Precarity

Abstract

It is commonly said that we live in a world of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ (Beck 1986/1992; Sennett 1998) where ‘plans for the future tend to become transient, protean and fickle’ (Bauman 2000: 137), and such claims seem to be gaining empirical justification. The last European Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2015, found that one in six EU workers feared losing their jobs in the following six months (Eurofound and ILO 2019: 1), while in 2018 the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for an end to precarious employment practices such as zero-hour contracts (European Parliament 2018). For Pembroke (2018: 4), ‘precarious work leads to precarious lives where people are trapped in uncertainty, floating and on stand-by, with all aspects of their lives, their personal ambitions and hopes for family formation, on hold’. Clearly, precarity is an issue of contemporary relevance, producing complex and dynamic effects at multiple levels. The challenge is to find a characterization adequate to this complexity, and one which explains these effects within ELT. Situating the term in a historical context might help here. ‘Precarity’, or ‘precariousness’ (in French, précarité), was used by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe Algeria under French rule, where resettlement policies in the 1950s uprooted much of the rural population, causing a condition among the displaced in which everything is stamped with precariousness. No regular timetable, no fixed place of work; the same discontinuity in time and space. The search for work is the one constant factor in an existence swept to and fro by the whim of accident … . The whole of life is lived under the sign of the provisional. (Bourdieu 1963/1979: 66) This draws attention to a key problem: is precarity a state, a condition, a process, or something else? As generally understood nowadays, precarity is a condition resulting from an employment regime in which deregulated labour markets give rise to various types of insecure work; in which social protections are minimized; and in which the ability to plan a coherent future is compromised (Kalleberg 2009; Standing 2011). The International Labour Organization (ILO 2011: 5) defines precarious work as ‘a means for employers to shift risks and responsibilities onto workers’ and a precarious job as one characterized by ‘uncertainty as to the duration of employment, multiple possible employers or a disguised or ambiguous employment relationship’ as well as ‘low pay, and substantial legal and practical obstacles to joining a trade union and bargaining collectively’ (ibid.). The precarity of today is linked to neoliberalism, which ‘proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms’ (Harvey 2005: 2). Ding and Bruce (2017: 14–24) examine the influence of neoliberal reforms on EAP practitioners, noting the shift in UK higher education from a liberal-humanist model of the university to one in which commercial interests dominate, and processes of marketization (operationalized by league tables and metrics) enable prospective students to exercise ‘marketized choices’ (ibid.: 20–21) as consumers of an educational product. Working conditions in such institutions are often insecure. Courtois and O’Keefe (2015), writing on Irish higher education, note that many academics find themselves in a ‘hamster wheel of precarious work’ (ibid.: 56), marginalized by colleagues who ‘cannot relate to or are not aware of situations of part-time, hourly-paid or contract workers’ (ibid. 59). Other sectors suffer in similar ways. Zemach (2018) describes how ELT publishing has changed since the 1990s. Editorial policy is increasingly directed by sales and marketing imperatives which stifle creativity, while falling royalty rates and the piracy of ELT materials make it harder for writers to earn a living. In 2014, a TESOL France survey of over 800 English teachers (see Wickham 2015) found that 64 per cent of those surveyed worried about economic issues and 30 per cent lived on or below the official minimum wage. Income insecurity was compounded by the pressure to accept zero-hour contracts or become ‘auto entrepreneurs’, both with reduced social protection. ‘Feeling disheartened—having to work even harder now for virtually the same salary I was getting over 25 years ago,’ one teacher remarked (ibid.: 10). Precarity has a worldwide reach. Simbürger and Neary (2016) document the contractual problems, inability to plan a future, and fear of taking collective action that affect ‘taxi professors’—the hourly paid teachers rushing to and from different university sites in Chile. Xavier (2014: 349) notes a ‘crisis’ in Brazilian English teacher education, with falling numbers training to be teachers in part due to limited career options and poor working conditions. And Robinson and Gauri (2011) document the impact of the liberalization of the Indian economy, with low-paid contract teachers increasingly employed to fill staff shortages, especially in rural areas. The phenomenon of precarity exists across different societies, then, yet how workers subjectively process the insecurity that precarity brings remains somewhat unexplored. Dörre (2014: 75), building on Castel (2003), treats precarity as a relational concept operating within three ‘zones’. First, he posits a ‘Zone of integration’ consisting of those secure in their jobs, alongside those who, while still integrated, feel threatened by decline. Second, a ‘Zone of precarity’ contains ‘the hopeful’, ‘the realists’, and those who have become ‘attenuated’ to their situation. Finally, there is a ‘Zone of detachment’ containing those excluded from social integration, ‘the left-behind’. This model helps us see the tensions at play in an era of expanding precarity: those at the bottom of the Zone of integration are disciplined by the fear of falling into precarity, while those at the top of the Zone of precarity are incentivized by the chance of rising up yet also disciplined by the threat of ‘social decline and a plunge into the “zone of detachment”’ (ibid.). Action to address these issues may be growing. A strike by members of the University and College Union (UCU) in 2018 brought pensions, declining working conditions, and the marketization of UK higher education into sharp focus. In March 2019, Dutch university staff, along with educators at all levels of the Dutch academic system, went on strike to protest the ‘incessant drive to turn schools and universities into supermarkets’ (Vrousalis and Rossi 2019: n.p.). Within ELT, a snap school closure in Dublin, Ireland, gave impetus to a two-year grassroots campaign against precarious work, and legislation to regulate the local ELT industry is moving through the Irish parliament (Salusbury 2019). On an institutional level, co-operatives can also mitigate some of the problems associated with precarious work, such as increased administration and social insurance costs. For example, Société Mutuelle pour artistes (SMart), originally founded in Belgium in 1998 and now operating in several European countries (see SMart 2019), provides freelancers with easier access to health insurance and pensions, while Serveis Lingüístics de Barcelona (SLB) in Spain offers support, training and development to members as well as legal and financial advice (see Chilton 2014). Precarity affects the whole profession, not just a minority within it. ELT practitioners, therefore, need to think about precarity, discuss and understand it, but also consider organizing against the imposition of a mode of life ‘lived under the sign of the provisional’ (Bourdieu 1963/1979). Final version received June 2019

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