007 (public holiday) opening at 12:30
- Place: The Okubo Community Center: 4F Multi-purpose Hall (the star mark in the map)
- Sponsorship: “MayDay for Freedom and Survival” Committee 2007
- Calling: All People of interest
- Contact & proposer: Freeter’s General Union
ZIP: 160-0023, MK building 2F, 4-16-13 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
Tel: 03-3373-0180
e-mail: paff (at) sanpal.co.jp
- Meeting place expense donation: 500 Yen
- Schedule & demonstration guide
Open: 12:30 @ Okubo Community Center, multi-purpose hall (the Okubo Community Center 4F)
Start: 13:00

Fightback1: 13:00-14:00
Declarations for the MayDay rally
(Okubo Community Center 4F hal)

Fightback2: 14:30-16:00
Okubo ~ Shinjuku MayDay march
(Okubo -> Shinjuku -> Okubo)
Check the route and how to join! (route map)

Fightback3: 16:30-21:00
Precariat talk session & interchange @ Okubo Community Center 4F hall
Mediator: Karin Amamiya (author) & QT (Freeters’ General Union)
Propounder: Makoto Yuasa (NPO Moyai, director)
Shiro Yabu (magazine “VOL,” staff writer)
-D.I.Y. Food booth by Eat Resist Exist
-A party and other plans are coming!

The managers of this rally in no way condone or accept any acts of violence or vandalism.
MayDay Appeal

In truth, the most important thing is living one’s life. In reality, existence is looked down upon! The reality is slave wages with extended working hours while workers’ life is being pushed to the margins. Honest employment is no longer a guarantee that one can live a sustainable life.

We should not allow any system that screens the people as the “valuable” and the “non-valuable.” The reality is that socially "unnacceptable" lifestyles are being marginalized. Illegitimate termination and employee selection are the norm with employers. If we do nothing, these problems will only become more severe!

In addition, it is important to know that there is no justification for murder. End all war in the world and within society!

The solution is the May Day protest: a day of solidarity, a day for us to fight back!

"Poverty" is viewed as merely a social problem, but in times of an expanding and unstable workforce, it becomes more and more difficult for one to be ably employed. In this case, the problem becomes overwhelmingly a political problem.

The government, however, trivializes these problems as a “shortage of job opportunities” and tries to attribute the responsibility to a lack of our job skills or ambition. This lack of action by the government has led to further marginalize the workforce and alienate us from ourselves.

The only people benefiting from such a system are the people with capital and means, not the common people.

The power structures want us to believe that they are doing us a favor: "Without sacrifice, there is nothing to be gained." But is sacrificing your life and liberty worth the slave-wages you are being paid? "Resistance is futile." But, in solidarity comes power. We do not need to be blamed for these unstable days with a gloomy future and do not need to wear out our minds, bodies or emotions any more.

We call upon all the people who refuse to accept this lifestyle that was not "given" to us, but rather forced upon us. We call upon all people who refuse unjust employers who divide and rule by stirring discrimination and exclusion among ourselves. We call upon all people who oppose war and all injustices to stand up for human solidarity and survival.
Join us in this day of liberation for the precariat and celebration of humanity!

March 23, 2007
“MayDay for Freedom and Survival” Committee 2007

see http://mayday2007.nobody.jp/index-en.html

* * *

More about precarity: Mayday Milan Call
 

repost from email: 01.05.2007 - The indymedia.org.uk feature on Mayday speaks of "the precarious". In Milan, the Mayday activists have sent out a Mayday call that explains a bit more about the condition of precarity. Its about Italy, and each Mayday has its own story, but they are connected in many ways, too.

Rollcall Mayday 2007

To all the precarious workers, both natives and migrants, men and women. To the contortionists of flexibility and the acrobats of everyday life. To the temporary workers and contractors, the pseudo self-employed, the long-term precarious and those secure until-who-knows-when. To students and researchers, precarious workers in education and information. To all those still looking for income and wage, to all those demanding their rights.

Let’s Mayday!

For the seventh time Precarious Milan is yelling Mayday!
The scream that seven years ago broke the embarrassed silence of media and institutions on the subject of precarity - be they of the right or the left - has today become a powerful presence, a fundamental point of reference, an unconcealable element on the national political stage.

As is known, each Mayday has its own story, but over time precarious workers have increasingly become the protagonists at the center of the stage, freed from the mediation of trade unions, parties and social centers. In a year that has demonstrated the unreliability of so called "radical" parties and the confusion of social movements, the precarious have found means and moments to organize themselves, both in the streets and in the ongoing process that links each Mayday to the next.

‘'’Mayday 007 speaks of conflict”’

We have long been convinced that precarity represents a crisis not only within society, but also in those social, political and trade-union movements that attempt to intercept, fashion and corral it. Mayday has been the proof of this. Those who wish to oppose precarity must reckon with the mechanisms that generate it. Precarization is a complex phenomenon; a fatal mix of atomization, blackmail, and consent.

The increasing protagonism of the precarious is the outcome of a process that began with new collective narratives, and has been able to create a virtuous cycle substituting the visible - but often transient - action that characterized many May 1st, with a continuing accumulation of determination, skills and passions. This has engendered increased participation. Two years ago we claimed that Mayday’s radicality was born out of creating relationships. Today we reiterate that this radicality consists in its ability to translate the frustration, isolation and blackmail experienced daily by precarious workers into something else, whereby disappointment at the in/civility of business can be transformed into a complicity between the precarious, and where conflict can be renewed in order to face the disorientation in which precarity plunges us.

‘'’Mayday 007 speaks of demands”’

We believe that the protections of permanent employment for those in fixed positons still represents an important frame of reference for the demands of precarious workers. But we also think that the particular social structure characterized by this form of "security", cannot be reproduced today. Mayday demands universal rights and uninterrupted income, as essential elements in disarming the continuous blackmail to which we are subjected.

But some clarification is required: the centre-left government is weak and unable to grasp the implications of the wildfire spread of precarious conditions. Commissions on social shock-absorbers, pensions, and new rights, point towards a complex set of "solutions" that we find shocking.

Electing to manage precarity, rather than create a set of measures, rights and protections able to strengthen the condition of precarious, reveals their clear intention: to protect the means by which companies enrich themselves through precarization, at best softening their most drastic effects. They want to treat the symptom and not the disease, hoping the invalid just forgets about it. Continuity of income, demanded by the thousands of precarious who have taken part in Mayday in recent years, can be transformed into an opportunity, rather than being merely the newest type of chains - but only if it provides the precarious with a choice, to reject the worst jobs, and therefore, implicitly, to fight and improve their conditions. Any other solution changes the terms of precarity, but does nothing to diminish its intensity. It matters little if we are precarious due to blackmail in the labour market, or due to the coercion of the latter combined with a welfare system that forces us to work at any cost.

‘'’ From conflict to income through the five axis of precarity ‘'’

We know that precarity starts from employment to then permeate the social - that is the set of actions, relations and choices that anyone carries out daily whether out of need, desire, awareness or coercion. In this sense the five axis of precarity constitute the horizon to focus on. Housing, a right nowadays denied not only to the precarious; sociality; education and training; access to knowledge and to free sustainable transport, still represent fundamental fields of action and conflict, which have always encountered and encompassed Mayday in a variety of forms. Likewise anti-prohibitionism and self-determination, regarding which the government - subjected to a clerical offensive - lacked the backbone to keep its promises. Individual self-determination, the right to choose one’s personal needs/desires, and the just demand to control one’s own body, are issues that refuse inter/mediation, and must be demanded and won through the conspiring of individual subjects.

‘'’ Mayday 007 speaks of rights, citizenship and new kinds of civilization ‘'’

Witch-hunts in the name of ’security’, together with refrains of ‘order’ and ‘legality’, the Bossi-Fini law on immigration and CPT (Temporary Accommodation Centers) represent a crucial tool for blackmailing an important part of the social fabric: migrants. The binding of citizenship rights to employment represents a a barbarism that humiliates and radicalizes difference, making much-vaunted ‘integration’ even more difficult. Migrants today epitomize the meaning of the precarity of life, and show how companies’ hunger for profit and their need for labour is unlimited: migrants’ rights to income, housing, health and education is, by law, under the control of business. And, following the same insistence on ‘legality’, they are prevented from freeing themselves from this yoke, as in the case of foreign phone-centre operators in Lombardia, who must suddenly lose their only source of income and go in search of new employment. Precarity doesn’t find one homogenous expression, but is the intentional outcome of different strategies that affect many parts of the social body by dividing and segmenting them. Neoliberalism needs the clash of civilizations. But the only fight we are interested in is that between two opposing understandings as to how to build a different society: the path of rights that clashes with the refrain of ‘legality’. Everyone must now choose unambiguously; which of the two paradigms will be the driving force behind which to mobilize one’s commitment and define one’s vision.

For us, it’s clear that ‘legality’ is increasingly unjust, and civil rights are won through conflict. In Milan, where hardship, rage and exclusion increase day by day, becoming progressively more uncontrollable, the town council’s only response is to demand that sidewalks of consumption and streets of fashion be unstained and untouched by this reality. We reject this shameless equivalence. It is imperative to reassert civil rights, abolish the CPTs, and repeal Bossi-Fini and all other discriminatory laws.

‘'’ Mayday 007 speaks of Europe”’

This year once again Mayday will encompass many European cities, because Europe is the public space which must be made into a social and conflictual sphere where the conditions of precarity can be challenged and overcome. The Europe we imagine is different from that monetary Europe born of the hypocrisy of the new millennium. Within it, we want to propose a new politics of welfare, applying the same criteria to natives and migrants, to reduce the number of employment types, stipulate a minimum per-hour wage independent of the type of employment contract, and guarantee continuity of income for all.

EuroMayDay represents today one constitutive processes for the emerging idea of a new Europe - radical, free, social and sustainable.

‘’ Mayday Mayday ‘'’ May 1°, ‘007 Milano, Porta Ticinese (Piazza XXIV Maggio) - 3pm

An invisible history of work (via)

Interview with Sergio Bologna by Sabine Grimm and Klaus Ronneberger
      
How can you photograph the work of freelances? How can you give visual expression to their physical devastation after many years of working in front of a computer screen? Sergio Bologna posed that question several years ago in an interview.1 Whilst in the Fordist era there was a long tradition of industrial photography, which documented the diverse forms taken by exploitation, it seems to be virtually impossible to depict the activities of the new self-employed using visual means. The strategies and tactics with which they confront the constraints arising from their status have so far been part of the »invisible history of work« (Bologna). Freelances are confronted with demanding communicative, technical-scientific and commercial standards, but these demands are more or less a private matter, provided that their clients can silently assume that freelances will rise to meet the challenge.

