The Politics of Precarity: Interdependence to Solidarity

In the politics of precarity, as situated by Guy Standing, the precariat is in the process of becoming a self-conscious class with the transformative potential to fight for a new system of progressive distribution not over work, which is increasingly insecure and untenable for the vast majority of people, but around broader issues related to "socio-economic security," including democratic control over time, space, knowledge, and "financial capital" (2014, 3–16). The evidence of the beginnings of such a transformation have taken the form of public assemblies and demonstrations, which bring together seemingly disparate groups of people who nevertheless collectively fall under the nascent precariat class, which is the subject of Judith Butler's Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). Significantly, Standing demarcates the precariat, generally defined by their relationship to insecure work, into three groups who are not necessarily politically aligned with one another, and may in fact blame dispossessed subgroups within the precariat such as "migrants and minorities" for their economic struggles (7–8). Butler frames her own contribution to precarity as generating a new politics of the body based on recognition of "human dependency and interdependency," which she argues brings together precarity and peformativity in the public assembly (207). Standing's argument that the precariat should (or will) forgo organizing around older organizing work models begs the question of what is to be done about precarious work in the meantime. Curiously, Butler does not cite Standing's foundational work on the politics of precarity. Yet, Standing and Butler each provide foundational and complementary work in identifying what is at stake in organizing the precariat (rather than the working class) from protest to organized political resistance against neoliberal capitalism. As a political theorist, Butler's contribution moves the reader beyond "work" in important philosophical and political ways, which Standing and the other authors discussed in this review do not. In doing so, Butler is able to analyze the politics of life and death as shaped by the conditions of precarity.

Rob Lambert and Andrew Herod's Neoliberal Capitalism and Precarious Work: Ethnographies of Accommodation and Resistance (2016) share Standing's understanding of the precariat and yet focus on work. Of particular interest is Dilek Hattatoglu and Jane Tate's contribution, "Home-Based Work and New Ways of Organizing in the Era of Globalization," which analyzes the politics of informal home-based workers in Bulgaria and Turkey. Home-based work includes "domestic workers, street vendors, small fishers and rag-pickers, among others" (97). Such work is rendered invisible and unvalued precisely because it is dominated by women in the private realm. The authors argue that the privatization of health care and education greatly increases women's involvement in home-based work (101). Their chapter includes a case study of the Solidarity Network of Home-Based Workers (named Ev-Ek-Sen), organized in Turkey in 2007, where women's demands include a right to life due to conditions of war (114). Luis L. M. Aguiar's "Sweatshop Citizenship, Precariousness, and Organizing Building Cleaners" deserves recognition for his concept of "sweatshop citizenship," which he defines as the "double endurance of industrial and social dispossessions … for the deterioration of workplace protections and benefits, compounded by neoliberal state legislative manoeuvers, creat[ing] perpetual vulnerability, marginality, and insecurity for vast numbers of people" (256). The response to "sweatshop citizenship," is the model of "community unionism" successfully used in the 1990 campaign of Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles (258).

Importantly, several essays in this collection theorize spatiality in ways that build on the insights of David Harvey (1982). Michael Gillan and Rob Lambert's "Closures and Openings: The Politics of Place and Space in Resisting Corporate Restructuring" makes the case for how...