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the shade of a floating house, still less somebody in an air-conditioned hotel room a few miles away. It means something different to the old and the young, the strong and the frail, the dominant and the marginal. Far from being all in it together, we are each in it alone, carrying our own climate with us. Climate change precarity Few moments have brought this home to me more clearly than the morning in February 2018, when I sat speaking to a brick worker and his wife in their small metal house, a
In Portugal, the categories of trabalho precário (precarious labour), precariedade laboral (labour precarity) and the precariado (precariat) have entered everyday language. Since the mid-2000s, there is growing publicly and politically sanctioned association between precarity and highly qualified youngsters engaged in insecure, low-paid work in the service industry. In 1994, in the midst of ongoing student demonstrations against a more restrictive framework to accessing higher education, the editor of the Portuguese daily newspaper Público signed a
precariat (Standing 2014 ). The term ‘precarity’ is commonly used to denote instability, low wages, lack of security and thwarted possibilities of advancement, all related to adverse modes of employment, such as zero hours, part-time and flexible contracts. More generally, as feminist scholars such as Isabell Lorey and Judith Butler argue, precariousness is a fundamental condition of vulnerability, lack of protection, exposure to risks and violence, inherent not to any specific class of workers, but to whole populations, such as sans-papiers or women exposed to sexual
Futility and precarity Liquid capitalism’s new ‘lightness and motility’, argued Zygmunt Bauman in 2000, ‘have turned into the paramount source of uncertainty for all the rest’.1 Indeed, capitalism’s short-term tactics of mobility and evasion have been systematically accompanied since the 1980s by strategies of downsizing and outsourcing that have radically transformed the very definitions of work and society. Terms such as ‘flexploitation’ and ‘precarisation’ were coined in the late 1990s to describe the new uncertain status of work within this new global
Nini's Diario already exists, much of which builds on the text's chaotic format to highlight the precarious situation of the migrants that cross the Strait of Gibraltar in patera. However, as I will argue in continuation, Nini's tales of the dark underworld of illegal employment that supports Spain's booming tourist industry along the Mediterranean coast communicate the extent to which the precarity of these migrant “Others” is part and parcel of Spain's financial success. Writing in Arabic for a Spanish audience, Nini shows that precarity is borderless – not
Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan examines urban youth’s practices of making do in digital economies, to understand how precarious working conditions reverberate in the coming of age in contemporary cities. Through a comparative analysis of the perspectives of young men working as airtime sellers in Abidjan and food delivery riders in Berlin, the book provides innovative analytical lenses to understand urban inequalities against the backdrop of current digital urban developments. Essentially, this ethnography challenges the easy conflation of instability with insecurity, and overcomes the centrality of wage labour in research on urban livelihood, by looking at a broader set of economic practices and relational mechanisms. The analysis shows how accruing symbolic capital, a feel for the game in contexts of ambiguity, and access to care are fundamental for explaining the unequal distribution of risks for socio-material insecurities in unstable work settings.
racialised tropes around African physical and intellectual capabilities, and in doing so contributes further to the inequalities faced by African migrant players (Agergaard and Ungruhe, 2016 ; Ungruhe, 2014 ; van Sterkenburg, Peeters and van Amsterdam, 2019 ). This occurs despite a general trend of growing hybridity and diversity in playing styles that migrants contribute to in leagues all over the world. The precarity induced by processes of racialised othering and self-charismatisation becomes even more apparent in instances
innovation can be any more effective than the past relief efforts it now disavows. Rather than system failure, just as important is that the world has changed. Societies are more fragmented and unequal than before ( Piketty, 2014 ). International space has striated into fast, slow and stopped lanes ( Brown, 2010 ) as debt, precarity and anger have flourished ( Mishra, 2017 ). Rather than correcting past mistakes, humanitarian innovation is embarked on a wholly different project. It is helping create the systems and structures to govern global precarity
incentive to tackle the political economy of precarity. Extreme food security crises represent a change in political market conditions that compel political elites to make tactical adjustments while also providing new opportunities for acquiring power or the instruments for power. Such changes in political organisation may endure well beyond the crisis. Finally, it follows that humanitarian operations are most likely to be caught up in the calculus of transactional politics in
et al., 2021 ): instead of humanitarians bearing responsibility for the outcomes of humanitarian assistance on refugees, it is instead ‘upward accountability’ to donors that is the primary mode of accountability engagement ( Daun, 2020 ). Yet outcomes of digital work for refugees are particularly important to consider, as this type of work is generally linked to the global gig economy, itself inherently intertwined with job precarity and global