In »Dieci tesi per la definizione di uno statuto del lavoro autonomo«, recently translated into German as »Die Zerstörung der Mittelschichten. Thesen zur Neuen Selbständigkeit«2, Sergio Bologna seeks to show the human face of self-employed workers. Bologna has been politically active since the 1960s; he was one of the founders of the Italian Operaist (Workerist) movement and has repeatedly addressed the social organization of work. Whilst he initially developed a theory of the Fordist »mass worker«3, the focus of his analyses shifted in the late 1970s. He turned his gaze on the impact of an expanding network economy with atypical employment contracts and flexible working hours, concentrating particularly on the emergence of a new generation of »jobbers«, working with informal or limited-duration contracts, workers who no longer had any prospect of a full-time job. They did not want to give up their freedom and saw Fordist wage-labour as anything but the promise of a better life.

Bologna thus began a study, extending over many years, on the new forms of self-employed work. His research was also to a large extent shaped by a caesura in his own biography. In the early 1980s a politically motivated decision was taken to remove him from his post as professor in Padua and he had to find a new way to earn his living; since then he has worked as a freelance consultant. His studies on post-Fordist working relations would certainly not have come into being in this form without this personal experience.

Picking up on the Operaist tradition and the social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, in his aforementioned book Bologna presents the viewpoint that independent work also represents liberation, and has the potential to be self-determined, in a nutshell, that it is possible »to produce better ways of life than waged labour«4. The Operaist perspective distinguishes his studies from the (industrial-) sociological approaches prevalent in Germany on the phenomenon of the new self-employed. In contrast to the post-Operaist theory of the multitude however Bologna’s theses have an empirical-sociological thrust. His work is based on statistics, interviews etc. and describes the various aspects of freelance work in detail.

Whilst most sociological approaches to the new forms of self-employment continue to take the paradigms of waged labour as their starting point, Bologna believes the phenomenon strikes at the core of the foundations of the Fordist society. Neo-liberalism threatens to destroy the social and political achievements of the labour movement. As work moves away from waged labour, it is not only traditional modes of struggle that lose their importance but also individuals’ relationship to exploitation and alienation. Self-employed workers are no longer confronted with exploitation exclusively as an »external« relationship of coercion, but must also to an extent ascribe the constraints they face to their »own willingness«. And so far they have not had any instruments for resistance that would place them in a position of power similar to that which Fordist mass workers previously enjoyed. The new forms of work bring about such a change in the spatial and temporal organization of work that the interests of freelances cannot be articulated in the vernacular of trade unions. The principle of making demands no longer pertains in the light of their working conditions.

But how can one conceive of representation and organisation of the self-employed, who are often isolated and in precarious situations? For Bologna they do not constitute a new »revolutionary subject«; instead, as in the early labour movement the key issue is initially self-help, a »system of mutual support«. In this context he expresses his opposition to the widespread notion that large industrial firms almost automatically generated solidarity among the workforce, whereas egoistic and individualistic behaviour patterns are the norm amongst the self-employed. For him attitudes of solidarity are always a product of political socialization processes and must constantly be generated anew.

With his theses on the »destruction of the middle classes«, Bologna attempts to intervene in a social sphere which right-wing politicians, as he emphasises, »continue to view as fertile ground for their slogans«5. Experience in Italy has shown that the new self-employed are susceptible to neo-Conservatism; many of them supported the Lega Nord and Berlusconi’s government. Historic parallels with the inter-war period in Germany spring to mind, when sections of the »new« middle classes were amongst those who voted for the National Socialists. Bologna devotes a chapter of his book to »An analysis of independent work in 1920s sociology «. Back then sociologists such as Emil Lederer, Theodor Geiger or Hans Speier turned against the Marxist assumption of a polarisation of society into two classes, the proletariat and bourgeoisie, and examined figures in the »grey area«: the production of new middle classes and forms of independent work in the transition to Fordism. In essence, to cite Bologna, reflections on the topic of independent work were suspended when National Socialism appeared and did not re-emerge until the late 1970s when the situation had been turned on its head: with the crisis of Fordism and the advent of new forms of independent work, ranging from the »drop-outs« of the 1970s via the new self-employed right through to the precariate, i.e. the class of workers in precarious employment. He is one of the most attentive analysts of this transition.

Sabine Grimm/Klaus Ronneberger: Talk of »destruction of the middle classes« is very much riddled with assumptions, particularly in Germany. Since industrialisation this discourse has repeatedly emerged here as a bourgeois-conservative topos in arguments, tinged with an air of cultural pessimism. You reproach left-wing intellectuals for so far not having taken a closer look at the middle class, which also includes their own social situation. What caused you to place the middle classes at the core of your analysis?

Sergio Bologna: I was inspired by my personal experience, contacts with people I met who had the same profession or a comparable lifestyle and standard of living. They struggle with similar problems and in essence enjoy the same opportunities in life and in their careers. I had to do without the entire tradition of the left. »Middle class« was long a term of abuse in that tradition. Later, after communist parties had turned their backs on class struggle and become moderate reformist lobbies, the middle classes became a popular target group of political campaigns; gaining their agreement and support has become the main objective of political propaganda. Basically the left’s approach to the middle classes was a neurotic-opportunistic attitude. In contrast, I am simply interested in how to reveal concealed forms of exploitation and in combating injustice and inequalities (e.g. with reference to questions of social security, the pensions system etc.) In the leftist tradition, the middle classes only deserve solidarity when they have reached the end of a process of proletarisation, in other words, when they have become impoverished. I am also interested in discovering the concealed potential for socialisation, in order to enable political action in contemporary society and ensure those directly affected can play an active role in the public sphere.

Grimm/Ronneberger: Which social groups do the post-Fordist middle classes encompass? In your theses you don’t simply talk about new forms of self-employment, but more precisely about the »second generation of the self-employed«, contrasted with traditional freelances such as doctors, architects or lawyers. And you distinguish between independent freelance work and precarious work.

Bologna: The Italian term “precariato” has a slightly different significance than the notion of the »abgehängtes Prekariat« (»socially-detached precariate«), which has become a buzzword in Germany in the debate on the »Unterschicht« (»lower class«). Differences in systems regulating work often make it difficult to compare particular social classes using the same terms or definitions. In Italy the traditional liberal professions have a form of self-regulation via their professional associations (guilds, chambers). These provide protection from risks for members and in some cases offer better benefits than the general social insurance scheme. Second-generation self-employed workers are members of what are known as »non-regulated professions«. Despite fifteen years of mandatory contributions, which have been increased significantly by Prodi’s government, they are only eligible for paltry benefits from the social security system. They have no form of self-protection – that is also a consequence of their fragmentation. We distinguish between the self-employed who can move freely on the »skills market«, the pseudo self-employed (who work, for example, for a single client and invoice the client every month) and casual workers/jobbers, who experience precarity as a »normal state of affairs«. Basically however all these groups are exposed to risk and the insecurity associated with precarisation. A typical feature of the post-Fordist era is to-ing and fro-ing between various different employment relations, which has become necessary to secure one’s livelihood: sometimes one is an employee in a wage-based contractual relationship, then self-employed again, then unemployed once more etc. However, there is a situation that is even worse, which was finally put on the agenda by the revolt of French youth in 2006, namely the situation of those who work for free, i.e. making their time and skills available to an anonymous third party for no pay: doing “stages” or internships. This phenomenon particularly affects young well-educated people. I consider that to be a really untenable state of affairs. It is a sign of the decline of our democracy. In Italy this form of exploitation is particularly common among traditional freelances: in large offices of lawyers or architects, where young graduates work for years unpaid. And that shows how difficult it is to draw rigid boundaries between social groups.

Grimm/Ronneberger: In your description of freelance work you protest repeatedly against the idea of drawing analogies with firms, terms used in common parlance, such as of micro-companies, one-man businesses, the Ich-AG (Me-Plc) etc. You write, »representing the company means learning to talk about success, whereas representing work means rendering visible the effort and difficulties associated with it «. The entrepreneurial ideology seems by now to have actually come to dominate societal perception of working relations, from labour market policy via the culture of self-help books right through to the way in which individuals perceive themselves. What consequences arise from this way of looking at work?

Bologna: The symbolic level is very important in this case, as particular notions of values are associated with symbols. My ideas on this are very simple. To my mind the notion of the »individual as a company« is nonsense, an absurdity. In economics and in European theory of law the concept of the company is always associated with the terms »institution«, »organisation«, »complex structure«, with three essential, distinct social roles within this structure: the role of the financier, the role of management and the role of the workforce. If these three social roles are assumed by one and the same person, then we have no right to talk about a »company«. In that case it is independent work, working on one’s own account.
But why do people insist so much on wanting to describe something that is actually »work« as a »company«? Why do statistics institutes persist in maintaining this classification, whose grotesque character is revealed at the very latest when these institutions publish figures on the size of businesses and talk about »average company size«? It is because this conceals an ideological operation. The subjects in question are transferred from the symbolic sphere of work to the symbolic sphere of the company. Perhaps some people actually believe they have managed to make the leap from worker to entrepreneur and have moved from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. In reality however they are often neither one nor the other.

Grimm/Ronneberger: With your theses you strive to make the reality of independent freelance work visible; the specific perception of space and time associated with this, the altered relationship between the public and the private sphere. To that end you also introduce two concepts; »relational work«, which independent workers invest to establish and maintain business contacts and networks, and the notion of the »domestication of the workplace«. What do you understand by »domestication«?

Bologna: The term was introduced by American sociology and frequently employed in the women’s movement. It simply means that work and private life are increasingly superimposed and ultimately merge, that the biological and cultural rhythms of life and the rhythms of work fuse into one single entity, that working time is no longer regulated by signals determining when it begins and ends. Statistical data confirm that working time in general is becoming extended. The spread of independent work has given rise to a massive extension of the social working day. New technologies have made the main contribution to this development. I am answering your questions whilst sitting on a plane from Berlin to Milan with my laptop on my knees. In a moment I’ll have to stop as we are coming in to land, but I will continue at once as soon as I am on the train taking me from Malpensa airport to the city centre. There I will take the underground and, when I get home, if I have time and am not too tired, I’ll switch my computer on again and continue to answer your questions. »Domestication« therefore does not mean home-working or tele-working; it means that work activities can encroach upon all spaces of private life. There is no longer a specific place devoted specially to carrying out work.

Grimm/Ronneberger: Your empirical studies also included interviews with self-employed people. What impression did you glean of the psycho-social consequences of freelance work? How do your interviewees deal with the permanent risk and insecurity? Did they comment on that?

