Recibido: 30-abril-2019 Aceptado: 29-octubre-2019 ABSTRACT In the last decade the European Union has implemented a wide range of policies aimed to foster entrepreneurship and self-employment among ...its young people in order to counteract the disturbing effects of the Global Financial Crisis on youth employment. ...the article identifies a core tension between the governmental discourse around entrepreneurship and the interviewees' experiences as well as gives evidences of the articulation between entrepreneurship and precarity. ...the deconstruction of this discourse gives support both to the notion of the 'self-as-enterprise' (Kelly, 2013) and to the thesis that it conforms a contingent engineering project of subjectivities (Crespo, & Serrano, 2013, p. 1117; Rivera-Aguilera, 2018; Serrano, et al., 2012). The main precarity factors that characterize the Spanish labour market are: high rates of unemployment; a high rate of temporary employment; an increasing labour segmentation which manifests itself in problems regarding access to and retention of employment; unequal employment conditions for workers and; an overall loss of labour rights intertwined with an increase in the workloads.
Since the neoliberal turn in Latin America the rural economy and society has experienced a great transformation. Corporate capital and transnational agro-industries have taken hold of agriculture ...radically transforming the economic and social relations of production leading to the precarization and feminisation of rural labour as well as the intensification of work. Peasant farmers were further squeezed having to increasingly find off-farm incomes, largely through precarious wage labour activities, so as to make a living thereby furthering the process of proletarianization. The 'new rurality' and 'territorial' approaches tried to take account of these transformations but they are found wanting. Instead, a political economy view to the agrarian question is found more promising. A counter-movement to neoliberalism has emerged spearheaded by indigenous peoples and the rural poor, sometimes linked to the transnational peasant movement 'Via Campesina'. Their main aim is to construct an alternative agrarian system based on 'food sovereignty' which is promising but also controversial. Desde el giro neoliberal en América Latina la economía y sociedad rural han experimentado una gran transformación. El capital corporativo y las agroindustrias transnacionales se han apoderado de la agricultura transformando radicalmente las relaciones económicas y sociales de producción que llevan a la precarización y feminización de la mano de obra rural, así como a la intensificación del trabajo. Los campesinos enfrentan condiciones cada vez más difíciles teniendo que buscar con mayor frecuencia ingresos fuera de la finca, principalmente a través de actividades salariales precarias, con el fin de ganarse la vida impulsando con ello el proceso de proletarización. Los enfoques de la 'nueva ruralidad' y 'territoriales' trataron de explicar estas transformaciones pero tienen limitaciones. En cambio, una visión desde la economía política sobre la cuestión agraria se estima más prometedora. Movimientos contestatarios del neoliberalismo han surgido encabezado por los pueblos indígenas y la población rural pobre, a veces vinculado al movimiento campesino transnacional 'Vía Campesina'. Su principal objetivo es la construcción de un sistema agrario alternativo basado en la 'soberanía alimentaria', que es prometedor, pero también polémico.
The distinction between labour and care is constitutive for liberal-capitalist societies in Europe. The hierarchization of refugees and the correspondingly disparate allocation of political and ...social rights, which have become increasingly apparent as societal structurings since 2015, are entangled with this constitutive distinction. Such trends are genealogically tied to a basic pillar of Western European societies: the idea of the autonomous individual and the related concept of free labour. These notions rely on deeply racialized, gendered, and heterosexualized entanglements, by which they ward off, devalue, domesticate, and feminise needs for protection and care. This is a logic forms the background of the politico-economic crisis we are facing today, and as such it must be the point of departure for thinking about current forms of precarization. In multi-dimensional ways, the regime of precarization constitutes how labour, autonomy, and care are entangled in contemporary capitalism and their function within governmentality. Subjectivation has become valorizable, allowing autonomy to turn into an instrument of government. Thus, the challenge today is to invent how might we imagine a way of living together that is based on commonly shared precariousness, on care rights, and on care-citizenship?
Discussions about the reconciliation of work and family are often considered to be focussing on women and middle class people with safe employments. By identifying the differences among men in their ...capacities to engage in involved fatherhood that stem from their positions in the labour market, this article introduces the perspective of a deprivileged marginalised group in the labour market and critically reflects on the impact of labour flexibilisation on caring masculinity and gender equality. Men as employees have heterogeneous positions in the labour market, which impacts their access to social – including parental – rights and possibilities for balancing work and care. Given that the precarisation of the labour market is a salient problem in Slovenia, this qualitative study based on explorative in-depth semi-structured interviews with fathers in diverse forms of precarious employments analysed how insecure and flexible work arrangements shape fatherhood practices, impact the chances for involved fatherhood and structure gender relations. The fathers’ experiences showed that precarious working conditions enable fathers to be intensely involved in children’s care mainly when their employment approaches standard employment in terms of stability and predictability of working hours and guaranteed workload. When work is entirely flexible and unpredictable and the employee is faced with either taking such a job or losing it, the reconciliation of work and fatherhood is aggravated as the organisation of everyday life is fully subordinated to paid work. In conclusion, precarious working relations were indicated to foster the strengthening of the breadwinner model and retraditionalisation of gender relations.
