Precarious Experiences Research Articles

Finding George Freeman: a ‘Liberated African’ in Berkshire in the Age of Abolition

ABSTRACT This article comprises a biography of George Freeman, an African boy ‘liberated’ from enslavement in West Africa and relocated to the countryside of Berkshire, UK. The article contributes to scholarship on the long-term presence and lived experiences of Black people in Britain, using digital humanities techniques and parochial records from the county of Berkshire to map the presence of Black people (and other minority ethnicities) in rural English counties. It also uses Freeman’s biography to engage in wider discussions concerning the precarious experiences of ‘Liberated Africans’. These two research areas are combined to construct Freeman’s biography as a global microhistory, adding to the growing scholarship that aims to overcome these areas of archival silence within histories of slavery and abolition.

‘Reinvisiblisation’ of Indian Migrant Labours during/post COVID-19 Pandemic: A Biopolitical Study

The paper unravels the ‘reinvisiblisation’ of the Indian migrant labours, who underwent mass exodus because of the lockdown imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic that brought to light their ‘invisibility’ to Indian planners and policymakers. The research qualitatively analyses the selected incidents to elucidate upon their precarious experiences unique to the pandemic. It employs the Foucauldian theoretical framework of docile bodies to understand the workings of biopower in disciplining the body of migrant labours to maintain their docility and utility even amidst the pandemic. The study further employs Judith Butler’s concept of precarious lives to delineate how migrant workers and labours were exposed to violence, injury, and death on their way back home. The research lays bare the attempts of the disciplinary regime to render them docile in the guise of assistance and ‘inclusive’ policy changes and concludes by suggesting serious changes in policy measures and alternatives to avoid such crises in the future.

‘Yet, they didn’t sign me’: the production of precarity in amateur and semi-professional football in Nigeria

This paper investigated how the experiences of precarity are produced in amateur and semi-professional football in Nigeria through qualitative interviews with former amateur and semi-professional footballers. Though a few studies have highlighted the precarities that football career aspirations produce among West African youth, the mechanisms through which such precarious experiences develop remain loosely articulated. This paper fills this gap. The findings revealed that precarious experiences emanate from an overbearing athletic identity, a disconnect between imagined mobility through football and actual opportunity, institutional failures, and corruption and exploitation. The policy implications include a need for a framework for dual career and life after football programme in amateur and semi-professional clubs, centred around information, health education and skills training, as well as institutional and regulatory reforms for better governance of the sector.

Sociological Types of Precarity Among Gig Workers: Lived Experiences of Food Delivery Workers in Riga

In this article, we examine the lived experiences of precariousness in gig work, a growing sector of the modern labor market, through the case of Latvia, a former Soviet republic that has experienced radical neo‐liberalization over the last 30 years. Many studies, mainly focusing on the Global North, have demonstrated precarious aspects of gig work—its short‐term engagements, the lack of legal protection and social benefits, and algorithmic management as an autonomy‐limiting control mechanism. Given the precarious nature of gig work, we examine why people engage in it. Building on literature that distinguishes precarity as a condition and precariousness as a subjective experience, we analyze reasons for engaging in gig work in Latvia. We identify five types of gig workers based on 56 in‐depth interviews with food delivery gig workers in Riga, the capital of Latvia. We analyze differences in our respondents’ motivations for choosing this work, their position, and historical mobility in the social structure. Based on this analysis, we find three factors that serve as a basis for a typology of food delivery workers in Riga: gig workers’ view of gig work as a temporary vs. a long‐term engagement, the breadth of perceived opportunities available, and their emotional satisfaction with the job. We discuss how these findings compare with other studies on gig work and gig workers’ subjective experiences.

Between hope and despair: experiences of precariousness and precarity in the lived experiences of recent diabetic amputees in primary care

Precariousness dominates the lives of patients with recent diabetic lower extremity amputations. Wound healing is not guaranteed, post-amputation mortality is high and personal and social identities are destabilised. This study explores the experiences of nine post-amputation diabetic patients in the context of Singapore’s primary health and social care and diversified cultural setting. The loss of physical integrity leads to the self being rendered precarious in multiple ways: emotional-existential precariousness results from uncertainty about survival; agentic precariousness, from restrictions to the individual’s autonomy; the social self is rendered precarious as social relations and identities are changed; and financial precarity, which arises from job insecurity and treatment cost. Patients act to overcome precariousness and regain agency in various ways. Supporting patients’ agency should be integral to all healthcare interventions, at whatever stage of the patient’s journey, and needs to take into account cultural roles and values.