Bologna: It varies from person to person. The forms of independent freelance work, or rather, to be more precise, work biographies in the post-Fordist era, take on very different shapes. Today a precarious worker may be on the breadline, tomorrow a well-paid consultant and the next minute unemployed with little prospect of re-entering the labour market. The people I interviewed almost all had a high level of professional qualifications, i.e. they were what is called knowledge workers. Three aspects made a profound impression on me, as they cropped up in all the interviews. The problem of risk is not one of them. The first aspect is the low esteem with which such people are treated during the initial job interviews in Italy, whilst in the USA firms are fighting to acquire talents and skills for their companies. The second aspect is the almost complete lack of political or civil commitment among this group; the excuse generally put forward is that they have no time for such engagement. The third aspect is the enormous difference between generations. Graduates who completed their studies in the early 1990s can look back on successful professional careers, with periods in which they worked as employees alternating with independent work. Graduates who completed their studies at the start of this millennium have enormous difficulties in starting out in their profession, even if they are have much better qualifications than colleagues ten or fifteen years older. As they cannot find work and are afraid the risky business of becoming self-employed, which seems to be increasingly difficult, they continue their studies, do specialist training or language courses, go abroad, etc.

Grimm/Ronneberger: In your theses you point out the contradiction between the democratic-liberal myth of the knowledge society and the crisis in the school and education system. The foundations for the production of »knowledge workers» no longer exists. The slogans on lifelong learning, initially formulated with emancipatory intent, have been transformed through reduced public expenditure on education into an obligation placed on each individual to keep on organising their own further training. How would you distinguish between that approach and your call for »self-education«? Where can self-education occur?

Bologna: At least three different questions arise in this context. The first relates to the »knowledge society« and »knowledge workers«. A great deal of propaganda has been produced in this respect, creating real myths. Is it correct to say that demand on the labour market focuses on increasingly specialized professional figures processing knowledge? The answer is no, as is apparent at a glance in any statistics on the activities most in demand in modern society. The majority of those are low-skilled forms of work. Certainly the number of people with scientific-technical, humanistic or legal expertise is growing, as a general role, but this group does not represent such a high proportion of the demand for labour that one could say it shapes our society. People whose basic skills are »relational«, who can communicate well, present themselves convincingly and are self-assured, are, I believe, just as much in demand, even if these people do not have particular know-how.
A further question is whether generally speaking the skills acquired increase or decrease their market value. Do people who have invested in education, successfully completed their studies at good universities, acquired post-graduate degrees, learnt languages derive an advantage from this on the labour market? Unfortunately exactly the opposite seems to be the case in Europe. University graduates have the greatest difficulty in entering the labour market. It is they who are forced to work for free. A cashier, a porter, a waiter, a call centre employee may not earn much but they never work for free. To that extent professional skills and university education appear to be becoming less valuable. In Italy there are indications that rather than going to university young people now prefer to do concrete vocational training courses or attend technical institutes, which award diplomas at the end of their courses and 25 per cent of those who nevertheless matriculate throw in the towel in the second year. That may of course be related to the fact that, at least in Italy, universities are tailored to suit the interests of the teaching staff rather than the students, in other words, that the educational system as such is inadequate. Perhaps this is also caused by the nature of demand on the labour market. If an economy such as that in Italy today no longer gains its vitality from innovation, but instead from return on equity, in other words from »unearned income« (to use the English term), it is natural that skills undergo a process of devaluation. What counts is no longer an individual with particular skills, but instead someone who is more flexible, more opportunistic, more prepared to accept compromises, to jeopardize their own human dignity. How is it possible to remedy this? It is not possible; the Western world has opted to drift in this direction and – at present – no social or political force wishes to resist this. One can avoid being utterly steamrollered by this development, for example by developing self-protection networks and in addition, by tapping into »unofficial« knowledge, all the alternative skills that are much more readily accessible nowadays thanks to the Internet.

Grimm/Ronneberger: In the light of the isolation of self-employed workers it is difficult to imagine forms of organisation and representation for them. You point out that it is impossible to implement strikes and similar forms of struggle and conclude that only a »system of mutual support«, comparable to self-help in the early workers’ movement, corresponds to the needs of the self-employed. Doesn’t this kind of alliance often stand in contradiction to the entrepreneurial ideology, which many self-employed indeed also adopt, denying their own social situation to themselves and others? Where do you see approaches involving this kind of »mutual support«, with networks that also offer scope to reflect on one’s own situation?

Bologna: That is right, it is very difficult to convince independent workers to meet, to organise themselves, to express their interests collectively. However, it is not impossible. My experience of this in Milan in particular is very interesting. One day a friend of mine, who is also self-employed, drew my attention to a homepage – http://www.actainrete.it . When I connected to the site, I discovered that there had for some time been an association of freelance workers, who had found some food for thought and been encouraged to act thanks to the book on independent work that I published almost ten years ago6. On the whole the members were women, who had decided to work freelance to combine their family obligations or their role as mothers with their profession. I joined this association too and we now work together. We are currently involved in a campaign against the tax increases introduced by Prodi’s government, which claims that it wants to help the weaker members of society but in reality has exacerbated the difficult situation of atypical workers and the new self-employed. We are also in conflict with the trade unions, above all CGIL, the largest trade union federation, which is supposed to represent »atypical workers« but in fact only defends the interests of pseudo self-employed workers. We have now been joined by a group in Bologna, also composed mainly of women. Some of them were among the founders of the trade union sub-organisation of »atypical workers«, but subsequently left it. We have now begun to structure our organization to ensure that every new contact contributes to making our discourse more complex. Given the high proportion of female self-employed workers in the association, we have established contacts with feminist groups and activists from the women’s movement and will be holding an initial public event with them in December in order to initiate negotiations with the municipal administration in Milan, the province and the region of Lombardy. Working with these groups has meant that we have been able to look in greater depth at some of the topics affecting the women’s situation, for example »domestication«. In addition, we have also taken a look around and discovered many other groups set up in particular professions to combat precarity and re-establish the value of skills, for example a group of freelance journalists, based in various locations throughout Italy. The topics of information and self-education will be addressed afresh on a totally new basis. What point am I trying to make in narrating all of this? I believe that with this group of self-employed workers, some of whom also voted for Berlusconi at the last election, I am involved in a journey of establishing networks; that is an avenue I also pursued in the past, but this time the topics permeating debates are professional identity and skills. I am very pleased that my writings have once again convinced people to defend their rights, that these texts helped them to gain a better understanding of their own situation.

Grimm/Ronneberger: What significance does the movement of workers in precarious situations have for a political articulation of the new self-employed? What do you consider to be the similarities and differences in terms of your view of the second-generation of self-employed work?

Bologna: The movement of followers of »Saint Precarious« stems from a totally different background. It came into being on the one hand in the social centres (centri sociali), and on the other hand in the environs of the »more creative« groups of the autonomous left-wing movement and the youth proletariat. This movement rapidly gathered an entourage drawn from the whole spectrum of the radical, neo- and post-Communist movements. The PRC, the Partità Comunista Rifondazione (translator’s note: the revamped Communist party) has piggybacked on this movement and will possibly integrate it into its structures. In the last elections important figures from the autonomous centres’ movement (centri sociali) were elected to parliament on the PRC list. One of them, for many years the figurehead of the Centro Sociale Leoncavallo in Milan, has even become deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee on judicial issues. I would say that the movement of followers of St. Precarious is highly politicized, with public-sector workers playing an important role in the movement: people in precarious employment in schools, hospitals, municipal administrations. They want to have stable, long-term contracts of employment rather than limited-term contracts. In contrast, the groups I am currently working with are made up of people with no particular political loyalties. They become activists out of a desire to protect themselves, because they wish to avoid the dangers of individual isolation, they come from the »normal« urban middle classes, even if some of them are also somewhat older and took part in the 68 movement. As ever, their individual stories and very interesting and testify to the profound transformations currently afoot better than any theoretical discourse could do. Politics and the media are miles away from that. In particular it always strikes me and frustrates me to see how out of touch with reality the left is. Prodi’s government, which has been in office since June, is the best example of this. This government has simply wiped out twenty years of reflection on the transformation of the world of work and post-Fordism. We really have regressed twenty years. If Berlusconi and Fini’s right-wing supporters could exploit this situation to serve their own ends if they took more concerted action, but at present they do not seem to be capable of that. Who knows if perhaps a new phase of awakening of civil society might not emerge out of this profound crisis of politics, out of the mistrust towards both poles of the political spectrum and this second-generation of self-employed workers will most certainly be on board then.

Translation: Helen Ferguson

1 C.f. »No Past? No!« An interview with Italian analyst of post-Fordism, Sergio Bologna, in: springerin, Volume 4/2001, p. 22.
2 Sergio Bologna, Die Zerstörung der Mittelschichten. Thesen zur Neuen Selbständigkeit, Graz 2006.
3 C.f. S. Bologna/M. Cacciari, Zusammensetzung der Arbeiterklasse und Organisationsfrage, Berlin 1973; S. Bologna/F. Ciafaloni/P. Bolzani, Techniker als Produzenten und als Produkt, Berlin 1972.
4 Bologna, Die Zerstörung der Mittelschichten, p. 23. (German edition)
5 ibid., p. 7.
6 Sergio Bologna/Andrea Fumagalli, Il lavoro autonomo di seconda generazione. Scenari del postfordismo in Italia, Milan 1997.

Bologna’s sections from the Bologna/Fumagalli book online in Italian here and here. 

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 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.

http://www.generation-precaire.org/

http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/02/precarity-and-experimental-subjection.html

http://www.stop-precarite.org/ 

section "France Intern Report" here -

http://www.theworld.org/?q=taxonomy_by_date/1/20070219 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5026941

by Laura Fantone
September 15 2006

Introduction

  In this decade, especially in the last five years, European social movements have
developed increasingly on the issue of flexibilization of labor. These movements are clearly a response to neo-liberalization and the reduction of welfare and the so–called “social rights” acquired, after intense struggle, by citizens of the industrialized countries during the 20th century (Hobsbawn, Piven and Cloward).

In Italy in particular, several new laws and tax measures passed over this period have transformed the workplace both qualitatively and quantitatively, particularly through the proliferation of temp-agencies and new types of short-term contracts. While a number of books and research have focused on how these shifts have impacted the workforce in general (Tiddi, Zanini, Chaincrew, Accornero), a gendered approach is uncommon and underdeveloped (Allegrini 2005). By bringing gender into the analysis of precarity, I intend to address its multiple dimensions, especially the aspects of precarity that impact everyday life and social reproduction. This approach stems from previous traditions of feminist research and aims to avoid any reductionist equation of precariousness as simply
a dreadful condition of labor *1.  By analyzing the emerging discourses in the new precarity movement, I intend to provide here some useful insights, eventhough any analysis of such a recently born movement can not provide but a specific depiction of concrete cases. My analysis is centered around the ideas of gender and generations, as two important dimensions defining the emerging movement.

