Canada 's Labour Market: towards precarity and casualization : Thunderbay IMC

WHAT IS PRECARITY?

Precarity stretches beyond work.
It includes housing, debt, general instability, the inability to make plans.
We can talk about the subjugation of life under capital, not just the subjugation of labour under capital.
Precarity is an instrument of control; it is enforced by those with power upon the powerless. We can't choose how we want to live.
It engenders competition in social life.
It forces us into a Darwinian "struggle for existence" on a social level.
Precarity is the basic condition of individuals in capitalist society.
It divides us, and limits opportunities to get together.
People are disempowered and social relations break down.

DO WE WANT PRECARITY?

No. Flexibility maybe, but not precarity.
The idea of flexibility does open up some possibilities. However these are limited to "certain sections" of the working class (young, childless etc.) rather than a choice available to all.
Our creativity in resisting full time wage labour has been appropriated by the restructuring of the labour market.
In the 1970s many revolutionary workers refused the "job for life" and demanded free time from work for social activity and the liberation of the human mind.
The restructuring of work and the smashing of many unions in the 1980's leading to the kind of precarity we experience now was capital's response.
Where does our creativity in resisting full-time waged labour end and appropriation begin?
Should preservation of the welfare state and a job for life be our ultimate goal?

THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY

The opposite of precarity, as it is presented to us, is regular wages and stable housing.
But this supposed 'opposite' to precarity is often just another version of it.
The privileges of enjoying this material security is at the cost of everything else - your time, life, energy, integrity, creativity and autonomy.
Capitalism creates insecurity to force us into this state of dependency that makes it difficult to think outside the system.
Production of precarity is inextricable from re-production of the social relationship that is capitalism.
Generalised insecurity is a tool of social control.
A generated state of emergency (eg the Terrorism Act) mirrors the insecurity in the new precarious work regime.

POLITICAL FOCUS AND ACTIVITY

We need to develop a network of struggles, collectivising those individual acts of resistance and establishing social support and solidarity.
We want to avoid the dead-end focus and sterile tactics of the old left around job security, and we need to transcend old ways of organising such as unions that can't work with more transient kinds of employment.
In a situation where work is transient, and many of us move from job to job, and work in places with a high turnover of employees, or for agencies where we never meet our boss; it is no longer enough to organise in the workplace, we must create networks of resistance on a social level & find new forms of collective struggle.

Useful links: http://users.resist.ca/~jon.beasley-murray/aut_02.html