Employment Precariousness and Industrial Action

Article by Mag Wompel published in: "Employment Precariousness and Industrial Action / Prekarität und Arbeitskampf. In: where work ends and mission begins by bankleer, Akademie Schloss Solitude, 2005, ISBN 3-937158-01-4, S. 106-119

Low-paid, temporary and unregulated work conditions have always existed. But what for decades was “reserved” for women and immigrants, as well as for voluntary dropouts, is now becoming the daily experience of more and more people. For years now, precarious wage labor has been expanding in all sectors of the economy. Deregulated work conditions have been on the increase since services have started to be outsourced, work made more flexible and since the low-income sector has begun to receive state support. The “entrepreneurial self” has become the leading notion in ever more trade branches.

Letter-carriers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, McDonald’s service personnel or call center agents working for low wages; “Ich-Ag”s [1]struggling for existence, subcontracted workers having to fight obscure agencies for their wages; Kazakh doctors cleaning German apartments, Kurdish refugees washing dishes in fast-food stands; Poles, Romanians, Germans or Portuguese working on construction sites; home workers stuffing envelopes on call; students selling movie tickets or going on to take supporting jobs in the training sector – the supposed “knowledge and information society” is based on temporary work and low wages. Not even a university degree guarantees a stable career anymore. Whether it be in journalism and the media, the culture industry, research or the Internet business – many academics today face pseudo-self-employment. Social status is no longer accompanied per se by material security – this is yet another reason why the mainstream press has suddenly started to notice the phenomenon of precariousness.

Because of flexibilized capitalism, wage labor with terrible labor contracts – or none at all – is becoming the new status quo for ever more permanent staff members of big companies, who, until recently, had considered themselves safe. The individualization of risk applies to everyone and affects almost every employee. This process is making evident the fundamental precariousness of working and living conditions in a capitalist system for what traditionally has been called the proletariat – regardless of income. In order for the concept of precarious wage labor not to become arbitrary, however, distinctions need to be made.

Ever since there have been precarious work conditions, there has been a difference between other-determined and self-determined precariousness – also regardless of income. The former has always been considered the only possible kind of wage labor for people on the lower end of the labor market hierarchy: immigrants, the unemployed, women. The latter, the self-determined, the volunteers, have been an increasing phenomenon since the 1970s and 80s. Theirs was an expression of revolt against Fordist working conditions – the very conditions to which many unionists today would like to return. This revolt targeted the rigid conception of life that accompanied so-called stable employment conditions, as well as the tedious, unhealthy assembly line work in the Taylorist factory. Today these dropouts – and the wildcat strikes at the time, especially in the automobile industry – remind us that the supposedly golden age of Fordism never existed and that work place security as well as relatively high wages and bonuses were bought at a high price.

Whoever at the time sought self-realization by means of new forms of work, of autonomy, self-determination and creativity, could only do so at the price of relinquishing the securities and comforts of Rhenanian capitalism. [2] Temporary, unsecure jobs and self-administered niche-enterprises were the only alternatives to “stable employment conditions.”

Today we are experiencing the drastic deterioration of the conditions of self-determined precariousness. Recourse to the “welfare hammock” is, as is well known, becoming increasingly more difficult. It should be remembered that compulsive municipal labor for the long-term unemployed and welfare recipients already existed in the 70s. The possibility of finding a job around the next corner when in financial need has been drastically diminished, and it is likely that this trend will continue.

At the same time, capital has succeeded in taking over the positive aspects of self-determined, if unsecured, work and turning it against the worker. Autonomy, flexibility and responsibility for oneself have become part of almost all employment contracts – even without the associated expertise and freedom. The transfer of risk to the employees by directly confronting them with the pressures of the market (often simulated, e.g. with group work submitted to the pressures of competition) turned self-determination into “the stress of creativity” and “the stress of flexibility.” Routine after all is the downfall for many business sectors condemned to having to be constantly innovative. The erstwhile dropouts and pioneers are now often finding the skills they gained from their variety of life experience being exploited – and this without pay.

But when everyone is affected by a reduction in wages and an anxiety about being able to make a living, when job insecurity, the expansion of work hours, the mobility of the workplace and the intensification of work, the dissolution of fixed work hours, the unpredictability of work operations due to the flexibilization of work hours, and the compulsion to self-discipline applies to more and more wage-earners, the current distinction between self-determined and other-determined precariousness does not really clarify matters. This is why we need to distinguish between “regular precariousness” due to the deterioration of labor contracts and the welfare system and “what has always been irregular precariousness.”

Even if the conditions of regular, wage-controlled labor and those of the precariously placed earner are becoming increasingly similar, we still should not underestimate the fact that irregular precariousness does not mean decreasing social and legal security, but generally no security at all. Temporary contracts, no involvement in decisions, barely any old-age provisions, rudimentary insurance, fragmented living and working conditions, constantly decreasing wages, no organizational structure, no attested rights, and often illegality – not only for immigrants. Precarious work in this traditional sense often means working without being sure one can actually make a living. Labor laws, representation and health care are often completely lacking from daily work conditions.

Most do not offer any alternatives to this situation. Others regard it as an interlude, or a path to advancement. As diverse as jobs and conditions are the conceptions of self, the perspectives and goals of the employees. Immigrants, however, have the fewest alternatives, especially those without papers: raids and special laws, the preference for Germans in the labor market, the prohibition of work for refugees, and in general an “immigration policy” that pushes people into illegal conditions and forces them to take on under-the-table work, which often means the worst jobs. And because there are such jobs, companies can force their employees to relinquish their demands, supposedly in order to save their positions. These employees do still have a certain degree of leeway. But the more concessions the workers make, the worse the work conditions become. Incidentally, a similar reciprocal dependency also exists between wage levels and wage replacement benefits, so-called transfer income.

