Everyday Life Within Precarious Working Conditions: A Conceptual Home for the Practical, Subjective and Emotional Actions of Precariousness

The visceral, experiential and productive doing of precariousness is currently scattered without a conceptual home. Extended and qualitative accounts of precariousness describe practical, subjective and emotional actions of living with vulnerability that are not extraordinary but make‐up everyday precarity. However, the precarity conceptual family is divided between either structural or differential vulnerability, leaving little room for the ongoing actions of being precarious. In response, I recover the term precarious working, which is often used but without full dissection, as a home for the analysis of the everyday actions within precarious working conditions. Precarious working exists in parallel to precarious working conditions, and together the two are the motions of precarity. The significance of precarious working lies in two domains: the interplay of objective and subjective insecurity and the substantiation of precarity. Precarious working highlights the individual acts of endurance, advantage and autonomy that interrelate with objective insecurity. Although unlikely to overcome the structural, these acts remain the visceral, experiential and productive substantiation of precarity. The concept helps to overcome the condition of precariousness as a mere outcome by highlighting the practical and active nature of the inequalities that precarity describes.