What in the hell …

There’s been a good bit written on the subject. For those unfamiliar, the wikipedia entry’s not the worst place to start. There’s also several web sites that deal with the issue.

Angela’s had a lot good to say on the subject. The Precarias a la Deriva are always worth listening to, their Precarious Lexicon is good. Alex Foti’s Precarious Lexicon is also good. (Alex is ex-Chainworkers. Chris did an interview with him recently.) Precarity Explained To Kids looks decent, culled from many sources. Mute’s run good content on it as well.

The term occurs in this document by the Frassanito Network on borders. (”The situation in Europe may not be comparable to the US. The difference is made above all by different histories of migration. ” This is part of why the precarity term hasn’t caught on in the US, that and that the welfare state and labor law regimes in the US were never quite like those in Europe - we have always been precarious to a greater extent.)

My understanding of the term is as follows:

“Precarity is currently the subject of growing debate and political mobilization in Europe at the time of this writing, partly in response to changes in the regimes of labor and welfare policy as well as labor practices. Precarity has several related meanings. With regard to work, precarity refers to a variety of so-called ‘nonstandard’ work arrangements: times of work (night and weekend work), quantities of work time (flexible or variable hours, part-time work, demands for overtime), and durations of work assignments (temporary work, non-contract work, freelance work). Precarity also refers to the legal status of work: whether work is legal or illegal, and which customary labor rights do and do not apply to which workers. Precarity also refers to instability of income, linked to precarious work arrangements, and to access to needed services such as healthcare and housing. All of these meanings of precarity indicate a general unpredictability of access to needed goods and services whether via a welfare state or private sector and a lack of control of work which in turn imposes less control over the rest of one’s life. In this sense precarity has historically been the general condition of the proletariat globally with moments of relatively less precarity being exceptions resulting from a number of political factors.” (From a list of term definitions here.)

I’m taken with a phrase of Jacques Ranciere’s, from an interview in 1981. “The condition described today 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.” (Quoted in Donald Reid’s preface to Ranciere’s Nights of Labor, page xxxiii. In the preface Reid translates “travailleur precaire” as “unstable worker,” the interview and the preface date from prior to the relative explosion of precarity discourse.)

There’s periodically talk of trying to translate the precarity discourse to the US. Some friends and I were planning to work on that at one point, prior to the US availabilty of the highly recommended Greenpepper issue dedicated to precarity. If precarity as a term were to catch on in the US what I’d like to see then is a collective discussion the present and on labor history. This Sewell book I’ve been reading lately contains many a provocative example and raises many a question. (Not least, how did self-managed unemployment insurance really work among the compagnonnage? Could that be replicated today?)

Sewell writes re: shoemaking and tailoring that these trades faced “skill dilution, subcontracting, the division of labor, and the production of ready-to-wear items,” all of which “threatened the labor force with seriously deteriorating living standards.” (175.) This is all a matter of class composition, political and technical (depoliticalized often, but precisely for political ends).

I’ve still not got round to reading that Silver book, Forces of Labor, that Steve speaks highly of, as does Wildcat. For more see here, as well as this interview with Silver where she discusses Arrighi and her own work in relation to the operaisti:

In 1971 Arrighi and others formed the Gruppo Gramsci. From the start, in their perspective there was a very strong Third Worldism and global perspective, which was something that was not really there in the early operaismo. A second difference is a much stronger combined theoretical and empirical approach, as opposed to the more philosophical tendencies within much of operaismo. One of the strong emphases in the Gruppo Gramsci was on the actual, concrete study of empirical conditions on the ground as they influenced the nature of workers’ bargaining power. In this sense they were closer to Romano Alquati and Sergio Bologna than to Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Finally, whereas certain tendencies within operaismo emphasized that the working class is strong, and getting stronger and stronger all the time, in Forces of Labor there is the attempt to see both the long term processes tending to strengthen labor, but also countertendencies brought about by the various capitalist fixes in response to the strength and militancy of labor.

Having that one unread on the shelf is among the many errors (evidence of my infantile petty bourgeois deviationism) I hope to correct soon.

Off the top of my head, I have this thought - if relative nonprecarity characterized at least certain sectors in the era and locations of Fordism, and if this nonprecarity (along with/as part of the larger class composition at the time) was a product at least in part of the struggles that preceded it, then study of those struggles might prove useful today in breakdown of nonprecarity, the return (for some) to precarity. At the same time agency should not be displaced to the pre-nonprecarity, pre-Fordism etc - the prior class composition. Nonprecarity was also in large part maintained by the struggles and organization of people living in those conditions. All I mean to say here is that the terrain of that struggle was (nonteleologically or nondeterminedly) composed by prior struggles.