The main argument of the essay is that precarity and job market flexibility are different issues, and that they are not solely negative phenomena for the generation of women in their twenties and thirties. The idea of an existential precarity turned-around and looked at creatively in opposition to the traditional values that Italian society imposes on young women. In fact, various third wave feminist groups are skeptical about security, as it evokes the ideas of a stable life made of marriage, family, and a number of responsibilities both in the house and in the workplace, which came with little recognition.  Nevertheless, in the view of this generation of feminists neo-liberal precarity must be resisted due to its exploitation and erosion of basic rights.

Precarity may thus be a condition that makes suddenly clear to all European men
and women the mechanisms that perpetuate vicious cycles of exploitation in a post-industrial context, in which the weight of social and affective labor rests mainly on women’s shoulders, and, even worse, is unevenly distributed between elder women, young women and migrant women.      Therefore the younger women’s experience of instability requires new strategies and tools for struggle. This approach intends to be an attempt to reframe the precarity movement as a struggle which requires solidarity and networking across genders, generations and ethnicities, rather than a simple defense of old rights through legal battles. My conclusion will address some current issues raised by women involved in such movement in the light of contemporary Italian (and European) politics.

Precarity as a post-industrial issue

  The European context
  The so called precarity social movement emerged in the last decade in Italy and Europe. Before outlining its features it is useful to remember, at the risk of stating the obvious, that the contemporary European context is marked by an increase in economic inequalities and growing disparities in social participation and citizenship rights, which are granted or denied according to the lines of skin color, age, masculinity, (white and
not, adults and not, male or not) and, last but not least, northern and southern origins. In this context it is important to look at the precarity movement as a powerful new discourse which has been able to mobilize a generation across the EU and to re-center issues of labor for left movements in a post-fordist contest. However, it is important to keep in mind the limited social and historical scope of this contemporary European movement. There are no comparisons with the similar economic contexts of the North America or Japanese post-industrial economies, where the shift to job precarity already
happened without a mass movement capable of responding to it in the public sphere. *2

  An even more obvious displacement of euro-centric generalizations on precarity, as well as on “the end of the industrial work model”, can be observed in the transfer of production to less regulated developing countries. The vast issue of globalization, in all its aspects, makes very clear how immaterial labor (as discussed by Negri, Lazzarato and others) is a broad concept with limited use, as it does not apply to the majority of
countries where large scale industrial and agricultural production, as well as “old-style” forms of exploitation are thriving.

  No one can deny that the precarity movement enacted some extremely useful strategies of unifying various groups under a shared perspective. Most importantly, it appropriated a negative term and circulated it widely, successfully creating a new political horizon where demands for new rights can develop *3 (flexicurity, unionizing of chain stores’ employees, access to free knowledge and culture, cheap housing and traveling). One can
see how these discourses and actions are vitally necessary in EU countries that are currently going through a labor market reform, such as Italy, Greece, Spain and, most notably France *4, which had the greatest mobilization so far, in Spring 2006. However, I intend to address here some material and discursive limits of the precarity movement, emphasizing the gendered dimension as one aspect that can provide a fresh view on the
issue.

The specificity of the Italian situation: flexible labor, inflexible institutions

  Data provided by the European Commission for Labor Affairs show how 4 million Italian workers have temp, part- time, free-lance or subcontracting jobs5. Of those, 2.5 millions are employed in the public sector, working for the state or for regional governmental institutions (public education, media, regional and city government, postal and health services). In Italy, they fall under a slippery category of “para-subordinate occasional, atypical, labor contractors”(co.co.pro, collaboratore esterno, occasionale, atipico, contingente and many other definitions bordering unintended surrealist humor).
  In a comparative study conducted in the regions of Lombardy and Emilia Romagna (CGIL 2005), the large Italian union CGIL, counted 1.5 millions of temp-workers who, two years after being hired (between 2002 and 2004), had not been given the opportunity to improve their contract into a more stable form of employment. So, if we consider that 18% of the Italian labor force has gradually become precarious over the last decade, it is not surprising that this movement has drawn many people into the streets during the last five years. The EuroMayday demonstrations have grown from 5,000 in Milan in year 2001 to 50,000 participants in 2005, but there have been many other actions as well.
   
Precarity was successfully transformed into an umbrella term with positive connotations, a tool for labor politics in a time in which working conditions do not facilitate communication nor unity and the unions lost many battles. The movement is based on a sophisticated use of internet and other media communication and is itself flexible enough to allow for multiple identifications. While it basically represents a whole generation, ranging from the 20s to the 40s, of (over)educated, politicized, urban youth *5 (often “alternative” people), it is open enough to include issues of gender, migration and
generations as potentially coevolving forces. It is to be expected then that this generation (la generation précarie, as Bordieu called it in 2001) would start to resent precarity, flexible jobs, and grow increasingly disgruntled about Italian institutions and society in general (as argued in the European Foundation for the Development of Living and Working research document, 2000).

  Flexibility and precarity issues have attracted the attention of researchers, journalists and opinion makers across the EU, to the point of becoming a mainstream issue and a general talking point among strangers. It is usually discussed in negative terms, through the narration of catastrophic stories in which the European educated youth figures as the ultimate victim. Starting from these diffuse negative feelings, the precarity movement has
thrived, finding ways to channel into a collective action something both personal and new about this generational experience6. The movement grew rapidly also because of its ability to speaking in different terms to various constituencies, raising consciousness
among the youth and at the same time engaging unions and policy makers in serious issues.

Post-industrial market, pre-industrial institutions and values

  Another aspect specific to Italy is that the economic model based on “flexibility” clashes with the ancient, unreformed institutions that are characteristic of a rigid society in which strict gender and age roles are respected, traditional family values rule and new forms of labor or family arrangements are greeted coldly, with great skepticism and fear.   Precarity also means lack of future prospect for a generation which, together the
withering public funding, is responsible for Italy’s “brain-drain” in all fields of research *6 as well as in the corporate world. Many professional in the forties abandoned the most cutting edge sectors exasperated by their lack of status, inflexible bureaucracies and low income. For the most part, those who survive in precarious conditions can do so because of some form of help from their family. An example of this is the fact that many young
Italians live within 30 kilometers from their parents, they see them twice or more a week and receive material help from their family of origin. *7 (Istat report on Italian families 2001 – updated on 2005). In fact, the Italian family proved in the last decade to be a resilient structure capable of adapting to various economic shifts and dysfunctional public institutions, as documented by extensive sociological literature (Bruning, Frey, Enaip and Censis researches). While I do not agree with much analysis of this field, it is important to recall here Italian family as the site of unequal gender dynamics.

  Furthermore, the poverty and restrained lifestyle which characterizes temp-work is not immediately experienced by many youth due to their family’s help. The elderly members are willing to help the youth even to the point of stifling their economic autonomy or personal independence. Even if many young precari strive not to be a burden on the family of origin, the discontinuous nature of income brings them to occasionally tap the already existing family resources. In addition, the lethal mix of precarious jobs for the younger generation and the simultaneous privatization of social services for children and elderly is forcing middle-class families to mobilize all their human and financial resources to maintain their previous average living standard. In being forced to tap into their savings, this class has now entered a debt economy. One could assess an important side effect of flexibility in the clear dilapidation of savings and extra-capital acquired by the middle class employed in the post-war boom. From the Fifties on, many Italian
worker’s families were able to buy their first home, count on a lifetime job to pay their mortgage and look forward to a decent pension, but they now find themselves stripped of their assets. In this bleak social and economic atmosphere, labor flexibilization quickly became another object of complain and frustration, as it reinforced old power dynamics, class difference and traditional family roles. In this respect, precarity shows its ambiguous nature: on the one hand increasing individual risk and flexibility, on the other hand strengthening the institution of the family by mobilizing it to sustain the weight of economic neo-liberalism and the related social ‘squeeze’.

Paradoxes of precarity

 Work without (spatial and temporal) borders
Another largely ambiguous aspect of flexible work in the service sector is connected to the emphasis on relational and communicational skills. Professional and personal knowledge overlap, as do work and leisure times, so that work can be done in non-standard hours. Moreover, the spaces dedicated to work dangerously blur the boundaries between the office and the home, so that it is possible to work inside and outside of the
office space.  Ultimately both these elements create a fluid border between life and work, private and public spaces, so that a precarious worker looses the capability to distinguish between the labor market, the self and his/her social networks. (Mitropuolos
2004, p. 91).

  Risk and uncertainty
  In the eighties and nineties, some philosophers and sociologists debated “risk society” and information society (Beck, Lash and Urry, Baumann), in the context of the rise of neo-liberalism and its effects, arguing that such a societal shift would require short-term time frames and continuous re-adjustment of knowledge to address the complexity of everyday life.  Meanwhile, for the “precarious generation” uncertainty is a given and
risk is taken for granted, as they have experienced nothing but insecurity and short-term plans. Such experiential knowledge can only clash with the ossified, slowly changing institutions, in which roles are very rigid. If the generation précaire lives in economic insecurity, works off-hours and needs to be mobile in order to follow rapidly shifting job markets, it simply can not do so when public services do not functions accordingly, or, where the predominant societal logic is the antithesis of both speed and flexibility. Italian institutions have dramatically reduced public services by keeping inconvenient schedules, rationalizing scarcity and increased their bureaucratization to an absolutely inflexible model. If risk and uncertainty are part of the ‘personal consequences of work in new capitalism’(Sennet 1998), the social consequences are much greater, for example inefficiency, generalized discontent among the citizenry due to the failure to harmonize life and work. These examples point at the highly ambiguous nature of precarity. Looking at its ambiguities can provide unusual readings of various ways in which precarity can create a disruptive change. Its contradictions can be appropriated, or queered.

Gender and generations dimension

In fact, from a feminist perspective, precarity has become a useful term to disrupt assumptions on traditional gender roles in Italy. At the very least, it is a paradoxical term which may challenge the rigidity of Italian society , particularly the ways in which it is family oriented and socially and geographically immobile). Some networks of young feminists such as Sconvegno, la rete Prec@s and Sexyshock have appropriated precarity,
tried to look at it positively, inverting its connotations in a discursive movement inspired by queer theory, based on humor and provocation. In recent Italian debates, these younger feminists have developed a critique not only of the flexible job market, but of many less flexible societal structures such as heterosexual marriage, maternity, care giving work and loyalty to corporations, brands, or the ideal of a lifelong career.

   “If we (younger female precarious) are asked to be flexible, ready to change and avoid planning anything in the long-term, why should everyone or everything else in society impose heavy pressures on us to maintain stable families, stable jobs and reproduce gender
  divisions of labor?” (excerpt from Prec@s mailing list)

This simple consideration utters a fundamental critique of both state institutions and societal values, in their failure to provide women with practical ways to piece together a meaningful, decent life (Piazza 2003). This statement evokes some of the “second wave” feminist’s arguments, such as the contradictory experience called “double presence” (Balbo 1978), of women working both in the family and in the workplace. This theme is reemerging in the contemporary global context, although it still starts from personal experience (the personal is political, and, if today the global is political, the global is personal).

