Working in the Context of Austerity

Abstract

How to do more with less? This is, essentially, austerity's onerous question. Its default answer, in turn, has been to defer, download and outsource the burden of being overtasked and cash strapped. As Peck (2012, p 632) notes, 'austerity is ultimately concerned with offloading costs, displacing responsibility; it is about making others pay the price of fiscal retrenchment' (emphasis in original). These 'others' are, frequently, marginalized communities of colour and the low-income urban neighbourhoods they inhabit. Cities, to quote Peck again, are 'where austerity bites' as it 'operates on, and targets anew, an already neoliberalized institutional landscape', but does so in a highly uneven manner (Peck, 2012, pp 629, 631). What Marxist-feminist scholars have referred to as the 'crisis of