Perceived precarious life: a SEM model for re-dimensioning of precarious work and its impact on mental health.

Precarious work is one of the most studied concepts related to work, and its effects have been analyzed in relation to variables such as mental health and wellbeing. However, there is a tendency to atomise the analysis of precarious work, without understanding that people's working life is intertwined with other areas of their life. Faced with this situation, this paper presents the concept of perceived precarious life, which is aligned with contemporary models of social inclusion and exclusion. Thus, perceived precarious life comprises variables of labor precariousness, social support and hopelessness in the family economic situation. To test this idea, a structural equation model (SEM) is presented, which tests the structure of the construct of perceived precarious life by relating it to mental health and coping strategies. After testing the fit of the model in both men and women, a SEM path analysis is designed between the variables, observing that perceived precarious life has an effect on mental health (β = 0.635, p < 0.01). This relationship is mediated by unproductive coping strategies (β = 0.142, p < 0.01). This model exposes a broad and integrated conceptualization of precariousness, combining aspects of work, relationships and hopelessness, which allows for an understanding of the integral experience of precariousness.

Journalists’ Perceptions of Precarity: Toward a Theoretical Model

ABSTRACT Journalistic work has become increasingly precarious. Labor conditions in the profession meet several criteria of precarity, as established in the sociology of work. Journalists, especially freelancers, often have low and unstable incomes and only limited access to social insurance. Thus far, precarity research in journalism has primarily focused on empirical investigations of precarious employment rather than on theorizing how journalists actually perceive these working conditions. This paper proposes a theoretical model that determines the factors of security and insecurity that can lead to a stronger or weaker perception of precarity. Drawing on a review of the precarity literature, the model allows for subjectivity within the precarious experience of journalists. It shows that family responsibilities and personality traits belong to the subjective factors influencing journalists’ perceptions of precarity. In addition, perceptions of insecure employment conditions depend on the life stage of the worker. We strongly recommend a multidimensional approach that captures not only the objective conditions of work but also journalists’ subjective sense of precarity.

Precarity among transient migrants: Mainland Chinese workers in Brunei Darussalam during the COVID-19 pandemic

Precarity often characterizes the inadequate social and legal protection that transient migrants receive. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews of Chinese migrant workers of Mainland Chinese enterprises in Brunei Darussalam between 2021 and 2022, this paper discusses their precarious experiences by demonstrating their encounters with local communities and when interacting with their families in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. It unveils that the daily struggles and precariousness of Mainland Chinese workers in Brunei are due to both exogenous and endogenous factors. This study sheds light on the vulnerable conditions of Chinese workers resulting from their individual choices and institutional factors that affect transient migrants.

Hong Kong Migrants’ Divergent Experiences in Australia: A Multi-level Spatio-temporal Approach

This study compares the social field for recent Hong Kong immigrants in the Australian cities of Melbourne, Sydney, and Darwin. We explore how migrants’ experience differs in terms of their capital, migration trajectories, and interactions with Australians and in the workplace. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews, this study features migrants’ precarious experience and (self-)selection to cities and regional areas which are shaped by the convertibility of migrants’ resources as well as state-based criteria of desirability. Compared to Melbourne and Sydney, the Northern Territory has a relatively more welcoming immigration policy. This lower bar offers a lower risk for Darwin’s immigrants seeking permanent residency. At the meso-level, Darwin’s transient population and its more multicultural ethnic composition facilitates opportunities for migrants from Hong Kong to both form social relationships outside their ethnic group and to enter standard employment. While the Australian government’s introduction of the “Hong Kong stream” migration could have attracted migrants whose permanent residency in Melbourne and Sydney would otherwise have been unobtainable, a sense of uncertainty mounted given the “incidental” nature and the paradigm of temporariness in migration policies. Our paper illuminates the interconnectedness of the macro, meso, and micro levels through a spatial-temporal understanding of divergent migration experience and strategies.

