Profiting from Precarity
In Italy during the 1970s, labour movements responding to and resisting the rigidity of assembly-line employment celebrated precarious patterns of work; precarity was something beautiful (precario bello). This, Stevphen Shukaitis observes, “is an eminently sensible thing to say when you think about what the kind of ‘security’ and ‘stability’ is created by working in a petrochemical factory or on an automobile assembly line for forty years.” More recently, popular discussions of precarity in the Anglophone world have tended to orient...