  Today Italian society and its institutions are engaged more than ever in reinforcing the traditional woman’s role in reproduction, partly because of the aging population and the low fertility rate, partly because of the fact that the previous generation of women entered the job market en masse. Even in the private sector, which should be more open to flexibility, Italian corporate culture does not encourage women to pursue risky or high-profile careers because of its sexism (Gherardi 2003). In this sense, risk in not yet socially acceptable for women trying to achieve high professional levels *8. In the post-industrial Italian labor market, risk and uncertainty are more or less acceptable according to a gendered model that privileges the male breadwinner. Therefore, precarity may also be read in different terms by female workers. In this sense, when in the public sphere precariousness is mostly “rendered in negative terms, as opposed to security” (Mitropoulos 2004, p. 90), it seems legitimate to wonder what kinds of regulation of
precarity would women need.

This point poses a challenge to both neo-liberalist globalization and to the precarious labor movement and its supposed universalism. In fact, the “cutting edge” of the precari movement, based in Milan, Paris and Spain initially developed a discourse and related slogans based on an idealtypical temp-worker. This subject generally corresponded to a young man living in a Northern or Central Italian urban area, employed in the service
sector, specifically in chain stores, customer care phone services, or large distribution warehouses, performing repetitive tasks. Over time, after dialogues with other political groups, especially women, brought some attention to gender difference in the language of such movement, space was allowed to discuss affective and reproductive labor in the discourse of precarity. In the last few years, the precari movement started discussing
issues beyond the stereotype of the young male chain worker, and has begun to address female-specific rights, such as    paid maternity (Mayday 2005 literature and flyers).

Nevertheless, the previously limited imaginary, which is still the mainstream image of precarity in Italian media, remained centered around multinational corporations and their workers, an issue often found in anti-globalization literature, as Sassen pointed out:
    
"Common interpretations of globalization take for granted the existence of global economic system as a direct function of multinational corporations. (…) These companies can only be managed globally because the capacity to do that was produced. Focusing on that capacity shifts the attention to practices that constitute economic globalization; the productive and reproductive labor behind the organization and functions of a global production system. (…) Focusing on the practices allows to understand how much of the resources necessary to global economic activities are not circulating or mobile, on the contrary, they are deeply rooted in a place, a global city or a industrial districts (…) If we look at the geography behind globalization we may find the workers, the communities and the labor cultures specific to a place, and not just those of multinational corporations. (…) By looking at the global city, we can study specific local organizations of global processes, such as central, wealthy neighborhoods in which the transnational professional class lives together with ‘their’ immigrant maids and nannies.(…) In the global cities, informal economy cuts the costs of some activities which are in high demand locally. Such costs are mainly paid by immigrant women." (Sassen 2001, p. 236 in Erenreich and Hochshild)

Mentioning migrant female care-workers points to the limits within which the precari movement built a new ‘precarious’ subjectivity, revealing immediately its historical specific boundaries, euro-centrism and andro-centrism. For these reasons, it is extremely important for the precarity movement to look at gender and precarity together in order to move beyond the goal of unifying a supposed “new” post-industrial European working-
class (Mitroupulos 2005). Perhaps it is time to shift into a more complex political analysis that can address citizenship and social welfare, immigration and de-industrialization at the same time.

Different precarities

In contemporary “Fortress Europe”, any struggle, especially around precarity, must keep in mind its excluded “others”. Immigrants have always been precarious, living in conditions of risk and insecurity. As Mitroupoulos argues:
    
Precarity has been the standard experience of work in capitalism, (…) impoverishment and war had been familiar to many generations of western workers before. The experience of regular, full-time long-term employment which characterized the most visible aspects of fordism is an exception in capitalist history (…) that presupposed vast amounts of unpaid domestic labor by women and hyper-exploited labor in the colonies."(2005, p. 92)

The facts that Italian domestic workers are mostly women from previously colonized areas and their jobs are scarcely paid, bring gender, racism and exploitation to the center of a feminist reading of precarity. This is the basis of current debates among a few Italian feminist groups, which may experience precarity as well, but in very different (racial, age and class) terms.

In this attempt to articulate different precarities it is also necessary to address the often overlooked issue of class difference within the same generation of precarious workers. To be specific, income differences and the availability of family support which can impact the lifestyle of people employed in precarious conditions, must be taken seriously. For example, it is obvious that an Italian female web-designer living with her
parents does not experience the same level of instability which an illegal migrant woman lives daily, nor the same level of alienation experienced by a eighteen years old male high-school drop-out serving fast food in an shopping center or in any highway rest-stop.

These differences do not erase the grounds for a feminist critique of family structure, as oppressive for both male and female youth, especially in the typically Italian configuration described earlier, based on sexism and gerontocracy. Female precarity can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, where strategies can be shared keeping by in mind the different ‘relative power’ positions precarious subjects
may have in European societies.

Creativity and Solidarity

  Women have always done social and cultural reproductive labor under precarious conditions in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies, “as disposable labor, service and domestic labor that has always been indispensable to the free movement of capital” (Vishimidt 2004, p. 94). In these contexts, gender roles have always forced women to juggle material and affective labor, often with little recognition in both fields.

   In the last two centuries feminist struggles drew attention to these long historical patterns of exploitation, refusing the victim’s role for women. On the contrary, drawing from the best tradition of internationalist Marxist and Anarchist solidarity, women still struggled together with male industrial workers and slaves. During the last three decades, capital has benefited from the struggle of post-war feminists by taking advantage of the disruptions to the “traditional” family and its division of labor. These social changes have created new “needs”, such as fast food and waged “care” industries, which were previously outside of the market. In the current post-fordist system, traditionally female relational skills (i.e. being professional and affectionate, docile and versatile, willing to travel to work and still taking care of the housework) have become highly valued by capital as it moved into the service economy, where the blurring distinction between work and life facilitated new forms of exploitation. This kind of feminization of labor did not coincide with any increased monetary and social values attributed to typically female skills, but led to a proletarization of all the sectors in which such skills are
required (care giving, housework, customer care, desire and reproductive economies).

In this logic, where production of immaterial objects through intellectual and cognitive work still carries higher value than social reproduction, feminist movements resorted to attributing creativity to the sphere of everyday life (a strategy adopted since the seventies in urban studies as well) *9. One successful feminist argument was the simple stating of an obvious fact: that domestic and care work are not simply reproduction and repetition, but involve creativity and complexity (Vishimidt 2004, p. 94).
 
Creativity allows to actively piece together an invented, patch-work identity, by cutting and pasting various roles and inconsistent parts of women’s lives (Balbo 1986). Creativity is also a highly valued currency in immaterial work, which could be given more visibility in its female forms. The last argument could provide today female precarious workers with a sense of active agency instead of seeing themselves as victims of precarity. It may also apply to various political subjects, ranging from migrant care- givers to sex-workers, who certainly know about precarity, instability, risk and creative forms of connecting personal and professional life *10.
   
 In short, the current precariat tends to see only its own kind of post-industrial euro-centric precarity, constructing its image as the universal victim/revolutionary subject. Such a construction may gradually expand to allow for solidarity across different kinds of precarities, and to this end some strategies developed in previous feminist movements may be inspirational. This is especially true when female precarious workers are offered to chose from a false dichotomy between immaterial labor, often proletarianized, and social reproductive labor in the exploitative context of family,
characterized by traditional and secure gender roles *11. This dualism does not account for female creativity and capacity to navigate contradictions and differences. In addition, it denies any intersectional identities, such as those who may be both cultural or information workers and housewives or sex workers, or those who find themselves in–between reproduction of social labor and immaterial labor. This specific group may offer different ways of looking at precarity as inherently contradictory and creative.

Prec@s network: Articulating precarity struggles

The main argument of the essay is that precarity and job market flexibility are different issues, and that they are not solely negative phenomena for a generation of Italian women, especially the educated, middle class youth.     Various “third wave” Italian feminist groups (Sexyshock, Fiorelle, A/Matrix, Sconvegno, Prec@s) have discussed their precarity as a new experience in which they are not simply victims, even if it involves risks and challenges. Of course, being myself part of these networks, this analysis carries a strong element of self-reflexivity, typical of feminist research, producing mostly
situated knowledge (Harding, Haraway), without any pretense of neutrality or generalizability.

  Basically, the debates carried on by these ’30 something’ feminist groups, brought many Italian women to realize the need to address some fundamental everyday life issues, such as income, life choices and the manifold problems derived from entering a flexible, sexist and gerontocratic job market. For the Prec@s network in particular, precarity means rethinking their political subjectivity as multiple, made of complex
articulations of the contradictory roles for young women: on the one hand subject to traditional expectations and low economic status, on the other hand, being relatively privileged immaterial workers, enjoying higher-education and middle-class backgrounds. Drawing from various feminist currents and movements, Prec@s engages in a dialogue about precarity both with previous generations of feminists and with migrant women, in
an attempt to question generational and ethnic differences, and their effects on feminist theories and practices.

Same place, different times: generations of Italian feminism

 In the last decade, the issue of inter-generational communication within Italian feminism has been crucial and difficult. The appearance of a new (third?) wave of women interested in feminism destabilized the universalism assumed by many ‘Seventies generation’ feminists. The latter group was largely unaware and uninterested in the younger generation, to the point that there is still an ongoing tension, characterized by cycles of denial, acceptance and refusals of such a “third” wave (Di Cori and Barazzetti 2001). By pointing to the need for a generational shift, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and the effects of exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, without being dismissed, or accused of matricidal behavior. One of the most successful strategies that the post-feminist groups use to gain visibility and express
their needs involves entering the current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection between the larger Italian labor movement and the feminists’ tense intergenerational debates *12.

   In recent years, the neo-liberal offensive worldwide and, specifically, the decline of the Italian “miracle” have led to a sharp reduction in real wages, benefits, social services and expectations. Living in a precarious context made the third wave feminists acutely aware of the fact that they will never live an adulthood characterized stability, social welfare and lifetime jobs, as their mothers did. In addition, many Prec@s came to the conclusion
that they do not necessarily want the ‘security’ that their mothers had, since it implied a stable life of marriage, family, and a number of responsibilities both in the house and in the workplace which came with little recognition (Piazza 2001). Today, everyday life activities such as shopping, care giving, cooking and cleaning are far from being divided equally between men and women in post-industrial Italy, in the rest of the world (Hochshild 1997). Not surprisingly, the presence of young adults and elderly members in the same family, another effect of precarity, ends up becoming a burden mostly for adult Italian women, whom have to provide the everyday housework and food for multiple generational households (Piazza 2005). The in-between generation of female baby boomers, instead of enjoying an easy retirement after their full-time working lives, are forced to work again in care-giving activities, to help younger and older generations of the same family. When women within the same family are not available for self-exploitation, it is usually another woman, possibly an immigrant, who is hired to carry on the burden of house and care work. In the same way, the precarie generation also fears the likelihood of having to provide care and assistance for their elderly relatives, considering the increasingly aging Italian population.           The discussions among generations of feminists developed around a few topics: life chances and responsibilities, and produced reciprocal empathy and solidarity, especially with regards to the issues of education, autonomy and security; three issues presenting unresolved contradictions in
Italian women’s lives.