Why does unpaid labour vary among digital labour platforms? Exploring socio-technical platform regimes of worker autonomy

Digital platforms provide many workers with vital income and offer the promise of flexible work, and yet also contribute to experiences of precariousness and exploitation, particularly with regard to pressures to undertake unpaid work. This article explores why unpaid labour is necessary and what drives its extent and form among diverse types of digital platforms. We theorize two ideal types of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ socio-technical platform regimes of worker autonomy, building on sociological insights about socio-technical systems, management control over worker autonomy and labour market segmentation by skill. In principle, ‘open’ (‘closed’) platform regimes grant relatively high (low) worker autonomy in terms of access to the platform, paid work and control over work tasks. Analysing five case studies, illustrative of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ regimes, we investigate unpaid labour in low-skill locational (i.e. food delivery) platforms and medium/high-skill online (i.e. freelancing) platforms. In brief, digital freelancers exhibit a lower extent of unpaid labour within relatively ‘open’ regimes, owing to greater autonomy over access to, and control over, platform work in a sector requiring medium/high skills. Conversely, ‘closed’ regimes mitigate unpaid labour for food-delivery platforms by providing market shelter for workers, who are easily replaced in an overcrowded sector requiring few skills.

Precarious Work and the Gendered Individualisation of Risk in the South African Manufacturing Sector, 2002–2017

Against the backdrop of workplace restructuring globally, post-apartheid South Africa is experiencing consistently high levels of unemployment, the deterioration of employment security and limited improvements in earnings. This article investigates the changing nature of labour-intensive production in the South African labour market and the gendered individualisation of risk associated with precarious or non-standard forms of employment. The article expands on the critical theoretical narrative about the challenges of labour under neo-liberalism by applying a gendered political economy analysis to the experiences of precariousness among workers in the South African manufacturing sector. By focusing on the interconnections between gender and political economy, this article delinks questions about the crisis of labour from a narrow focus on skills and refocuses our understanding in terms of the structural determinants of vulnerabilities in the labour market. The article argues that the gender composition of informal and precarious work in the post-apartheid labour market has significant implications for addressing the persistent racialised and gendered inequalities in the South African economy. KEYWORDS: labour market restructuring; informal employment; precarious work; gender JEL CLASSIFICATION: J21; J30; J71; J80

Squeezed out: Experienced precariousness of self-employed care workers in residential long-term care, from an intersectional perspective.

To understand self-employed long-term-care workers' experiences of precariousness, and to unravel how their experiences are shaped at the intersection of gender, class, race, migration and age. In the Netherlands, increasing numbers of nurses and nursing aides in long-term care (LTC) opt for self-employment. Societal organizations and policy makers express concerns about this development, as self-employment is seen as a risk factor for poor health. Self-employment is not necessarily precarious work but can contribute to the precariousness of specific groups. Knowledge about inequities among self-employed nurses and nursing aides in long-term care is lacking. A participatory, qualitative interview study. The research team consisted of four academic researchers and five (un)paid care workers. Semi-structured interviews with 23 self-employed nurses and nursing aides in LTC (2019-2020). Data were analysed from an intersectional perspective. First, we describe that feeling precarious as a hired employee-due to increasing workloads, health risks, poverty and discrimination-shapes care workers' choice for self-employment. Second, we describe inequities between self-employed care workers who could (financially) afford to turn to self-employment as a health strategy and those who felt squeezed out of the organizations due to poverty or discrimination. They more often dealt with precarious work in the context of precarious lives, negatively impacting their health. Third, we describe how negotiating an entrepreneurial identity with a caring identity required material sacrifices and thus contributed to self-employed care workers' financial precariousness, particularly as women. Our findings indicate that working in LTC is becoming increasingly precarious for all care workers, both for hired and self-employed, with younger, lower-paid and racialized women with unpaid caring responsibilities seemingly most at risk for precariousness. Our findings urge policy makers and care organizations to develop gender and diversity-sensitive policy responses to address these inequities.