Abstract
The rising economies in the global South have been a destination of expatriates, businessmen, and high-skilled migrants during the bonanza times. A move to these places was seen as ...cosmopolitan way to improve professional careers by acquiring international experience or higher quality of education. However, in the post-crisis context after the crash of 2008, the needs of the Southern European populace have changed due to the precarisation of their social contexts in terms of economic insecurity which instead have been pushed them to seek job opportunities across borders to avoid unemployment. In this article, we shed light on the transnational strategies performed by the precarised Spaniards moving to Algeria to cope with the constraints that the crisis initiated in their day-to-day needs. In doing so, under the lens of the transnational theory and the mobility turn, we performed multi-sited fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, based on in-depth interviews with participant observation of Spaniards who have developed a transnational strategy between both countries since 2005 to 2016. The goal of this longitudinal methodology was to identify how the effects of the crisis have encouraged the evolution of these transnational itineraries attending to the particular tensions when moving to this country culturally different in the other side of the Mediterranean. Through three specific cases, we show how these Spaniards reshaped their trajectories from short-term mobilities, punctual and voluntarily planned and scheduled, to circular mobilities, perceived as an imposition by the social context without the possibility to decide when to come back home.
La movilidad transnacional de personas cualificadas entre España y Argelia conoce un importante cambio a raíz de la intensificación de las relaciones comerciales bilaterales, dando lugar a una ...movilidad Norte-Sur. La instalación de empresas extranjeras en Argelia favoreció la movilidad de personas con alta cualificación motivadas por la posibilidad de desarrollar sus carreras con unas buenas condiciones laborales. La crisis económica y social ha provocado la intensificación de la movilidad transnacional española hacia Argelia, a la que se han unido pequeños empresarios y personas sin empleo que se lanzan a la búsqueda de un trabajo incluso de forma irregular. En este trabajo nos centraremos en analizar, con una aproximación cualitativa, cómo la crisis ha afectado a la movilidad transnacional de los expatriados españoles, que han pasado del privilegio a la precarización, en un contexto percibido como adverso, pero necesario para evitar el desempleo en España.
The traditional Dutch rental contract is permanent (i.e. time unlimited), but there are indications that in recent years the number of temporary rental contracts has increased considerably. Dutch ...housing policy appears to be responding to this by pursuing deregulation of the conditions under which temporary rent is permitted. It is in this regard startling that there is no reliable data available about the size or character of the temporary sector, and it has thus far not attracted any scholarly attention. Given that temporary rent can be viewed as a form of precarisation, a transfer of risk to citizens, with corresponding negative effects on the lives of those involved, it is imperative to close this knowledge gap. This paper is a first attempt to do this. Firstly, I systematically review the scarce evidence that is currently available, and secondly, I explore why the rise of temporary rent has thus far failed to stimulate any social debate; it appears to constitute a silent precarisation that contrasts with the politically sensitive issue of labour precarisation. In doing so, I will identify the research questions that must be answered if the significance of this process for both tenants and wider welfare-state restructuring is to be fully understood.
The article examines the transformations of work, labour casualisation, and the precarisation of migration, deepening the links between these phenomena and the social consequences of their ...intertwining, such as the double precarity affecting migrant workers, and examining the significance of contemporary migration policies which pave the way for a wider spreading of precarity and which anticipate corresponding labour laws. The article – which considers the European context – focuses on posting of workers as an example of the convergence of the aforementioned processes, and an empirical space for social research in which to test new forms of precarity and stratification, and the transformation of migration policies increasingly focused on the concepts of temporariness and circularity.
Research on precarious work and the working conditions of low-wage workers often stresses the role of the labour market or state institutions in either creating or exacerbating already precarious ...working conditions. However, it often ignores their organisational aspects. At the same time, in organisation studies there is a large body of literature that focuses on internal organisational structures but disregards working conditions. This article is based on a case study of supermarket cashiers and deals with the flexibilisation of their work. Firms use two forms of flexibility as a cost-cutting strategy: numerical and functional flexibility. Numerical flexibility divides workers into different groups according to their work contract. This enables firms to employ as much labour as they need at a particular point in time. In effect firms reduce the number of employees while intensifying the work of the employees they retain. In the case of functional flexibility the duties and responsibilities attached to a job are redefined. In this respect, I show that the duties of the cashiers in my case study are increased beyond the scope of tasks traditionally attached to this occupation and head towards the model of a universal worker. This shift leads to a decline in qualifications that, combined with technological changes, results in the degradation of work. As a result, flexibilisation processes deepen existing asymmetries in employer-employee relationships and thereby enable firms to transfer a significant amount of market risk onto the shoulders of workers. Moreover, the negotiating position of workers remains weak and their wages low.
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