‘Precarious Parents’ precarity and parenting in Italy, a note on exchange and use value

This paper is based on a theoretically-driven empirical research on parents in precarious work. There is a dearth of research in this specific topic, yet this seems a privileged site from which exploring the dynamics of Social Reproduction. The focus on parents in precarious work allows an exploration of ‘Precarity’ where gender and class necessarily need to take centre stage simultaneously. The research took part in Italy, through a series of qualitative interviews of parents in insecure jobs. The methodology of co-research was used and the categories developed through this research are the result of participants and researcher critical understanding of our social context.
The description of parents’ precarity is connected to the analysis of precarious employment as social form: seemingly economic concepts (like ‘wage’ and ‘employment’) are re-interpreted in the context of struggle in which parents are implicated on a daily basis. On the other hand, the unpaid domestic labour of (especially) mothers is connected to their daily general activities producing use-value, for themselves as well for others. I conclude that rather than ‘balancing’ home life with (precarious) work, these families are struggling against capitalist valorisation in order to make their home life and their work life useful for themselves as well for others.
Precarious parents do not simply adapt to their insecure life circumstances, nor simply put up with precarious work conditions. The type of resistance to the economic necessity they are trapped in can be deciphered through narratives around dignity. Eventually dignity represents their daily struggle against economic subordination and marginalisation.