Unpaid labour holds a paradoxical role in waged work, integral to the ideal worker norm of commitment and sacrifice, central to precarious employment yet often overlooked in analyses of insecurity. This article develops a class-sensitive account of how unpaid labour shapes the relationship between precarious work and insecurity. Drawing on qualitative data from dancers and care workers, we conceptualise unpaid labour as a mechanism through which precarity is produced and normalised, reinforced by norms that legitimise self-sacrifice as occupational worth. In ballet, prestige functions as a symbolic resource that can buffer material insecurity, producing a partially decoupled relationship between precarity and insecurity sustained by aspirational hope. In care, gendered, class-based constraints heighten vulnerability, generating a tightly coupled dynamic where hope functions as endurance. Challenging binary models equating precarious work with insecurity, we theorise unpaid labour as a critical but overlooked mechanism in the classed and affective nexus between the two.
Pulignano et al. (2026) studied this question.