Discussion

The first chapter gave an overview of a series of developments around the precarity concept. It shed light on the emergence of a more insecure and precarious workforce since the 1970s that was not contained to the margins of the labour market but gradually extended itself to the more permanent employees. The broadly accepted reasons behind such a development were recognised and discussed, emphasising the wider changes in global economy that gave rise to deregulation policies and more aggressive employers’ cost-reduction strategies. Although flexibility was portrayed as a positive development that can enhance employees’ job satisfaction, it was discovered that flexible contracts offer less protection, pay and certainty. In addition to that, a series of flexible forms were associated with higher work intensity and health problems as employees experienced higher workloads and more unstable working patterns than in the past. This chapter also outlined significant developments in relation to the progress of the concept, as in different countries diverse definitions emerged for describing precarious employment conditions depending on national institutional, economic and societal factors. The recent convergence towards an acceptance of precarity might be linked with recent contributions by international organisations and scholars that extensively utilise the term for referring to growing levels of insecurity. However, we also noted that precarity is not politically and ideologically neutral, and there is a dispute over the novelty that is supposedly linked to the term. More structurally oriented accounts argue that precarity has always been a feature of capitalist societies, while others insist that the levels of security enjoyed by European employees since the Second World War were rather unique in the history of capitalism. The fact that in many parts of this world collective systems of representation and trade unions were never important factors of their systems has also been added as evidence of the short-sighted and ahistorical manner through which employment insecurity is theorised. Nevertheless, the term encompasses some analytical vigour especially when applied in contexts hit by significant labour market changes and continuous deterioration in the employment conditions experienced by employees. The eruption of the crisis and the diffusion of the crisis to traditionally more secure employees are signals of the extent to which aspects of precarity are no longer reserved for a tiny minority but increasingly spread out to the majority. Although the danger to categorise everyone under the precarity label is existent, we assume that the very strict boundaries of the past have been erased and nowadays insecurity and thus precarity touches many groups of employees even in different ways. For instance, changes in work organisation and longer hours of work might not be associated with low pay and immediate fear of job loss, they are, however, indicators of a more precarious existence where long-established expectations about work life are short-lived and the near future is uncertain. The inability of European economies to escape vibrantly the economic recession and offer quality and well-paid jobs to European workers and especially the young generation is another reason that precarity is more than a euphuism. Moreover, the fact that contemporary megacities are overcrowded by ‘self-employed’ Uber and Deliveroo drivers and cyclists is not a random development but rather a structural change to the conditions that workers work and live in the modern world with significant consequences for their sense of security and stability.