More simply: the precariat today is likely able to find experiences to learn and draw inspiration from among the earlier precariat, as well as the precariat which never went away. The latter is a matter for another time. (Speculating briefly on that, race/racialization strikes me as tremendously important in both, as do I think related but not identical issues of migration and borders, all of which are things I’ve not paid as much attention to as I should have. Gender as well, particularly in terms of feminized and largely unwaged labor. More reading and percolating to do.) On the former … more Sewell, on shoemakers and tailors:

“As the division of labor increased and skill requirements fell, these trades were flooded with poor and relatively untrained men - and a large number of women as well. The high levels of seasonal unemployment that had always plagued the apparel traes were thus compounded in the 1830s and 1840s by a good deal of chronic underemployment and sometimes by falling wages as well. According to the estimates of Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce, shoemakers worked only about 200 a year in the late 1840s and tailor about 150, as against 300 for most trades. This reduced their yearly earnings to pitiful levels, in spite of the respectable wages they made when fully employed. Both in Marseille and elsewhere, the tailors and shoemakers did their best to sustain their corporations and to defend themselves against deteriorating standards. But even when they won strikes against their masters, their position was usually soon undermined by the changes that were inexorably transforming their trades.

Marseille’s shoemakers had been organized since the beginning of the nineteenth century - initially as a compagnonnage and from 1816 as a mutual aid society as well. In 1833 the shoemakers won a strike for higher wages; whether they were organized by the compagnonnage or the mutual aid society is not known. The gains they won in the strike were soon eroded, however, and in 1845 the shoemakers organized another, particularly effective strike. In this case the shoemakers’ bad fortune was the historians’ good fortune: The police broke the strike by arresting the leaders of the shoemakers’ society for illegal coalition, and the records for their trial contain valuable information both on the organization of their corporation and on conditions in the trade.

It is clear from these records that Marseille’s shoemakers worked under widely varying regimes of productiong. Testimony at the trial referred at one point to “workshops where up to eighty workers were employed,” but also says that during the strike certain workers “without danger to the themselves could not, except in hiding, receive and fabricate the ouvrage [work to be done at home] that was given to them by their masters.” The trial record also refers to bout directeurs d’ateliers (directors of workshops) and entrepeneurs d’ouvrage, a term that implies work on a putting-out basis. It appears that some shoes were made in small workshops, others in very large workshops where the division of labor was probably very advanced, and still others in the workers’ own rooms or garrets - a diversity of working conditions typical of the shoemaking trade in the 1840s. The trial record also refers to production for local consumption and to “the fabrication of pacotilles [shoddy goods] for export abroad to the colonies.” One suspects that the very large workshops and the domestic putting-out branch of the trade corresponded chiefly to the pacotille branch, but the records are unfortunately silent on this question.

The shoemakers’ strike of 1845 was extremely well organized. Although compagnons and memebrs of the shoemakers mutual-aid society were surely involved in the strike, it was organized by a new and much more inclusive society that contained virtually all the shoemakers in the city. It was composed of thirty-six sections and had an executive bureau of twelve members. It maintained a meeting room and an office and had a permanent president, secretary, and treasurer. This society drew up a single wage scale to be applied to all branches of the trade and presented it to the masters. In addition, it demanded power over placement of workers into jobs, which would, in effect, have made membership in the society compulsory. Most of the employers refused these demands, and the offending employers were struck, with nearly 100 percent effectiveness. The society also set up a producers’ cooperative to provide work for themselves and to take business away from the masters for the duration of the strike. The workers’ society, in short, organized the strike with unusual care and thoroughness and managed to enforce adherence on workers in all branches of this extremely heterogeneous trade. The strikers were attempting to create a powerful and unified workers’ corporation, more of less comparable to those of Marseille’s tanners or the hatters of Lyons and Paris, and had the strike succeeded, they might have been able to do so. But it ended in failure when the authorities arrested the leaders of the shoemakers’ society and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from one to three months. The unified corporation did not survive this defeat, but the shoemakers’ compagnonnage and the mutual-aid society remained intact, and struggles against the masters continued. In 1855 the compagnonnage and the mutual-aid society once again attempted to form a single, unified society, which was denied authorization by the government; whether the fusion took place in spite of this refusal is uncertain. And when trade unions were legalized in 1869, shoemakers were among the first to establish a chambre syndical. Thus, in spite of the poverty, overcrowding, and deterioration of their trade, Marseille’s shoemakers continued to keep some sort of workers’ corporation alive.”

All of this might, I think, also provide further grist for the mill of criticizing and sorting out what to keep in the (mainly post-) operaisti talk about the social factory, the diffuse factory, the socialized worker, and the emarginati - again to criticize the over emphasis on novelty. Additional stuff to look into, the conference where some of the operaisti discussed the IWW, and also Gisela Bock’s book on the IWW, particularly the Italian edition which had a different title, I think.