Precarious work, gender and race: class struggle and care-work (Keynote)

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

This paper is about parents (but especially mothers) in precarious employment, as the intersection of parental responsibilities and paid work represents a privileged site from which to explore the process of precarisation within a wider social context. Social reproduction is then interrogated in order to conceptually frame mothers’ everyday struggles for stability. The dyad use-value and exchange-value is mobilised to make sense of gendered activities in the domestic sphere as well as in paid work, so that the outcome of this research marks a conceptual shift from the metaphor work-family balance to the tension between useful activities and the monetary valorisations that these mothers need to obtain. The research suggests then that these parents produce social wealth at a number of different levels, but their activities need to meet their exchange-value because monetary valorisation represents the way to get their livelihood. This research aims to conceptualise the antagonism of ‘precarious mothers’ as their ‘normal life’ is distorted by daily struggles to achieve these means. The paper proposes to view precarious work in global terms, so processes of precarisation are linked to processes of racialisation and gendered processes. This is not in view of producing a unitary explanation that would consider the intersection of these social factors. The focus on the phenomenon of ‘precarisation’ shifts the analysis to a process that in this precise field see the struggle to be ‘employable’ and yet struggling against the ‘commodity form’ of labour converge towards the daily reproduction of social life.
Keywords: precarious work, struggle, gender, race, social reproduction
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusUnpublished - 19 Jun 2020
EventCritical Political Economy Research Network: Critical political economy at the end of neoliberalism? - Online conference organised by The University of Limerick, Ireland
Duration: 19 Jun 202019 Jun 2020

Academic conference

Academic conferenceCritical Political Economy Research Network
Country/TerritoryIreland
Period19/06/2019/06/20

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