Precarization is the global tendency towards the development of exploitation in absolute terms through a reorganization and restructuring of the organization of labor that decouples the worker from stable workplaces and work teams, basic services, employment expectations and stable income.
Forms and elements of precarization
- Temporalization. Reduction of the duration of employment contracts, which breaks with the organization of labor power in stable teams and workplaces.
- Partialization. Reduction of the individual working day, usually below the minimum necessary income.
- Uberization. End of the contractual bond between workers and capital, a return to the piecework system in which the boss pays only for the unit of work or service actually delivered. Now mediated by a computer application that makes the collective character of labor, and the very existence of the boss, who claims merely to "match supply and demand", even more invisible.
- Outsourcing. Fracturing of the production chain into different contracts with different intermediaries in charge of managing the work in each task, with freedom to increase exploitation in absolute terms in each of them.
- Deskilling. The fall of wages in absolute terms does not allow the reproduction of labor power at the worker's original skill level.
- Loss of protection. Reduction and degradation of social security, pension, unemployment, health and education-access coverage managed by the state and mutual societies, the non-monetary part of the wage received.
Consequences for the way of life of the class
- Workers no longer have a defined "job" or "workplace", but several employers who hire them for specific tasks, for short periods or in any case of unpredictable duration, by the hour or by the piece. The relationship with a stable group of fellow workers and with an unchanging space (the factory, the workshop, the office) disappears from their experience.
- Nor are relations of exploitation any longer with one company, with a single boss. They are mediated by intermediaries who "send you" to different destinations, in a way that makes it evident that the "precarious" are exploited by the bourgeoisie and capitalism as a whole.
- The reproduction of labor power becomes precarious as well. Access to health services, accident benefits, housing, etc. is eroded until, in many cases, it disappears.
- The ways workers relate to each other, and the way in which collective conversations and reflections on their own situation take place, change too. They no longer have a company or factory as a reference, nor, in any very strict sense, a geographical one. And yet support and solidarity networks form as often as before, or more.