Interfaces of precarity and the networks of precarious lifeworlds: Experiences of housing,social supports,and work in youth homelessness

Abstract

Research on precarious work in labour geography and labour studies has been complemented by scholarship on other political-economic dimensions of precarious lifeworlds—notably housing—and more expansive accounts that attend to broader ontologies of precarity. Nonetheless, much of the literature on precarious work treats employment and housing, among other domains, as separate or unidirectionally linked phenomena. Drawing on interviews with 45 unhoused youth in Toronto, this article develops interfaces of precarity as a theoretical construct to unpack the mutually constitutive relationships among precarious work, housing, and social supports for unhoused youth in Toronto. By attending to the ways these dimensions of life collide in unhoused youth’s narratives, their dynamic, multidirectional, and spatiotemporally contingent interrelations are revealed, offering empirical insights into the ways these domains are co-produced and differentially experienced. This article also contributes to scholarship on precarity by materially grounding precarity’s relational and multiscalar character. In doing so, the article not only advances scholarship on precarity and precarious work but also highlights the importance of integrated and relational responses to multidimensional precarity in service delivery and organizing.

Introduction

I’ve been non-stop trying to find employment and housing and university—and fixing family relationships, and my own mental health issues as well—it’s just so many things. (Erin)

I interviewed Erin in the winter of 2021 during the putative “third wave” of COVID-19 in Toronto. At the time, I was a researcher at a large youth shelter, particularly interested in young people’s experiences of precarious work. Erin, a non-binary young person who had recently entered a shelter after a period of sleeping rough, made the myopia of my inquiry clear: questions of work, at least for them, could not be conceptually excised from other conditions of life. Their relations to, and efforts to overcome, precarity were necessarily multidimensional.

Precarious work arrangements remain a central preoccupation of economic and labour geographers, labour studies scholars, and sociologists studying work. While much of this robust literature has focused on precarity as a phenomenon immanent to the employment relation—often in the context of transitions to flexible accumulation and immaterial labour beginning in the 1970s and currently epitomized by gig work and the platform economy (Fudge, 2017; Gebrial, 2024; Harvey, 1989; Lazzarato, 1996)—the field has been enlivened by contributions that untether precarity from the exclusive domain of work. Butler (2004) has been particularly influential in this regard, conceiving precariousness as a broad and universal condition premised upon the inherent interdependence of human and more-than-human life (Puar, 2012: 163). In recognition of the ways precariousness is differentially experienced given hierarchized regimes of security and care (Butler, 2004), precarity has been mobilized as an analytic to account for “the ‘differential distribution’ of symbolic and material insecurities” (Lorey, 2015: 21). This expansive understanding of precariousness and precarity—what we might call precarity as a politically-mediated ontological condition—orients scholars of labour to the ways precarity necessarily exceeds employment, or what Strauss (2018: 626) helpfully terms “the interrelation of ‘labour’ and ‘life’.”

Sustained research has followed. Offering an early theoretical intervention in geography, Ettlinger (2007) exhorted scholars to move beyond “bounded” accounts that see precarity as emanating solely from particular social and economic transformations in North America and Europe and attend to its micro, multidimensional, and contextually contingent permutations. Phrased otherwise, “vulnerability and politics are interwoven in concrete lives,” necessitating methodologies sensitive to the thickness of precarity’s everyday instantiations (Han, 2018: 340). This agenda has been effectively incorporated into literature in human geography and anthropology exploring affective experiences of precarity (Allison, 2012; Joronen and Griffiths, 2019; Philo et al., 2019; Raynor, 2021; Stewart, 2012; Worth, 2016), as well as research on precarious employment’s interlinkages with migration (Strauss and McGrath, 2017; Worth, 2016). Nevertheless, precarity’s grounded multidimensionality remains a challenging conceptual problem to operationalize, particularly for scholars with a focus on labour. As a result, research on precarious work’s myriad interconnections with other dimensions ¹ of life remains somewhat limited.

How can scholarship on precarious work, then, take into account the multidimensionality of precarity to inform a more capacious analysis? In this article, I suggest that by looking at interfaces of precarity ² —the spatiotemporally contingent points of collision and interaction between the various dimensions of precarious lifeworlds—the dynamic, multidirectional, and mutually constitutive relations between precarious employment and other areas of life come into view. By attending to these interfaces, what Strauss (2018: 626) calls the “co-production of precarious work and precarious legal status” can be extended to other co-productive domains, offering insights into how precarity is differentially registered and resisted across time, space, and social location, within and beyond work. Indeed, if we are to understand precarious work as networked within broader relations and conditions of precarity, as Ettlinger (2007) and others suggest, there is a need for analytical orientations geared towards unpacking these relational and multiscalar interconnections.