“School of precariousness”: the production of consent to precarious work in administration internships

PurposeThis study aims to understand the production of consent to precarious working conditions in administration students' internship experiences.Design/methodology/approachA total of 13 students of an undergraduate program in Business Administration in a private university were interviewed. The students' perceptions about the dynamics of the internship and their engagement in this experience were explored through thematic analysis.FindingsInternships became more than spaces to learn about the world of work. They are also the locus of professional socialization toward precarious work. The detachment of internships from their educational scope is mediated by neonormative control mechanisms that subjectively mobilize the interns, producing the institutionalization and appreciation of the precarious experience, resignified as something that leads to autonomy, learning and a job position.Practical implicationsThe article can help students, universities and companies to assess the role of internships in training future professionals.Social implicationsThe research problematizes the internship as a form of professional socialization toward precarious work and its detachment from the original educational purpose. The article critically contributes to the debate about the current professional socialization process of young students.Originality/valueThe article highlights the subjective dimension that supports students' consent to dysfunctional internships, discussing both the experience of work precariousness and exploitation, and the terms of the students' engagement in such dynamics, bridging consent to neonormative controls.

Infrastructures of migrant precarity: unpacking precarity through the lived experiences of migrant workers in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Migrant labour has increasingly become key to the functioning of many economies including in Asia. While existing studies have generated rich understandings of precarity, there remains a paucity of studies that shed new light on how migration infrastructures shape the production of multidimensional forms of precarity in the global South. Drawing on a case study of Nepali migrant workers engaged in the manufacturing and service sectors in Malaysia, this article examines migrant workers’ precarious experiences and the role of regulatory, commercial, workplace and socio-economic infrastructures in shaping migrant experiences. It unpacks multidimensional categories of migrant precarity transcending oft-discussed economic forms of precarity, which provide a heuristic tool for researchers to reveal the underlying precarity-generating specific political, social, and economic processes. The article argues that migrant precarity results from the complex interplay between workplace and regulatory infrastructures in receiving country, which is worsened by the workings of commercial and socio-economic infrastructures in sending country. The article has demonstrated how migration infrastructures established by the regulatory and commercial actors purportedly for facilitating migration and benefiting migrant workers have instead produced and exacerbated migrant precarity.

Truths and unfreedoms of regimes of insecurity and the resistance of the commons

PurposeThis paper aims to explore narratives of insecurity to understand how the casualisation of the employment relationship makes life more fragile and precarious. The authors engage in an inquiry about how multinational enterprises (MNEs) structure precariousness for workers in emerging economies. The authors attempt to understand how workers analyse their experiences of precariousness and what form their resistance takes as a result of their analysis.Design/methodology/approachThe authors engage with the narratives of eight Indian workers/trade union activists working in different marginal spaces of the Indian economy to uncover a commons where we are the multitude. By commons, the authors imply shared forms of property, which stand against the concept of private property that is central to the social relations of capitalism. The authors are performing the data of workers by interspersing them in an analysis of angst and hope.FindingsWorkers understand their experiences of precariousness as emerging from a complex political economy structured by MNEs, which involves multiple fronts of marginalisation. Workers realize that they need to engage in comprehensive forms of resistance to undo the regimes of precariousness. Workers create shared universes of grief to relate to each other’s experiences of precariousness. The unfreedoms experienced by workers lead to a sharing of the social relations of commons where workers can resist by expressing solidarity with each other.Practical implicationsThe authors contribute to practice by arguing that workers’ collectives should not accept the naturalisation of precariousness. By staging a dialogue about the injuries of precariousness, they can craft a politics of resistance that begins the process of commoning.Social implicationsWorkers’ politics of resistance can significantly democratise the global political economy in important ways by advancing the potential for commons.Originality/valueThe authors make an original contribution to the study of precariousness in the context of international business by arguing that the experience of precariousness can lead to a commons where workers resist structures of injustice.

Addressing the complex substance use and mental health needs of people leaving prison: Insights from developing a national inventory of services in Canada.

