No simple term exists in english that conveys the sense of the 'precarite' in french or precariato in Italian. Over the last five years however it has become a key term in describing the character of the new work-force emerging outside of the forms of production that were the stamp of the postwar period. Because the definition of precarity is first of all negative, emphasizing the loss of the social guarantees that were the hallmarks of social partnership in the post-war period: wage increases linked in some way to inflation and productivity, health insurance and holiday pay, fixity of employment and seniority. These concessions to organized labour were however limited to those dedicated to activities that were defined as 'productive work'; careworkers, women's work in the home, cauldron of social reproductuion, pert-time and many service workers never had access to these benefits. 'Precarity' thus is a theme which not only captures the factual mutations in the nature of the workforce this half-century, but extends further, bringing within its scope and creating a common space for confrontation with feminine, affective and atypic al labour. Precaria a la derive put it like this: " There is no adequate English translation for all that is implied by ‘precariedad’. The word, increasingly common in discourses about work in Europe, while sometimes used to refer only to a condition of inadequate income, can be applied more generally to the diversity of life/work conditions associated with part-time, flexible, unregulated, multiple, no-contract, no-benefits, at home, project-basis, freelance, illegal or invisible employment.

Webster’s defines precarious as: “dependent upon chance circumstances, unknown conditions, or uncertain developments; characterized by a lack of stability or security that threatens with danger.” This is pretty much right on target. "

or later:

"We might venture a definition of the word precariousness, broad enough to acknowledge the amplitude and multidimensionality of the phenomenon, but concrete enough to avoid that the term lose all explicative force: thus we will call precariousness the juncture of conditions, both material and symbolic, which determine an uncertainty with respect to the continued access to the resources necessary for the full development of a person’s life."

Beyond the differences in terminology however, the condition that the precarity debate refers to should be familiar, indeed it is a discussion which is well advanced in the United States where historically relatively low union density changed the balance of forces, particularly since the 1970s, ascent of the Reagan/Thatcher axis etc. The prevalence of this state was well described by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book "Nickel and Dimed", chronicling her temporary immersion into the America of the working poor. In this masterful - which is elsewhere a model of accessibility - text she demonstrates how even in times of a tight labour market that ought to allow workers more bargaining power and greater wages, the benefits do not materialize. A predominant reason for this breakdown of the market model is the lack of mobility that is the direct corrollary of poverty - without the means of mobility or the ability to take time off to search for another job.On a more effete theoretical level George Caffenzis has confronted the subject in his "Abolition of Work or Towards a Renaissance of Slavery?" in which he counters claims by luminaries such as Jeremy Rifkin and Toni Negri that through atomization, robotization and the general eclipse of immediate physical production by the general intellect, work is in the process of being phased out.

"And then oriented and disoriented, stirred-up and united, we watched a montage which pulled together voices and images from our passages. We debated, we talked about precariousness; everybody talks about precariousness these days. But can we really? Is it useful? How do we define a category which contains such differences, such a variety of experiences and situations? Doubts arise. Is putting the work of a high-wire freelance researcher together with the work of an in-house domestic worker without residency papers in the same category not a way of obscuring a terrible difference in social power? How shall we delineate precariousness outside of labor? And with these and other questions we go to have a drink and to plan, drunken, future itineraries of the singular common."

Such a discussion is tempting for several reasons, some of which might be better resisted. Marx's description of an economic system generating inevitably conflicting classes and postulation of the proletariat as the social aggregation for transformative progress has created a n intellectualized culture always in search of a subject capable of fulfilling such a role. In Italy this gave birth to a series of categorizations according to the period: mass worker, socialised worker, and for some, this has =now metamorphosized into the precarious worker (or according to another, and not necessarily, opposing view the cognitariat, or that group of producers whose creation of value unfolds predominantly in the field of immaterial labour - programmers, fashion and style industry, media, research, advertising). The benefits of such a schematic are not under consideration here. What is to be noted however is that in terms of exploring the state of precarity as a social condition, such a vocabulary, with all its presuppositions and imperatives, is not helpful in the field of inquiry because it conflicts with subjective perceptions many people have of their environment. Their may be a specific component of the precariato who can in some way trace a trajectory from what was once known as the proletariat, but many of those whose circumstances have been stripped of guarantees do not see themselves there. Indeed it is exactly this lack of homogeneity which could be said to be the first thing which the precarious have in common, a singularity, a lack of an exemplary profile against which all others can be measured. In this sense we can say that the 20 year old worker in a call center on a short term contract shares something with the highly paid film-editor who works by contract; their shared situation can only be understood negatively against the lack of the job for life, of the predictability provided by collective representation or the promise of the welfare state to care for its subjects till the grave do them part. Such a general level of description may be useful as a broad sociological premise, but hardly as a key to anticipate new forms of insurrection or community.

Querrien in her review of Le Nouvel Esprit Du Capitalisme compares the organization of production by project to the lot of the intermittents, contrasting the past where workers simply had to administer the functioning of machines whereas now each one must bring a specific ability to a whole. This imposes heavy responsibilities, induces anxiety and externalizes the cost of discipline from the firm to the individual who must constantly renew their employability, expand their skill-set etc.

"Those responsible for this new social critique share with the managers a culture of mobility, thev are opportunistic, capable of seizing any occasion, and function in networks. They are capable of monopolizing to their benefit the points of contact between networks, they amass heavily laden address-books without allowing others to benefit from them, they attribute to themselves responsibility for events to whose organization they have contributed..... they become entrepreneurs of themselves as recommended by the economists and the banks. Relations of exploitation become based upon differentials in mobility: the more one does, the more one is mobile, the more one is employable. Querrien, 258

Dismantling Social Protections

CreW, Chainworkers, Derive Approdi Andrea Fumagalli, Precarii, Derive Approdi. Temp Slave Processed World