The Making of Precarity: How Workers Can Fight Back

Abstract

Precarious work is widely defined as employment marked by uncertainty, instability, and limited social protection, and is often assumed to produce corresponding precarious subjectivities. While existing scholarship challenges the presumed linear relationship between objective and lived experiences of precarity by acknowledging variation in how workers experience insecurity, it frequently under-theorizes the mechanisms that mediate this relationship, including how precarious subjectivities are shaped beyond immediate labor market conditions. Precariousness can be reconceptualized as a multidimensional process structured by class-based and intersectional inequalities. Material deprivation, such as income insecurity, unstable contracts, and restricted access to social protection, and symbolic misrecognition, such as stigma, devaluation, and denial of legitimacy, are mutually constitutive. From this perspective, precarious subjectivities are not solely generated within the labor market but also shaped through broad cultural processes of gendered and racialized valuation. Class relations mediate not only workers’ exposure to precarious employment but also how insecurity is interpreted, normalized, or contested, intersecting with gender, race, and migration status. By foregrounding the interplay between material and symbolic and identity dimensions, precarious subjectivities are differentiated and socially reproduced across hierarchically structured labor markets and social and cultural processes. Addressing precarity thus requires interventions beyond contractual reform, including struggles over recognition, moral worth, and the social valuation of work. Resistance must therefore operate simultaneously on redistributive and symbolic terrains to challenge the structural reproduction of precarity under contemporary capitalism.