Hyper-precarious lives

Abstract

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of 'hyper-precarity' alongside notions of a 'continuum of unfreedom' as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants' precarious working experiences.

Encountering energy precarity: Geographies of fuel poverty among young adults in the UK

“…Young people's fluid lifestyles and specific end-use energy demand patterns mean that fuel poverty metaphorically and physically overflows the limits of home, creating multiple performativities of precarity in spaces (such as libraries, caf es, university buildings, work offices) that have received very little attention to date. The interactions between housing and energy injustices in driving young people's precarisation point to the need for a spatially integrated understanding of the manner in which fuel poverty reflects manifold vulnerabilities beyond energy, including the precarity of housing, food and labour (Lewis et al, 2014). This also calls for further explorations of processes of socio-technical subject-formation (Walker, Cass, Burningham, & Barnett, 2010) to understand how domestic energy deprivation is conditioned, institutionalised and reproduced via a set of material and institutional normativities (Rudge, 2012).…”

Population aging and migration – history and UN forecasts in the EU-28 and its east and south near neighborhood – one century perspective 1950–2050

“…Such long-term relationships have been present in terms of migration from Eastern Europe westwards and from MENA region northwards for many decades dating back deep into the Cold War Era [24]. Contemporary momentum of massive, large scale migrations outsourcing from MENA region going primarily towards rich European Protestant North [25] is probably the peak of an iceberg in long migration routes history [26], as was the Muslim invasion of Spain in the early 700 s CE [27] and more recently illegal migration from Senegal to European coasts such as Lampedusa, Sicily or the Canary Islands [28]. We witnessed that these movements were triggered by civil wars of Libya, Syria [29], Iraq and Arab Spring [30] unrests taking place few years ago.…”

Developing Reflexive identities through collaborative, interdisciplinary and precarious work: the experience of early career researchers

“…International conflict, environmental degradation and the policies of deregulation (individualism, competition, privatisation and marketisation) have dramatically influenced the redesign of social-welfare, employment policies, labour and industrial relations laws and led to a new way of being within a 'modern' economy and society (Massey 2009). This neoliberal policy reform has contributed to an increasingly generalised phenomenon of flexibility (Massey 2009;Peck et al 2005) which many have argued has disadvantaged women, older people, younger people, and migrants more than others (Lewis et al 2015;McDowell et al 2012;Kalleberg 2009). The discrepancy in experience of precarity, indeed, is one that all but the least alert of early career researchers are highly sensitive to -and negotiating personal precarity in the context of partnerships with groups and organisations experiencing mass, sustained and intergenerational economic insecurity is a dynamic that is often visible in these research projects.…”