Precarious Work

Arne L. Kalleberg, Steven P. Vallas, Arne L. Kalleberg, Steven P. Vallas, Steven P. Vallas, Arne L. Kalleberg

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781838679217, 9781787432888
• eBook ISBN: 9781787434493
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

This volume presents original theory and research on precarious work in various parts of the world, identifying its social, political and economic origins, its manifestations in the USA, Europe, Asia, and the Global South, and its consequences for personal and family life. 

In the past quarter century, the nature of paid employment has undergone a dramatic change due to globalization, rapid technological change, the decline of the power of workers in favor of employers, and the spread of neoliberalism. Jobs have become far more insecure and uncertain, with workers bearing the risks of employment as opposed to employers or the government. This trend towards precarious work has engulfed virtually all advanced capitalist nations, but unevenly so, while countries in the Global South continue to experience precarious conditions of work. 

This title examines theories of precarious work; cross-national variations in its features; racial and gender differences in exposure to precarious work; and the policy alternatives that might protect workers from undue risk. The chapters utilize a variety of methods, both quantitative statistical analyses and careful qualitative case studies.  This volume will be a valuable resource that constitutes required reading for scholars, activists, labor leaders, and policy makers concerned with the future of work under contemporary capitalism.

PART I

THEORY AND METHOD

PRECARIOUS WORK, REGIME OF COMPETITION, AND THE CASE OF EUROPE

Valeria Pulignano

ABSTRACT

The chapter elaborates a critical theoretical narrative about the political economy of European capitalism. It illustrates how precariousness has been exacerbated by the impact of the global financial crisis and the emergence of a new system of European governance. Theoretical accounts in the sociology of work and labor studies have demonstrated the complexity of the outcomes and widely discussed the role of national labor market institutions and employment policies and practices, political ideology, and cultural frameworks impinging upon precarious work as a multidimensional concept. The chapter’s core concern is to illustrate how shifts in power resources, and particularly the weakening and deinstitutionalization of organized labor relative to capital, has acted as a central social condition that has brought about precariousness during the years leading up to and following the 2007–2008 crisis. In so doing, the chapter aims to overcome the existing theoretical accounts of precariousness which have often been limited by one or another variant of “methodological nationalism,” thereby exploring the transnational apparatuses that are emerging across national economies to date, and which impinge upon the structures and experiences that workers exhibit in an age of growing marketization.

Keywords: Precarious work; employment; Europe; labor market; marketization; inequality

INTRODUCTION

The social causes and consequences of precarious work are complex often contradictory. Sociologists of work and organizations have sought to capture this complexity using any number of research strategies, exploring the role of nationally specific labor market institutions, employment policies and practices, as well as the political ideologies and cultural influences that impinge upon precarious work (e.g., Kalleberg, 2014; Rodgers & Rodgers, 1989; Standing, 2011; Vallas & Prener, 2012; Vosko, 2011). Yet, these diverse approaches have often been limited by one or another variant of “methodological nationalism,” which fixates on the nation-state as the taken-for-granted unit of analysis. Although comparative studies in employment relations have sought to deal with this issue, the results however have been often limited and still anchored to the specificity of the national economies. Too often, this has prevented scholars from systematically exploring the transnational apparatuses that are emerging across national economies with growing frequency and importance, and which impinge upon the structures and experiences that characterize employment in an age of growing marketization.

The chapter is an attempt to elaborate a critical theoretical narrative about the political economy of European capitalism. Accordingly, it illustrates how precariousness has been exacerbated by the impact of the global financial crisis and the emergence of a new system of European governance whose features are both actual, or objectively structured, and virtual or subjectively experienced (Della Porta, Hannimen, Siisidinen, & Silvastri, 2015). The chapter’s core concern is to illustrate how shifts in power resources, and particularly the weakening and deinstitutionalization of organized labor relative to capital, has acted as a central social condition that has brought about precariousness during the years leading up to and following the 2007–2008 crisis.

Precariousness arises within an integrated, dynamic, and contested institutional and cultural field of power relationships. This is what in the chapter I name regime of competition as the social mechanism underpinning the turn toward neoliberal policies and practices, which have elicited growing precariousness in Europe, particularly in the making of the recent crisis. In so doing, the regime of competition does not refer to a coherent single national regime, comprising a set of pre-defined structural components (e.g., policies, practices, laws) as the institutional structures producing specific social outcomes. Rather, it indicates a feature of the transnational regional economic landscape underpinned by a common set of assumptions, discourses, and ideas legitimizing, while institutionalizing, those policies and practices. This neoliberal setting informs the concrete changes to employment (industrial) relations and welfare policies which have progressively fostered growing precariousness in Europe, especially during the recent crisis.

Thus, the chapter’s main concern is to highlight and to discuss the system of power, which has contributed to the changes which employment has undergone in post-industrial society. It sees socio-economic labor market and welfare transformations as occurring within this context. This is key to understanding how and why precariousness – as the uneven distribution of resources and opportunities among people (Atkinson, 2015) – is structurally enabled as well as culturally and discursively framed and legitimized. The central argument of the chapter is that exploring changes in the degree of power relationships between capital and labor is crucial in shedding light on the social mechanisms underpinning and governing precariousness.

