Seeing the "Changing Nature of Work" through a Precarity Lens

Abstract

This article reviews the concept of precarity and offers critical reflections on its contribution to thestudy of contemporary labour and livelihoods. A stock-take of key and recent literature suggeststhat, despite conceptual ambiguity and overstretching, “thinking with precarity” continues to provea valuable and worthwhile exercise – so long as that thinking is carefully articulated. This involvesunderstanding precarity as: 1) rooted in concrete labour market experiences but also connected tobroader anxieties over social and political life; 2) a process-focused concept rather than end-statedescriptor; and 3) speaking to longer histories and wider geographies than its commonplace statusas a residual term or category implies. The analytical advantages of thinking in such a way areillustrated through a critical analysis of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2019 on the“changing nature of work”, and in particular its handling of digital labour.KEYWORDS: precarious work; politics of precarity; livelihoods; digital labour; gig economy

Online Labour Index 2020: New ways to measure the world’s remote freelancing market

“…In bringing jobs and income to people in Global South countries, they could help to foster more resilient, sustainable local communities (Hjort and Poulsen, 2017) and offer alternatives to the physical migration to places with more jobs and higher wage levels (Braesemann et al, 2020). However, several studies have reported that transactions on online labour platforms are shaped by geographical frictions and biases that restrict participation (Ghani et al, 2014; Braesemann et al, 2021) and that these platforms contribute to the exploitation of a global class of precariously living knowledge workers (Mallett, 2020).…”

Online Labour Index 2020: New ways to measure the world’s remote freelancing market

“…In bringing jobs and income to people in Global South countries, they could help to foster more resilient, sustainable local communities (Hjort and Poulsen, 2017) and offer alternatives to the physical migration to places with more jobs and higher wage levels . However, several studies have reported that transactions on online labour platforms are shaped by geographical frictions and biases that restrict participation (Ghani et al, 2014;Braesemann et al, 2021) and that these platforms contribute to the exploitation of a global class of precariously living knowledge workers (Mallett, 2020).…”

A global analysis of worker protest in digital labour platforms

“…Finally, it should be noted that platform worker research to date has been concentrated in a relatively small number of cities in the global North. Evidence of platform worker struggles in the global South is far less developed (Mallett 2020;Carmody and Fortuin 2019;Prabhat, Nanavati and Rangaswamy 2019). Examples include studies of taxi-app drivers in China (Elfstrom 2019;Chen 2018); "remote" platform workers in Africa (Anwar and Graham 2020); taxi-app drivers in Cape Town (Carmody and Fortuin 2019) and Johannesburg (Chinguno 2019) in South Africa; and app-based motorbike taxi drivers in Indonesia (Nastiti 2017).…”