This reciprocal dependency is not however seen as a connection or coherence, but as a hierarchy. Many wage earners reproduce this split desired by capital, with all its demarcations and exclusions.

At the bottom of this hierarchy of misery are the immigrants, who are also carefully separated according to status. At the very bottom we find, as so often, immigrant women. Most of the work that has always been performed by women is precarious, whether paid or not, and women know best that precariousness cannot be restricted to the work world. Precarious work means insecurity in all aspects of life, and for women also often a life of dependency on a man.

Women were, and still often enough are, forced into invisible work and emotional labor: work that is essential but not acknowledged because it depends on skills that are regarded as innate and not learned. These qualifications are therefore not measurable and go unpaid. It is often very lonely work, which frequently does not even count as such because it is also characterized by the intertwining of work and life, of private and family life, of public and private, of production and reproduction. Whether it be housework, child rearing and care, sex work or gastronomy, now also called center work – emotional work is often exploited without pay. This however is combined with a basic insecurity regarding all the resources we require for life and survival. Seen this way, the current precariousness is, in a certain sense, the feminization of wage labor, rather than a satisfaction of the decades-old demand for the recognition and professionalization, as well as the gender-neutral distribution, of reproductive work.

The unions continue to focus on the high earners and the highly qualified, on the large companies – and hardly on the temporarily hired or “borrowed” employees. The lack of attention given to those groups primarily affected by precariousness is also exhibited by large numbers of union leftists and is accompanied by a lack of adequate strategies for organization and industrial action. Union practice today remains oriented towards company-based representation by works committees. It is doomed to fail in the face of working conditions where there is no company to furnish a place of communication or a stable circle of colleagues.

The precariously employed themselves have failed to come up with many new forms of resistance. There have been individual actions and activities in Europe that have been encouraging and even successful – the strike of the precariously employed in the cultural sector in France or that of the African cleaning women in Paris, the struggle for pay and residence status by farm workers in Spain, the protests by irregular construction workers in Berlin. The informally and precariously employed, particularly immigrants, are developing new strategies and are opposing their legally insecure status: the struggle of the “intermittents” in France against the cuts in unemployment support; debates surrounding “lavoro autonomo” and the union-autonomous movement of the precariously employed in Italy, “Precarias a la Deriva”;[3] self-employed radio journalists or the cleaning staff in industrial companies. In Germany as well there have been successful attempts.

The organization of precariously working people requires non-company-based spaces for the fight against social atomization and isolation, particularly to encourage a necessary exchange of experiences. What can we learn from which struggles? How can we organize ourselves? How can we collaborate internationally? In the U.S., union Workers Centers have been successfully created in city districts. These are spaces of communication and of mutual respect, offering more than just a replacement of the company meeting place. This is an approach we should consider here, although we can hardly hope for the participation of the German unions - not as long as their politics are oriented towards the regulation and support of national, regional or company-based competition, towards the securing of industrial location, and towards the propogation of the lie that full-employment would appear if (non-) wage labor costs were adjusted properly. It is precisely this argument that is currently being used to force more and more people to accept any job offer. The expansion of the E.U. to the East has brought itinerant workers and immigrants more into the unions’ field of vision, although some union officials have reacted repressively in terms of exclusion and denunciation.

It is becoming downright urgent to share our experiences, and to connect and spread the isolated, successful modes of organization and struggle of precarious workers. It is at the intersection of “precarious occupation and (legal as well as) illegal migration” that it is crucial for those affected to attain greater legal security and a strengthened capacity for resistance – without having or wanting to resort to rigid, classical organizational and regulative forms. There is no returning to stable employment conditions. It is time to give up the unrealistic goal of full employment along with its fixation on (wage) labor.

It is from this perspective that ever more associations of precarious workers, immigrants and the unemployed are demanding non-restrictive regulation – in other words, security and rights without a retraction of the flexibility of their way of life. [4] At the same time they want security in every phase of life, i.e. an unconditional basic income.

Although they still to a large degree “fetishize work,” ever greater numbers of union leftists are accepting this demand. The undogmatic among them are increasingly seeking out new coalitions and alliances with the unemployed and immigrants. The recognition of the heterogeneity of the people involved and their needs can be the first step towards necessary new forms of action.

Isolated precarious workers not only need spaces for communication, but also forms of struggle that allow for a refusal in the face of pseudo-self-employment or social labor, and that overcome divisions and create solidarity without preempting diversity. The required broad alliance of precarious wage earners and those threatened by precariousness needs to formulate demands that look beyond capitalism, as well as taking up the positive aspects of unregulated work. In the long term we don’t need to demand a work place or take over the factory, but to practice new forms of production and distribution, as well as reproduction. It is also a matter of overcoming the separation between work and free time; a matter of a life of dignity and inalienable civil rights for everyone, globally. In the short term, we need to decide what battles we can fight together despite our heterogeneity, and how they can be employed towards long-term goals such as a collective reduction of work hours, a legally enforced minimum wage, an unconditional basic income, and the right to voluntary mobility and flexibility. These struggles need to be taken up as soon as possible.

Mag Wompel, Bochum, is an industrial sociologist and a free-lance journalist as well as the managing editor of LabourNet Germany http://www.labournet.de/

Translator’s note:

(1) A “Me Company”, the term given to government-subsidized business start-ups by the unemployed.

(2) Named for the Rhine River on whose banks the West German capital was located, the term refers to a market economy that makes use of economic success for the sake of social equality.

(3) A feminist initiative in Madrid, founded after the 2002 general strike in Spain, which was only addressed to the regular work force.

(4) Precarias a la Deriva call this “flexurity”.