I learned a new word this week:
precariat. It was referenced in a news story I read on the CBC online
news feed reporting that the world's total jobless rate has passed
200 million, according to the United Nations.
As it stands, we are told that fewer
than one in four workers in today's world has a steady, predictable
and reliable job. Think about that: think about the insecurity of millions upon
millions of families whose welfare rests on part-time, on-call,
sporadic employment, with periods of unemployment between cheques.
Mix with that an alarming rise in child labour.
Even assuming the numbers the UN study
reported may not be completely accurate, it is unsettling. Welcome to
the new environment of work in a globalized economy that has nearly
completed its race to the bottom.
Welcome to the precariat.
A bit of research tells us the term
began to grow in usage following a 2011 book by British economist Guy
Standing. His book is called The Precariat: The New Dangerous
Class.
The year it was published was the same
year the Occupy movement was born. That movement brought the world's
attention to the inequality of income in the triumph of capitalism.
(I don't think you can call an economy “free market” anymore,
when the majority of workers in it have little or no freedom within
it. So the old term capitalist will have to serve.)
But the concept of the “one per cent”
or “10 per cent” the Occupy movement talked about is not just a
theory. It's a real, growing uncertainty for more and more people
whose only asset is their labour, in a world where business owners
feel no compunction against “hire and fire” tactics and the
reminder that whatever anyone does, someone else more desperate can
be found to do it for less.
The connections carry forward from the
book.
Two years later, 1,129 Bangladeshi
slave-wage garment workers perished when their ramshackle factory
caved in on them. Six months after that, 10 more were killed when
their sweatshop factory caught fire. Their products have been
profitably sold in stores everywhere.
A year after that, when police in the
U.S. were beginning to be accused of racially-profiled violence,
academics began to pontificate on what America would do with its
restless “excess labour.” These are people and entire communities
where one cannot find a reliable sustained job, much less a career,
no matter how skilled, unskilled or educated you are.
To use another term: the precariat.
Lest we think this is a problem for
somewhere else, Wayne Lewchuck of McMaster University reminds us that
precarious employment is becoming the rule in Canada as well.
“GDP per capita keeps going up. The
problem is we're not sharing the wealth equitably,” he said in a
news report. “In many ways, we've gone back to the 1920s.”
Ah, yes, the 1920s. The good old days.
The decade that turned into the Great Depression, where Canada's
“excess labour” went off to be cannon fodder in the Second World
War.
A huge portion of Canada's well-paid
careers are “gated” by professional associations that more and
more require costly post-graduate degrees.
The result is increasing job
encroachment by aides or licensed practitioners, who will do much the same job, but for less money — or in the case of intern trainees,
for no pay at all.
The threat, I believe, is not to the
money economy, but to the social fabric of our country as a whole.
A growing precariat must eventually
become restless. The forces of “law and order” will need to use
more and more brutal force to maintain the status quo.
We may blame and distrust the police
who even in Canada have been given the tools to spy on us and even
profile our very thoughts, but they are working for an elite whose
luxuries depend on precarious labour.
It's not a very hopeful picture. But
perhaps, one time in history, we will be able to use the information
we have to create a solution to a problem, not just to learn to
endure it.
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