The ‘trap’ of education

Recent quantitative studies show that education does not impact greatly the career chances of a young Italian woman.*13 If precarity and the feminization of labor ended up negatively impacting young Italian women, their access to higher education also came without the many social and economic advantages previously related to education. Certainly, the precariat will not enjoy any increased social status acquired by studying
(unlike the previous generation of women), and will quite possibly not reach the status that their mothers hoped for their daughters.
 
  Today, nevertheless, young women comprise the majority of university students in Italy and generally do better in school than their male colleagues. Statistical data gathered by temp-work agencies show that a young woman with a college degree is the least likely to be hired for any position on offer, since they are mainly technical jobs in small industries or clerical work.    While Italian societal values still reflect the idea that a college
education will give access to a stable –if not highly paid– state job, such as teacher, librarian, hospital or researcher, the job market has evolved so rapidly that today even the public sector largely hires temp-workers, leaving young women few viable options apart from precarity.

The trap of autonomy
One of the desires repeatedly expressed by Prec@s and other young women is that their acquired knowledge and skills should be adequately compensated, and that their work should take place in a environment where professional growth, personal enrichment and cultural development are available (Prec@s on–line document). In a sense, resorting to creative work appears to be a way to call for autonomy, to express the desire to keep
learning, to redefine the content and the formsof one’s job in relationship to one’s personality and life developments. By valuing independence and creativity, these women tend to fill working and leisure time with new experiences and cultural events. Such passions make them less willing to put up with hierarchies and disciplined work environments. ‘’We trade security with creativity and autonomy” (Florida 2003, p. 35)

   The truth is that many “alternativi” (bohemians) and urban dwellers who are a core component of those who consider themselves part of the cognitariat, would never want stable, life-time company jobs. As a consequence, young precarious women consider their adulthood exciting but uncertain in its outcome, which may also lead to future downward mobility, since free-lance contracts will provide them with minuscule pension
funds at the time of retirement. In this sense, the precarity movement has became crucial because it provides active ways of addressing the hidden costs of autonomy: economic instability and lack of benefits and security.

The trap of stability

Certainly, much of the current discourse around precarity in the Italian movement, having been successful in creating a new, visible community, has moved to defining what such workers want. So far, the main argument against the proliferation of precarious jobs is the attendant lack of security. Research institutes and media use sociological language to underline negative aspects of precarity, dangerously relating marginality to the working
poor. However, many arguments in defense of security are based on connecting precarity to low marriage rates, low birth rates, low savings and investment, social exclusion, psychological distress and deviance. Similarly, many researches by unions or labor sociologists connect low-income to indexes of dissatisfaction with society *14, position themselves in defense of security, while missing a chance to launch a more subtle inquiry
on the effects of social and cultural capital on precarity.        

Such language mimics a structural functionalist model of capitalist society in the context of neo-liberalism. *15 From a female perspective, maternity, starting a new family, or long-term financial planning to achieve home ownership are not exclusively positive events, since they also entail less
time to work and learn, as well as increased housework.

   Coming from a completely different perspective, Newsweek has recently published an article arguing that EU social rights and equal opportunity laws for women have essentially failed to create the kind of career-driven female manager that is necessary to the free market *16. In making a comparison between the EU and the US in terms of women’s presence in important companies government, Newsweek dismisses the fact
that, in order to sustain her career, an adult American woman must outsource childcare and housework to exploited migrant women (Parrenas 1999). Newsweek tells a story of resiliency - that Western capitalist societies are capable of reproducing old structures of power. While on the surface they allow more opportunities to women and any other non-hegemonic subjects, such institutions foster female exploitation and devalue social
reproduction and affective labor.

Female precarity as (an inter-generational inter-ethnic issue)

Various “third wave” Italian feminist groups (Sexyshock, Sconvegno, Prec@s, A/Matrix) are discussing precarity with the aim of proposing possible measures and political campaigns to make it “livable”, starting from their group’s values and experiences. Their original approach to precarity shows clearly their rootedness in earlier feminist thought and action. While their reflections assume the presence of a consolidated neo-liberal private sector, therefore they do not engage directly with demands aimed at multinational corporation (such as work at home), their demands mostly address the state as a central agency involved in precarity-related conflicts. An assumption that precarious jobs are here to stay leads these group to assess the full consequences and, subsequently, ask the state to provide more security. In this sense, precarity struggles do revive issues and strategies previously raised by feminists, challenging both the state and traditional household family structure as sites of complicity in the erosion of gendered rights and autonomy.

Concluding notes: New struggles, ancient obstacles

Precarity today is a work and life condition capable of mobilizing a great European movement, mainly because job flexibilization erodes labor and social rights. However, it is important to distinguish precarity and job market flexibility, which should be addressed as different issues, in order to allow for a gendered critique as well as to widen the scope and subject participation of the precarity movement.

Beyond the mainstreaming of labor rights struggles to end precarity, lies the more complicated issue of existential precarity, as it impacts affective economies, everyday life, social reproduction and societal values. In this sense, instead of generalizing goals to end precarious labor conditions as something typical and problematic for one generation of workers, current precarity discourse can be transformed and retooled to oppose the traditional values that Italian society still imposes on young women and marginals. A precarious existence is not solely a negative phenomenon for the generation of cognitarie women in their twenties and thirties (namely some active networks such as Prec@s, precarias a la deriva, or Sconvegno). Nevertheless, economic and income precarity do perpetuate vicious cycles of exploitation in a post-industrial context, in which the weight of social and affective labor still rests mainly on women’s shoulders, and, even worse, is unevenly distributed between elder women, young women and
migrant women.   Therefore, if the need for solidarity among women is stronger than ever, the younger women’s experience of instability requires new strategies and tools for a different struggle over precarity. This struggle must be based primarily on solidarity and networking across genders, generations and ethnicities, not just debates on new rights and legal battles in the name of a universal European worker or citizen. Labor laws and
welfare policies ought to be redesigned keeping in mind not just the young (male) European service worker, but also the affective labor increasingly outsourced to migrants and native women. Therefore, the struggles over precarity is not separated from a critique of social values, enacted by criticizing families and everyday life as the key sites where flexibility is allowed to continue and where the negative effects of precarity are absorbed at the cost of reinforcing traditional female exploitation.

Notes

1. The core arguments of the precarity movement I refer to here, can be found in documents published in Chain workers and Euromayday websites, Mute, Green Pepper and other magazines from 2001 to 2006.
(See links in the webliography).

2.   While I do not have sufficient information about Japan, I must clarify that this is not entirely true in the US. Even if mainstream political debates cheered the new economy, many critics focused on the vast effects of a crude neo-liberalism which characterized the 1980ies. The loss of job security and rights was one of these effects and did encounter some resistance. It’s important not to dismiss the many forms of resistance documented in counter-cultural literature, through the Eighties and Nineties, in magazines like Temp Slave or Processed World, which became central in the sharing of everyday forms of rejecting the erosion of stable employment. (See Processed World and Temp-Slave Anthology).

3. One important aspect of the precarity movement stems from the intuition of self-organizing and replacing the role of the union in providing legal advice and material help to abandoned workforce (Toner 2004).

4.  It is worth to recall that a recent statistics published by Italian CUB union identified those Mediterranean countries as the ones with lowest wages, when compared to the rest of Western Europe.

5. A vast increase in such type of contract were also registered between 1996 and year 2000 in continental EU, shifting up 4 points, and reaching 30% of the workforce. In the Italian case, the labor market looks even more unstable if we were to add the approximately 3 million jobs in the gray or black market. (Data from the 2001 report on “precarity and social integration” published by the EU Commission in 2002).

6.  It was in fact a timely shift into the issue of precarity that absorbed many of the Italian anti-or- alterglobalization movement, which was heavily repressed after the G8 Genoa meeting in 2001. As argued by Alan Toner (2004, p. 38):      A renewed realism as to the acute difficulties faced in everyday life underlies the emphasis on     precarity; this focus enables a narration of needs and desires in the first person, facilitating a rupture with discourses of the no-global period which often lapsed into jaded third worldism, where serious problems were often exoticizes as somebody else’s, somewhere else.

7. Such strong family ties also explain to the typically Italian phenomenon of adult professionals, mostly males, living with their family until their forties, commonly referred to as “mammoni”.

8.  In regards to social measures and women’s careers, data show that the number of women with part-time contracts in the EU are four times more than men, while in the US it is only 2,2 times more (Censis 1999). It is also useful to remember here that the so called “glass ceiling” is a fairly common experience for women throughout the EU. Italy was rated 35th on the global chart of women presence in active governing bodies. Similarly, in the top European 200 companies, women hold only 8% of board seats, compared to an average of 14% in the US. In France, for example, high power positions often largely correlate to having attended the Grand Ecoles, prestigious higher education institutions which only opened to women in the seventies. Today, the French business school HEC have launched a campaign to recruit more female M.b.A., so to raise the number of female students from 16% to 32 %. Norway is actually is enforcing a quota of 40% female members, not only on within governmental institutions decision-making boards but also in the corporate world. (Newsweek, 02 2006)

9. In some notable cases, as in the wages for housework movement, the state goal was to end domestic labor, as a form of labor without value, which should be recognized by the state and legitimized a reproduction. This demand would push society into a radical redefinition of gender division of labor (dalla Costa 1971). Also, women performing free labor embodied the example of an ideal community where work may exit capitalist logic of value (Bettio 1988).

10.  An interesting literary experiment can be found in the North American Processed World magazine, in which arguments regarding information and digital workers were intersected with sex worker and maids, creating a space for close comparisons and dialogues. ( See Anthology of Processed World , concluding
chapters, 1991).

11.  Such a view is largely based on an image of the single, male, urban artist or creative worker as the vanguard of the precariat, juxtaposed to the stereotyped housewife, living in the suburb, engaged in social reproduction and discipline. On the contrary, it could be argued that, today, cultural production is subsumed into work and cognitive capitalism, and family may be the context where dissent and emancipation can find expressions (Vishmidt 2004, p. 95).

