Contesting, (Re)producing or Surviving Precarity? Debates on Precarious Work and Informal Labor Reexamined

The discursive traverses of “precarious work” invoke a wide range of meanings, from a political frame of reference for new labor and social movements to conceptualizations framing scholarly inquiries and institutional policymaking. Often, the notion is simultaneously registered along both descriptive and analytic planes. It consequently generates a certain amount of ambiguity, flitting between different levels of analysis. Quite paradoxically, however, the terms “precarious work” and “precarity” over the last decade or so have generated a potentially stable frame of reference for labor politics against the tide of neo-liberal policies and practices. How do we go about conceptualizing “precarious work” within specific, historical contexts and arrive, from such instances, at a more historicized understanding of the notion? What does such an exercise in conceptualization reveal about its contemporary salience among labor scholars, activists and policymakers in different contexts? These questions motivate the paper. In addressing them, the central argument of the paper alludes to a world-historical approach in tracing parallel concerns between contemporary scholarly discussions on “precarious work” and “informal labor.” It claims that the proliferating usages of “precarious work” beyond their original scope of reference in European contexts indicate tensions through which ongoing world-historical processes are mediated in shaping relations of social (re)production today.