Precarity in America

While I was living in Europe I found myself involved in quite a few pub discussions about Precarity and its adjunct flexploitation. One thing that popped up in all of those conversations was the question of why there is no discussion of precarity in the United States.

I said then, and still believe that there is a discussion in America of precarity, but that discussion is not taking place in the chattering classes, but amongst those who are already in positions of precarity. See MayDay 2006, when hundreds of thousands of Latin-American immigrants marched for visibility.

Precarity in America, like in Europe, is divided along class lines, but in America class lines are more closely congruent with racial lines than they are in, for example, the UK. So no, white guys in pubs in the US don’t generally discuss precarity, so we, as white guys in pubs, are not privy to that discussion.

The other big difference I see is that while Europeans tend to immediately glom on to the negative aspects of precarity, Americans tend to see (or invent) a silver lining to the precarity cloud.

First, no one in the US has any real job security; our CEOs and project managers and everyone else are constantly under threat of losing their job and income. It’s as if we were a nation of football (soccer) manager — one run of bad results and we’re quickly replaced.

Second, precarity is sold to us, and we happily buy it, as a stupendous opportunity. We revel in being part of the Creative Class, freelancers and odd-jobbers. By studiously avoiding analysis of the psychological and sociological stresses of precarity we free ourselves to focus entirely on the improved “work/life balance” that this precarious existence supposedly brings within our reach.

Americans are used to certain labor conditions that Europeans are not and we have accepted those conditions as normal and inevitable:

Almost everyone in the US is employed at-will; that is, the employer is free to discharge individuals “for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all,” and the employee is equally free to quit, strike, or otherwise cease work.

Our Unions are practically non-existant, with our most unionized labor sector, Education, barely coming in at 1 in 3 union members, while across the labor force, barely 12% are unionized. Compare that with the UK which is over 28% or Sweden at 82%. France is an interesting counterpoint with only 9% trade-union membership.

These two conditions, coupled with a general lack of solidarity amongst working people (perhaps France is explained thusly) and the afore-mentioned embracing of part-time, self-, fixed-term, temporary, on-call and tele-working in the US amongst those who were not already part of the “casual labor” market, and you have a milieu in which there can’t really be a discussion of precarity yet. Only once we have suffered some large economic crisis that impacts those in voluntary precarity will the chattering classes take up precarity as a topic.