I’ve been talking up this idea of the Precariat and the Cognitariat lately. Here’s a short excerpt from an article in the latest issue of Greenpepper magazine , a great publication out of Amsterdam, and well worth supporting. The issue is really good (not yet on-line, though back issues are), with a half dozen really interesting articles and a cool design. It’s one of those publications that reminds me of why I can still get excited by print media: stimulating, inspiring, and informative.
Mayday Mayday! Euro Flexworkers, Time To Get a Move On!
by Alex Foti
For two decades, neoliberalism has been first and foremost a system of labor precarization and deunionization at all levels of urban and suburban living. This has led to a precarious existence deprived of basic social rights for the majority of working women, youth and migrants. At the core of this process of neoliberal accumulation lies flexible and contingent labor by casualized workers in crucial reproductive and distribution services and in the knowledge, culture, and media industries that provide the raw material on which the system functions: information.
We, active temps of Italy, call ourselves PRECOG because we embody the precariat working in retail and service industries and the cognitariat of media and education industries. We are the producers of neoliberal wealth, we are the creators of knowledge, style and culture enclosed and appropriated by monopoly power.
We are the women in a feminized workforce and economy that nevertheless reserves to xx people more discriminatory pay and roles than to domineering xy people. We are the consumerized younger generation left out of the political and social design of gerontocratic and technocratic [modern life]. We are the first-generation [immigrants] coming from the five continents and, most crucially, the seven seas. We are the middle-aged being laid off from once secure jobs in industry and services.
We are the people that don’t have (and mostly don’t want) long-term jobs, and so are deprived of basic social rights such as maternity or sick leave or the luxury of paid holidays. We are hirable on demand, available on call, exploitable at will, and firable at whim, We are the precariat. The precariat is the sum of all the people with non-standard job forms that have the social standard around which collective life increasingly revolves. It is a condition of generalized social precarity and singularized job precariousness.
Chainworkers is the Milan-based organization where you can connect directly to some of the organizing going on in Europe.
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