2023-03-01
One person’s flexibility is another’s precarity. While it is helpful to think in terms of both sides, we must be honest about what the uncertainty underpinning the new world is doing to us.
By Dr Christian Mauri, a Perth based sociologist, organiser for The Fremantle Network, and the founder of Family Tales, which turns the stories of families and communities into legacy items.
My research deals with the growing population called the “precariat”. By this I mean people who are being habituated to a life of unstable labour and all that this entails in terms of navigating regular unemployment, being disposable, stress and frustration, and all that jazz. Those of you who work in service and hospitality, or as biannually unemployed academics, or spend months hunting for jobs online will be familiar with this world. It isn’t new, but it is ascending. To help consider this, I make three offerings: a tool, a term, and a ponderance.
Framing the New World of Work
I begin by pointing out that, almost always and at the very least, it pays to think in terms of the coin. By this I mean thinking in terms of two outward faces that are connected, but don’t see each other. The head and the tail: the thinking end up above and, to stress the metaphor, the shitty end below. I present this as a tool to remind you to think about the hidden and connected sides to each story. For example, an increasingly cliched buzzword in the world of work is innovation. Businesses seek innovative applicants, entrepreneurs and artists seek to mix things up, universities seek to invent and discover. While innovation is great on the head side of the coin, tails reveals another buzzword: disruption.
Because a disruptive world is unpredictable, old promises and expectations must be revised and new strategies developed, as we are seeing in the emphasis on new values, new heads, such as flexibility. For businesses, flexibility means prioritising the ability to quickly respond to changes in the market, such as by the breaking down of careers into isolated jobs to be competed over by single-use individuals. While this is most obvious in the highly insecure, non-standard employment of the “gig economy”, the preference for casual and limited-term labour is being embraced by employers across the board. Unfortunately for the would-be flexible worker, the tail end of this coin is uncertainty and precarity. Such arrangements erode the ability to envision the future and make commitments, buy property, and develop a lasting sense of occupational identity and community. Flexibility may broaden the horizons of a willing few, but it constrains the horizons of those stuck on the growing tail end.
The Precarious Proletariat
As the precariat may be a new word for many, it’s worth fleshing it out a little bit. We can call the trend of escalating short-term and insecure employment, relative to declining ongoing and secure employment casualisation. This insecurity corresponds with the increased dependence on employers and the loss of control over employment and work. In short, as people become more desperate and disposable, they are more likely to take what they can get and put up with more – especially following extended periods searching for work. We can call this increased subservience to bosses proletarianisation. Put these two processes together and we have the precariat: they are typically more educated than the proletariat of the mid-20th century but lack many of the old securities; they also tend to have values and interests less oriented toward class-identification and involvement in unions – for one is less inclined to strike if their employment is just about to be revised. There is so much to say on all this, but I’ll conclude with a point on education.
On Education and Employment
For the first time in Australian history and across the West, the average person looking for a job is expected to have a higher level of education and experience than is required for the labour that they are expected to perform. Here it’s worth returning to the coin. Starting with heads, we are seeing the unprecedented fraying of the link between educational and occupational attainment. The pandemic may have temporarily disrupted this – but the larger trend is clear. Employers are asking for more than ever while offering less in terms of security, inclusion and advancement. Highly competitive and time demanding application processes are overseen by time-stressed external recruiters who admit to looking at applications for a handful of seconds (at least for those reviews that are not already automated). As a result of these factors and many others, we are observing the first generation since WW2 to face negative social mobility, which means that the material conditions of young people today will be worse than that of their parents. Moreover, this decline is looking to become the new normal.
Flipping over to the tails, we find the question that I’ll leave you with. How will these developments be met by whole generations that have been told that education is the key to gainful employment? People who were advised to align their passion with their livelihood, that self-realisation could be found in occupational identity, and that if they love what they do they’d not work a day in their life? What cognitive dissonance and frustration will ensue? Who will be blamed? Already the blame game is tacitly trained on individuals, for spelling errors on resumes, not enough networking, and so on. As universities push for deregulation and amp up their advertisements to be as inspiring as possible, people will return to spend more on higher degrees, potentially contributing to the issues further. Discouraged by the ongoing unpaid work of job searching, or due to the shame of not standing up to unethical actions at work because of a precarious employment situation, many will become passive. On each of these points, I can only encourage you not to only see one side of the coin.
Conclusion
To conclude on a positive note, there is building consciousness among the precariat of France and the UK that they are not alone, leading to more youth challenging the world of precarious work that they are entering into. We will never be able to return to how things were, but we can encourage others to join unions, resist the pressure to treat flexibility as a win-win for employers and staff, and – for those employers and HR people reading this – treat people and value statements as real and serious. These are not just individual responses, for they are oriented toward capacities for collective action. There is much more to say on all of this.
[Editors' note: The Greens have a policy initiative to "end the insecure work crisis".]
Header photo: Credit: the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]