Contesting, (Re)producing or Surviving Precarity? Debates on Precarious Work and Informal Labor Reexamined

ABSTRACT

The discursive traverses of “precarious work” invoke a wide range of meanings, from a political frame of reference for new labor and social movements to conceptualizations framing scholarly inquiries and institutional policymaking. Often, the notion is simultaneously registered along both descriptive and analytic planes. It consequently generates a certain amount of ambiguity, flitting between different levels of analysis. Quite paradoxically, however, the terms “precarious work” and “precarity” over the last decade or so have generated a potentially stable frame of reference for labor politics against the tide of neo-liberal policies and practices. How do we go about conceptualizing “precarious work” within specific, historical contexts and arrive, from such instances, at a more historicized understanding of the notion? What does such an exercise in conceptualization reveal about its contemporary salience among labor scholars, activists and policymakers in different contexts? These questions motivate the paper. In addressing them, the central argument of the paper alludes to a world-historical approach in tracing parallel concerns between contemporary scholarly discussions on “precarious work” and “informal labor.” It claims that the proliferating usages of “precarious work” beyond their original scope of reference in European contexts indicate tensions through which ongoing world-historical processes are mediated in shaping relations of social (re)production today.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal economy
• labor
• precarious work
• social reproduction
• world-historical

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Mushahid Hussain is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, New York. His work focuses on labor and the informal economy in contexts of agrarian dispossession, circular migration and social policy changes under neo-liberal globalization, mainly in South Asia. He combines approaches in historical sociology and critical development studies for identifying and explicating emergent forms of subsistence perspectives. He also writes on politics, socio-economic issues, education and culture in Bangladesh, and has a forthcoming book chapter in What Is Education? (Edited by A. J. Bartlett, J. Clemens and J. Whyte, Edinburgh University Press, 2017).