12. This shows an understanding of “politics of articulation” (Hall 1978, Grossberg 1996) deriving from Gramsci via Cultural Studies and Post Colonial Studies borrowed from the Anglophone debates. At the least, this articulation shows a rather interesting refusal to engage in single-issue identity politics, where one group define itself simply by fighting one dimension of globalization or any other contemporary issue, renouncing a –priori to confronting with difference and multiplicity.

13. Considering that 57% of the European workforce is female and women are slightly more than half the total college graduates, the presence of women in research, scientific committees or high-profile political roles is still quite low compared to Northern Europe or any developed country. (OECD and ILO report
2005)

14. This seems to be the tone, perhaps unwittingly conveyed by parts of the Precari manifesto published in Green Pepper 2004.

15. Similarly, some of the arguments proposed by the Intermittentes tend to defend their rights as based on the idea that they are engaging in fundamentally useful jobs for the future of France’s economy. Generally speaking, such arguments fit quite easily with mainstream economic analyses which tend to see the role of EU in the global economy as mainly to export cultural capital and tourism. (See Intermittentes website)

16.   In this regard it is also worth noting that Italy scores one of the biggest disproportions between the percentage of women in the labor force and the percentage of those in decision–making positions (legislators, senior public officials or managers or various kinds of businesses): female labor force in general is up to 37%, but only 18% of working women works in decision-making positions, while in France the ratio is 50% to 30% and in Germany 44% to 27%. In contrast, Newsweek points at the fact that the US show a stronger balance, scoring 47% to 45%. (Data published by ILO and OECD, June 2005)

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V. A. “precariat” Republicart 2004, web journal accessible at: http://www.republicart.net

V. A. 2004,The Middlesex Declaration of the European Precariat, 2005. accessible at:
  http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1554249

V.A. (Chaincrew), 2003 Chainworkers: lavorare nelle cattedrali del consumo, derive e
approdi

Zanini , A. , Fadini U., (eds), 2001, Lessico postfordista. Dizionario di idee della
mutazione, Milano, Feltrinelli,

Young, I.M. 1990, “Polity and group difference: A critique of the ideal of universal
citizenship.” Ethics, Vol. 99, pp. 250–274.

Networks Cited:
-prec@s, italia http://www.women.it/ precas
-generazioni di donne a sconvegno,milano http://www.sconvegno.org
-sexyshock, bologna www.ecn.org/sexyshock/
- Precarias a la deriva, Madrid, Spain (see also escalera karakola)
www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm
- chainworkers.org, Milano
-Athena Network Europe, Amsterdam.
-Next Genderation European network.
-Generation Précaire, Paris.

Webliography:
www.euromayday.org
www.chainworkers.org
http://www.intermittents-danger.fr.fm
http://www.gendercertification.com/eng/bibliografia.php
http:-// www.eurofound.eu.int/publications/files/EF0121EN.pdf
http://www.eu2001.se/static/eng/norrkoping/aboutmeeting.asp

Glossary (adapted from A . Foti’s contribution to Green pepper magazine, 2004.p.18).

Precarity- from the Latin precor-preaece- to pray because someone or something is
depending on uncertain premises or unknown conditions. Precarious as an adjective
indicates a lack of security and stability that threatens with danger.

Precarious worker (in the English speaking world such definition corresponds to temp-
worker or in recently literature can be defined flex-worker). Someone employed
temporarily in information and service sector, under non– standard contracts and
schedules – without social security or contract benefits.
Somebody performing a flexible service work. While informational skills are essential
for this kind of job, relations skills provide the most value to the employer.
Precarious workers are interchangeable by firm and possess low individual power in the
labor market. Collectively, however, they (could) possess tremendous bargaining power
since they are situated in crucial sectors, where social production (service, distribution
transportation and communication) and reproduction (care giving) intersect.
(Synonym with) precarie

Cognitaire:
a.k.a. "cultural worker, immaterial, brainworker", i.e.: free-lance, artist, I.T. worker,
somebody usually employed in education, media, research institutes or advertisement
firms, with a contract that involves giving to the employer the product of his/ her
technical language or knowledge skills, all amplified by computer processing and formal
and informal networking. This process occurs not only during working time, but spills
over into the worker’s life through his/her use of cell phones, pda’s, email and other
supposedly neutral or private technologies.

Chainworker is a term first appeared in an Italian webzine funded in 2000, to give a
name to the temp workers employed in shopping malls, chain stores, warehouses and
customer care phone centers, usually owned by multinational corporations. They are
unhappy successors of those working on assembly lines (in a chain of production) in the
industrial economies, and those chain-ganged into slavery earlier, under forced labor
and servitude typical of early capitalism.

The "precariat", “the chainworkers” and the "cognitariat" are largely invisible or
excluded, as their work takes place at the limits of the informal economy, oscillating
between being paid and unpaid, black-market and limited contract forms, and, it usually
takes place in deregulated workspace (at home, in temporary structures or in cyberspace).

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Whose Precarity Is It Anyway?
Stevphen Shukaitis

“The condition today described as that of the precarious worker is perhaps the fundamental reality of the proletariat. And the modes of existence of workers in 1830 are quite close to those of our temporary workers.” – Jacques Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France

During recent years in Italy and Spain, but now having spread more broadly, there has emerged a discussion about conditions of “precarity,” or precarious labor. Describing conditions of unstable, short term, flexible, and highly exploited labor, these discussions and the organizing based around them have sought to find new ways to contest forms of social domination and exploitation found within neoliberal capitalism. These new conditions make it utterly clear that not just the usual, but also the more ‘radical,’ methods of union organizing and political contestation, are no longer adequate to current conditions. As ever-increasing populations are involved in part-time, contract, and temp jobs – from 16.8% in the US to 46.1% in the Netherlands – creating methods of contestation that work from such positions is increasingly important. But concepts and methods of organizing inevitably need to be adapted as they move across time, space, and cultural context. In what ways might various ideas gained emerging around precarity be useful to radical political
organizing in the US, or more broadly to other locations that do not share the same cultural and social history where these ideas have emerged?

Although the term precarity had been used previously, its contemporary usage derives from the efforts of the labor organizing and media activism collective Chainworkers, a Milan-based group which formed in 1999-2000. Their aim was to find ways to merge together the methods of IWW-inspired anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing and subvertising to find ways to contest forms of labor found within post-industrial capitalism. In conditions where work to a large extent no longer occurs primarily within centralized locations of productions (such as factories), but is distributed across much larger geographic scales. Forms of labor also increasingly differ from the physical production of goods, rather comprising activities often described as service sector jobs and involve communication, cultural interaction, advertising, working with data, and forms of emotional labor (work involving forms of care or creating a sense of well-being). This includes anything from airline flight attendants to advertising and media work, from sales jobs in countless chainstores to the expanding sector of lower level management.

These discussions are inspired by the legacy of workerist and autonomous politics in Italy originating from the 1960s and 70s involving groups such as Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua and involving figures like Sergio Bologna, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Mario Tronti, and Toni Negri. A key concept emerging from this milieu is that of class composition, which stresses how class relations and forms of power are not eternal but are constantly shifting fields of power that are determined not by the autonomous force of capital, but rather by capital’s needs to integrate forms of working class insurgency into its working. The refusal of work, seen in the US in the figure of the slacker or the dropout, was seen as a means to withdraw from capitalist relations and create
autonomous forms of community and existence, or what is often referred to as exodus.

Given the drastic changes occurring within forms of work, it was necessary to radically update and reformulate labor organizing tactics to address them. While there have long existed many forms of contingent and precarious labor, such forms have become increasingly central in the continuing reproduction of capitalist domination, particularly since the neoliberal reaction to the social insurgencies of the 1960s and 70s which was followed by the capitalist counterattacks in the 1980s. The Chainworkers thus moved their area of focus increasingly to the cultural and media spheres, trying to find bases of antagonism not primarily or even necessarily within the usually recognized locations of work, but through all through the social fabric and areas where capitalist dynamics
have seeped into. As the formerly existing space of the workplace was fractured by changes in the capitalist nature of work, organizing through cultural politics attempted to create a shared basis for a politics which was not based upon being located in the same physical workplace, but rather through the creation of shared positions and commonality in various cultural fields. In other words, being located with the same workplace gave workers a common experience and space from which it was possible to organize, a space which no longer exists in the distributed forms of production and swing shifts that are more common in today’s economy. Thus the strategy shifts to using forms of cultural politics and symbolism to form a common space to organize from.

This is based on an understanding that cultural production is not an adjunct or addition to the “real work” of capitalist production but increasingly (particularly within highly industrialized areas) is the work that is a key component of it. And despite all the hoopla about the allegedly non-hierarchical and non-exploitative “new media” workplace that circulated during the 1990s and through the dot.com frenzy, the new boss was just as horrible as the old one, and even more so for those who didn’t occupy the few relatively privileged positions in such workplaces that had become emblematic of this transformation (for an excellent account of this hype and its reality, see the book No Collar by Andrew Ross). Precarity in many ways is the inversion of the forms of struggle and exodus that
emerged during the 1970s. Capital found ways to take people’s desires for less work and for forms of flexible labor and arrangements, and turned them into increasingly uncertain conditions as social welfare provisions and neoliberal deregulation were brought into the Mediterranean countries.

Precarity as a concept was quite useful in creating an opening for repoliticizing everyday life and labor relations, which was needed in a period when the social energies unleashed by organizing around summit protests had clearly reached the its limit. At its best, precarity became a method deploying a cultural politics based around a realization that the unstable and uncertain forms of social life that existed were closely connected by a series of new enclosures to the forms of debt and financial bondage being created: each imposition of structural adjustment programs by the International Monetary Fund in the so-called Third World is connected the dismantling of social services in the First, the enclosures of common lands is related to the increasing enclosure of people’s time, energies, and creativity, and so forth.

This was accomplished through the development of an array of cultural symbols and actions, such as the figure of San Precario, which uses the common image of the Catholic saint to represent the figure of the precarious work and her desire for communication, transportation, housing, resources, and affection. Originally developed as a means to “celebrate” the newly generalizing conditions of working on Sundays (which has until recently been quite rare in Italy), San Precario quickly caught on as a meme and rhetorical device for bringing to public discussion precarious conditions and instability. San Precario has since appeared at numerous rallies, actions, parades, and events, where followers have had “miracles” performed for them such as the autonomous reduction of prices. This
practice of autoreduction, or negotiating by mob, originated in Italy during the 1970s to combat rapid inflation in costs of food, clothing, electricity, and other necessities (accompanied by squatting and a massive refusal of payment). This practice was renewed at a guaranteed income demo on November 6, 2004 at a supermarket owned by the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi when 700 people entered the store demanding a 70% discount on everything, chanting that “everything costs too much.” While negotiations occurred many people simply left with food and provisions, many of whom had not been involved in the demo at all.