Internationally, transitions from prison to the community are often precarious experiences for people who are living with substance use and mental health concerns. In Canada, a continuing opioid overdose crisis and overlapping challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic have generated urgency for scaling up community-based services that can meet the complex substance use and mental health needs of people leaving prison. In this commentary, we reflect on our experience with and knowledge gained by developing a national inventory of substance use and mental health services for criminal justice-involved persons who are re-entering the community. We learned that there is a scarcity of such community-based services specific to criminal justice-involved populations and a glaring lack of information about culturally safe and appropriate supports. Stakeholders from organisations across Canada identified that communities need a comprehensive array of low-barrier services, inclusive of harm reduction and substance use treatment services, to meet the diverse needs of people leaving prison. We recommend building greater investment in and awareness of community-driven, local programs, as well as enhancing efforts to engage people with lived and living experience in service design and provision. We also briefly describe a few programs to highlight examples of how to operationalise the themes that we observed to emerge while developing a national inventory of community-based substance use and mental health services for criminal justice-involved persons.

Health and work well-being associated with employment precariousness among permanent and temporary nurses: A cross-sectional survey

Nursing is at risk of becoming precarious employment with low wages, poor working conditions, heavy workload and underdeveloped career development possibilities. This study aimed to explore employment precariousness, health and work well-being among permanent and temporary practical nurses and registered nurses. The data were collected from Finnish nurses ( n = 5867) using an online questionnaire in autumn 2020. This cross-sectional study was reported by applying the STROBE guidelines. Temporary nurses perceived their health and work well-being as being better than permanent nurses; however, they also perceived higher employment precariousness. Vulnerability, such as being treated in an authoritarian manner, had the strongest negative association with health and work well-being among permanent and temporary nurses. Practical nurses and registered nurses perceived employment precariousness in several dimensions, but this needs to be further studied because the results of this study are somewhat contradictory. Also, further studies are required to survey post-COVID-19 care work, as the pandemic likely affected the study, resulting in higher experiences of precariousness.

Experiences of precariousness and exploitation of Romanian transnational live-in care workers in Austria

Based on conceptualizations of a continuum of exploitation to examine phenomena related to precariousness and modern slavery, this article examined Romanian transnational live-in care workers’ job perceptions based on thematic analysis of qualitative interviews. As a framework, we adopted a five-dimensional concept of work-related precariousness, comprising (1) reproductive–material, (2) social–communicative, (3) legal–institutional (participation), (4) status and recognition, and (5) meaningful–subject-related aspects. While interviewees reported job satisfaction, they gave many accounts of unfair or exploitative treatment. Prime aspects of exploitation included low wages, extensive working hours and insecure self-employment, being tricked to work without remuneration, being urged to engage in work beyond care, being withheld food and sanitation, inadequate training, low status and recognition, and fulfilling excessive demands due to a strong sense of commitment. We align our findings with the literature to identify urgent fields of action for improving working conditions in live-in care.

The new housing precariat: experiences of precarious housing in Malmö, Sweden

Precarious housing research has become increasingly relevant to previous welfare housing contexts, such as Sweden. In the 1990s, Swedish housing became gradually market-oriented, which induced a shortage of affordable rental housing and increased housing costs in all major cities. This article presents the results from interviews with individuals about their experiences of the unequal housing market in the city of Malmö, Sweden. The article furthers knowledge of the lived experience of housing precariousness in the Global North. The narratives from the housing precariat are analysed through the lens of housing inequalities, and the analysis theoretically adds to ‘research on critical geography of precarity. The article aims to illustrate the consequences of the shift from a general welfare approach of housing to an individualized and neoliberal housing market. In particular, this article adds insights on the gendered and racialized aspects that affect housing precariousness.

Teachers, fixed-term contracts and school leadership: toeing the line and jumping through hoops

ABSTRACT Fixed-term contracts are a relatively recent, yet growing category of employment for teachers in the public school system in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. In this article, we draw on quantitative and qualitative data from a large state-wide survey (N = 18,234) of members of the public-school teacher union, the NSW Teachers’ Federation, in order to explore the workload reports of teachers in temporary employment. We find that overall, these teachers report similar levels of workload to staff employed on a permanent basis. Experiences of work are, however, qualitatively different, with many in the temporary category feeling they must work harder than permanent teachers in order to ‘prove themselves’ to school executive. We argue that such experiences of precariousness may have particular ‘scarring’ effects for teachers in temporary employment, including gendered patterns of career progression, and discuss implications for leadership and policy.