The case of Europe is used to illustrate this argument. We show how a regime of competition emerged from the socio-political contexts unfavorable to labor in the majority of the European countries. This regime became particularly evident in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis. Fritz Scharpf’s (2002) conceptualization of the process of European integration, as something contributing to “constitutional asymmetry” between policies promoting market efficiencies and policies guaranteeing social protection and equality, is key to understanding how the European Union (EU) permitted the regime that encouraged and institutionalized precarious work. The guiding economic principle is that a more intensive rivalry among firms, and indeed among the employed themselves within these firms, as well as between the employed and the unemployed, helps to reduce the “reservation wages” such as the income of not only the employed but also the unemployed (i.e., social benefits). The result is an increase in the incentive to do whatever is possible to keep work (or employment) by pushing people to work. This can be done, for example, by bargaining concessions for the deregulation of the employment conditions under growing internationalization and marketization (Greer & Doellgast, 2016) and/or encouraging reduction in social protection while fostering employment policy assistance, aimed at marketing and matching existing skills rather than developing new ones (Bengtsson, de la Porte, & Jacobsson, 2017). The result has been the re-orientation of the employment relationship from the protection toward the competition for employment. Its justificatory order is the promise to raise employment by fostering what is in effect a war among the poor.

The chapter starts by reviewing the sociological debate on precarious work. It then develops the analytical proposition that a new “regime of competition” has unfolded at the transnational level and that has begun to exert pressure on the national institutions and cultural precepts found across the European landscape. We focus on two major policy reforms at the core of the regime of competition and examine their effects, that is, uncoordinated collective bargaining and social welfare cutbacks and employment policy. We finally discuss and conclude.

UNDERSTANDING PRECARIOUS WORK

The notion of precariousness or precarious work has a complex history. Kalleberg (2009) refers to precarious work as work that is uncertain, unpredictable, unstable, vulnerable, and risky from the point of view of the worker. Examples include work which lacks continuity of employment and social protection and/or uncertain levels of pay and working hours (see also Rodgers & Rodgers, 1989). Precarious work has been exacerbated by the growing power and reach of global capital, which has exceeded the ability of nations and labor unions to regulate it. Numerous trends, indeed, have been associated with neo-liberal globalization, including an increase in long-term unemployment, the growth in individually perceived and collectively experienced job insecurity, the increasing non-standard and contingent work, the risk shifting from the employer to the employees, the lack of workplace safety, and the increase in work-based stress (Arnold & Bongiovi, 2012; Berg, 2015; Hacker, 2006; Standing, 2011).

Sociological studies have focused particular attention on the work structures and labor market institutions that have given rise to precarious forms of employment. Processes of precariousness start in the labor market, due to the ongoing economic, social, and political transformations of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. Particularly, capital reorganization during the last 30 years has included a marked increase in the autonomy of financial capital when compared to industrial capital. Capital has spread throughout the world, opening the way for mass delocalization and relocation; capital is less fixed and is growing more flexible. These transformations in capital have brought about a management offensive which seeks to adapt workers to the new conditions of capital development (Supiot, 2001). It is here that deregulation comes into play. Deregulation involves dismantling the barriers that capital faces on the labor market (e.g., regulation inherited from Fordism) and restoring to capital its discretionary power. This involves the destruction of the protections that have often surrounded the employment relationship.

Understanding the changes capital has undergone is key to explaining the transformations occurring in work processes and their effects on the employment relationship (Kalleberg, 2011). Individual attributes have been much explored to understand the changes underpinning the growth of precarious work and its consequences for job quality and the working conditions of workers (Holman, 2013; Prosser, 2015). On the other hand, the impact of cultural (symbolic), ideological, and political constructs on the subjective experiences and individuals’ acceptance of precariousness have also been pointed out (Vallas & Prener, 2012). Ho (2009), for example, illustrates how financial institutions such as investment banks and private equity funds mobilized new meanings and ideologies at work, underwriting the “shareholder conception of the firm” that has in turn increased precariousness. Likewise, Lane (2011) explains how in the United States a new corporate culture has arisen to produce a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary, therefore contractually precarious, and all workers are, or should be, independent “companies of one.” This is in line with other studies emphasizing the capacity of organizations to frame the precarious experiences of job seekers through discourses (Sharone, 2014). The central threat underlying all these studies is that both cultural and ideological influences embraced in different organizations have played a major role in the legitimation of precarious work (Vallas, 2015).

Several analytical questions emerge from this general state of the field. One add...

Table of contents

• List of Contributors
• Probing Precarious Work: Theory, Research, and Politics
• Part I Theory And Method
• Part II Precarious Work in the United States
• Part III International Perspectives On Precarious Work
• Part IV The Consequences of Precarious Work
• About the Authors
• About the Editors
• Index