Another innovative tactic was the holding of fashion show by the designer Serpica Naro to highlight conditions of precarious workers. In February 2005 during the Milano Fashion Week anti-precarity activists disrupted a high profile Prada catwalk, and then threatened to disrupt a fashion show
for the controversial designer Serpica Naro, which was planned to be held at a car park in Milan only accessible by one bridge. Police contacted the show’s agent to warn him about the possible disruption. But as the event began, the police became confused when the crowd (which was supposed to “disrupt” the show), starting laughing at them, instead of being angry and
frustrated since the police were preventing them from moving. Even stranger was that they were accompanied by the models and organizers themselves, who then proceed to produce the permits showing that it was they who had organized the show to begin with! There was no Serpica Naro –
it was all a hoax based on a clever rearranging of “San Precario.” When the media began to arrive, still largely unaware of this, they were treated to a fashion show highlighting the precarious conditions of those involved in the fashion industry and related sectors (such as garment
manufacture). This event turned the tables in a highly media saturated political climate like Italy (where someone much of Berlusconi’s power was through his use and control of the media) and managed to break down expectations of what constitutes activism and political action.

The most visible expression of the concept, which starting in 2000 had started to become adopted by various sections of the anti-globalization movement, are the EuroMayDay Parades, which started in Italy in 2001. Employing carnival like forms of protest and tactical absurdity these events sought to revive the Wobbly tradition of humor and satire in politics as well as breaking with more traditional trade unions and social democratic parties, which had taken part in the institutional decision making that ushered in the currently increasingly intense and unstable social conditions. Precarity was used a rallying cry to find points of commonality between forms of labor and generalized social situations of insecurity, for instance between the positions of lowly paid workers in chain stores, computer programmers and data manipulators, and the highly exploited and blackmailed labor of undocumented migrants. The goal was to tease out these common points and positions, build alliances across the
social sphere, and find ways to bring together antagonisms against these common but differing forms of exploitation. The first May Day parade in Milano brought out 5,000 people and created a flying picket that succeeded in shutting down all the major chainstores in the city center. By 2003 the event has grown to 50,000 people and inspired similar events across Europe. A European network was created in 2004 during the “Beyond the ESF” forum in Middlesex that took place at the same time as the European Social Forum and led to events taking place in 20 cities across Europe in 2005 and a march of 150,000 in Milan.

And in many ways this seemed a very fitting approach, for the concept of precarity describsed quite aptly many of the situations of various emerging movements, such as the Intermittents du Spectacle, a group of seasonal arts and cultural workers who attracted attention by organizing against their uncertain situations by disrupting live TV news broadcasts and the Cannes Film Festival. San Precario himself, who is now widely used in the media to refer to these forms of organizing, has both a holy day (February 29th) and a sacred location (created during an occupation of Venice Beach during a film festival there). The concept also seemed to capture well the
organizing of casualized Parisian McDonalds workers who occupied their workplaces; migrant organizing against detention and deportation (such as the often celebrated san papiers movement of undocumented migrants); and many other of the struggles that have emerged recently. It could arguably be used to describe organizing such as the actions against recent changes in immigration law in the US and around the conditions of domestic and sex workers, the recent (and first) demonstrations by workers against Wal-Mart that occurred in Florida, as well as campaigns such as the IWW Starbucks Workers Campaign, the New Zealand based “Super Size My Pay” campaign, and the Taco Bell boycott campaign put together by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (and the Student-Farmworker Alliance that grew out of it). These are claimed as signs of the emergence of a new social subject, the precariat, which is the condition of autonomous proletarian self-activity in the increasingly exploitative conditions of neoliberal capitalism.

But in many ways, haven’t we been precarious for quite some time? As Jacques Ranciere observes in the quote that begins this article, a precarious existence is perhaps the defining condition of the proletariat:indeed, the bloody terror and dispossession of primitive accumulation is precisely the process through which a state of precarity, the inability to effectively live outside of capitalist relations, is created. And what does it mean to speak about precarity in situations that have a far different political, economic, and social context? For instance in the US, where to a large extent there have never existed the forms of “job contracts” and increased forms of labor protection that are now under attack in places like Italy and Spain. In such a context it is silly to talk about the process of social relations becoming precarious, because they have been for a very long time. And in countries where such protections existed, they only operated for a relatively brief period of time, namely the era of the Fordist-Keynesian welfare/warfare state that existed from the end of WWII until the 1980s.

In some ways arguments around precarious labor emerge out of, and are based upon, certain latent assumptions and conditions concerning the role of the welfare state and social democracy that are fundamentally different from those that exist in the US. They rely implicitly upon people recalling what might, in general, be described as the slightly better job that various European attempts at social regulation of the economy and creating forms of security for their populations, admittedly measures taken because of the larger and more militant social movements that have existed there. In other words, discussions around precarity draw some of their rhetorical force from an implicit positive appraisal of conditions that formerly existed in which people were not in a precarious position, or perhaps were less threatened by forms of insecurity, previous the relatively recent (although having crept up for some time) attacks on social welfare and corresponding deregulations of labor markets and dismantling of social security measures along with the creation of larger political frameworks (such as the European Union) that have enforced a large degree of these changes on individual nation-states.

This can be seen in the usage of ideas posed as a response to precarious conditions, such as basic/guaranteed income and flexicurity. Basic income was an idea first popularized in the milieu of 1970s autonomist politics, particular in Italy, to argue that people held the rights to a basic form of subsistence and ability to survive regardless of forms of recognized labor they were involved in. This was important both in acknowledging the importance of the many activities of social reproduction (housework, caring for children and the elderly, etc) that are usually unwaged, and in trying to separate income from labor time spent in forms of capitalist work. Flexicurity as a concept has emerged more recently, most noticeably as a policy of the Danish government, who has taken the somewhat paradoxical approach of both deregulating labor markets and forms of employment while also strengthening the provision of social welfare services (as opposed to the usual tact of dismantling the apparatus of the welfare state at the same time). Social movements have thus used notions of flexicurity across Europe, usually inflected with a more radical tinge, to argue for measures to support people’s ability to exist under conditions of instability and uncertainty. In other words, the argument is made that it is not the uncertainty of flexible conditions and employment itself that is necessarily undesirable in itself, but rather that there are not measures existing to ensure that people can be secure in these conditions: thus the idea of flexicurity, or flexible security.

It should be readily obvious how such arguments are inflected to various degrees by social democratic assumptions. After all, whose going to provide this basic income / flexicurity? If not the nation-state, then where are the measures enacted from, the EU? Some other political space that has not clearly emerged yet? As Brian Holmes argues in the essay “Images of Fire,” forms of violence and racism have already injected themselves into the notion of flexicurity and thus overdetermine it in a context marked by exclusion. In other words, a concept that emerged in a context of racism and forms of social domination, in this case a reliance on the hyperexploited labor of migrants and in domestic spaces, cannot easily be separated from this context without being shaped by it. This is not to say that such is necessarily the case, but rather that there needs to be serious discussion about how those kinds of dynamics can be avoided, particularly if a concept such as precarity is to be used in the US, which has a long standing and particularly intense history of intersecting dynamics of race, class, gender, and social power.

Also, and perhaps more fundamentally, there is a risk of identifying common positions and grounds for struggle by drawing out the implications of changes in the forms of labor that do not necessarily resonate with those experiencing them, or do not necessarily produce unproblematic alliances. As the Madrid-based feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva observed, while those involved in designing a webpage and providing a hand-job for a client can both be understood to engaged in a form of immaterial labor (forms of work more based on cultural or symbolic rather than physical production), one which is connected through overall transformations on structures of labor and social power, these are two forms of work hugely inflected by the social value and worth assigned to them. And thus any politics that is based on the changing nature of work has to consider how differences in access to social power and the ability to have a voice about one’s conditions affect organizing from those conditions, and the possibility, as well as difficulties, of creating alliances between them. To continue using the same example, how do we form a politics based upon those conditions without those involved in a form of labor with greater social prestige (for instance web design or computer-based work) speaking for those who do not have the same access to forms of social power and ability to voice their concerns (in this instance, prostitutes). There is a huge potential to recreate a form of paternalistic liberal politics, only this time based upon an understanding of a connected position in an overall form of economic transformation.

Or to use another example, one could argue that both the people involved in the riots that started in Paris suburb Clichy-sous-Bois and spread across France last year, and those involved in the massive student and labor protests and occupations against the introduction of new flexible labor contracts for young workers, are involved in organizing against the same dynamics of uncertainty and exclusion. That, however, does not mean that there is easily or necessarily a common basis for political alliance between those positions based upon that shared condition. Or at very least there is not a basis for alliance between those two situations until political organizing occurs which draws upon those conditions to create common grounds for alliance rather than assuming one exists based on large scale transformations in social and political power. To borrow another argument from Precarias a la Deriva, perhaps rather than using a notion of precarity and its forms based on the changing compositions of labor (such as those embodied in an understanding of the difference between a chainworker and a brainworker), it would be more useful to consider how differences in social position and conditions creates possibilities for differing forms of insurgency and rebellion, and how to work between these various possibilities.

And this is the question that ultimately determines whether a concept such as precarity is useful within a US context: can it be used to contribute to constituting a common ground of the political that does not recreate conditions where certain groups assumptions are hoisted upon others or where the implicit social democratic assumptions work their ways into radical politics? The idea is not to import a discussion around precarious labor and radical politics from Italy, France, or Spain, in the hopes that such ideas and practices could just be translated and reused unproblematically. It is just a question of literal translation of the words, but a translation that finds resonance with a particular cultural, social, and political context. Rather, the task is to learn from the way that discussions around precarity have been developed to ferment political antagonisms and everyday insurgency in a particular context, and to see how a process like that can occur elsewhere, drawing from particularities of the location. The grounds of politics themselves are precarious, composed of an uncertain and constantly shifting terrain. Whether a concept such as precarity is useful for recomposing the grounds and basis for a radical politics is not something determined by the concept itself, but rather how those who use it employ it.

"A minority of the members of society own and control the means of production and distribution, and, as a result, are able to dictate the terms of life to the many. The workers having aspirations above a life in which the conditions are hard and precarious, and in which the life of the toiler is sacrificed without stint that the cupidity of the capitalist may be satisfied, look for something better, and inquire as to the right of him who produces nothing receiving the greater part of the product of the community.

In the struggles of the rising capitalist class with decadent feudalism the worker was told that the master in the shop was his friend and the baron his enemy, and, as a consequence, the toiler fought the battles of his immediate exploiter to a successful issue. This accomplished, it was found that he had but changed one master for another, and that he was more mercilessly exploited under capitalism than had been the case under the old regime."

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