2019/02/23 by Sian Lazar, Andrew Sanchez · 82 citations
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Economics #Employment and Welfare Studies #Epistemology #Gender studies #Identity (music) #Identity politics #Labor Movements and Unions #Labour economics #Law #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Precarious work #Precarity #Premise #Scholarship #Sociology #Trade union #Transformative learning #Work (physics)
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10624-019-09544-7
published in Dialectical Anthropology 43(1), 3-14 (Springer Science+Business Media)
crossref issued 2019/02/23 · crossref published 2019/02/23 · crossref published-online 2019/02/23 · openalex publication_date 2019/02/23 · crossref created 2019/02/23 · crossref published-print 2019/03/01 · crossref deposited 2023/09/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/08/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The introductory essay to this collection examines the possibilities that work-based collective organisation affords for transformative politics under precarity. We begin from the premise that precarity is experienced in different ways in the Global North and South, among stable workers and in ‘informal’ work. Recent scholarship has explored the relationship between precariousness in life and labour, but has paid less attention to labour relations. Contrary to some dominant theories of ‘the precariat’, we suggest that precarious workers are not always anomic and lacking in work-based political identity, but nor are they straightforwardly a ‘class in the making’. The papers in this volume show that there are multiple ways that people organise collectively to challenge and improve their conditions of work, from traditional trade unions, cooperatives, and union-like associations. All have different ramifications for politics and understandings of class composition, and of how informal and precarious economies are likely to develop in the future.