I illustrate this approach by drawing on interviews with 45 unhoused youth in Toronto, Ontario. In so doing, I demonstrate how understandings of precarious work relations are expanded when analysis is extended to other life domains. I begin with an overview of theories on precarity, and draw on the work of Butler (2004, 2009) and others to demonstrate the analytic utility of a multidimensional and relational conceptualization of the term. With the theoretical foundations of this integrative framework established, I then consult the geographical literature on precarious work, showing how engagements with multidimensionality and interactions with other precarious life dimensions have been limited and frequently reduced to a unidirectional analysis. After briefly introducing the case study of unhoused youth in Toronto, Ontario, I demonstrate two interfaces with precarious work articulated by participants, focusing on housing and state support—interfaces that were simultaneously structural, everyday, and braided together in precarious lifeworlds while also providing opportunities for expressions of agency in ways that exceeded traditional acts of workplace resistance. In so doing, I develop interfaces of precarity as a theoretical construct for exploring interactions between precarious work and other domains in the broader ecology of precarious lifeworlds, as well as contribute to literature on precarious work to demonstrate, empirically, how housing and social supports reciprocally interact with labour market experiences. These interfaces, to be sure, are not exhaustive, but rather emerged as the most salient during analysis, and illustrate some of the most pressing areas compounding or allaying precarity in unhoused young people’s lives more generally (Gaetz et al., 2016).

Understanding precarity multidimensionally

The notion of precarity has an extended intellectual history, one that has been conducive to multidimensional thinking since its inauguration. Scholars tend to locate its first usage in the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who, in 1963, identified the precariousness of marginalized workers in Algeria as a condition of generalized economic insecurity and poverty, further characterized by a temporality overwhelmed by the exigent concerns of the present (Bourdieu, 1979). While this analysis focused, primarily, on labour market conditions (e.g. high unemployment, low wages, informal work), Bourdieu also attended to poor housing conditions and an affective experience associated with a lack of “psychological security,” generating “a looser term referring to an omnipresent social background of precariousness, including but not limited to the realm of work” (Choonara, 2020: 429).

The promulgation of the term beyond French sociology can be charted through both political and academic movements (Choonara, 2020). In the 1990s and 2000s, precarity and the idea of a “precariat” served to coalesce labour, contingent workers, and the unemployed in broad-based movements for social and economic justice across Europe (Lorey, 2015; Standing, 2011). Scholarly uptake similarly accelerated at the turn of the millennium, with a particular focus on flexibility and eroding employment conditions (Choonara, 2020; Kalleberg, 2009; Standing, 2011). Writing in the context of ascendent neoliberalism, this work—much of it in sociology and economics—echoed earlier Bourdieusian conceptualizations of precarity, as well as cognate theories of labour market transformation under “globalization” such as those produced by Bauman (2007) and Beck (1992), highlighting the growing “liquidity” and heightened risk associated with post-Fordist capitalism.

Meanwhile, in the humanities, Judith Butler set the stage for a more expansive and relational foundation for precarious studies. Writing in the aftermath of 9/11, a moment which laid bare human vulnerability and collective responses to it, Butler’s (2004) Precarious Life drew on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to highlight an immutable fact of life: that we, as interdependent beings from birth, “are subject to death at the whim of another” (p. XII). This death, as with other forms of injury, can be borne from active violence or the passive, slow death that results from a lack of care or sharing of resources; we can be murdered, we can starve, and we rely on one another to survive. Thus, precariousness is a relational condition, premised upon a shared basis of life and the mutual dependencies and obligations it entails.

Building on this understanding of precariousness as a “socio-ontological state of being” (Lorey, 2015: 18), precarity then refers to unequal political allocations of this condition of precariousness, occurring through the hierarchization of bodies and lives and the distribution of (frequently material, though also symbolic) resources, opportunities, and violence that follow, often emanating from the state (Butler, 2009; Lorey, 2015). Under this perspective, precariousness is differentially distributed and, therefore, is not merely something that is shared by all humans but “denotes a relational difference, a shared differentness” (Lorey, 2015: 19, emphasis mine). If precariousness highlights something universal in our relational state of living, then, precarity gestures towards an individuated relation to that which is shared. Precarity thus indexes the plural economic and structural sources of precarity as well as its affective dispositions; a relation that operates at multiple scales, from embodied feeling to planetary phenomenon (Puar, 2012).

Multidimensional approaches to theorizing precarity, and particularly those in the Butlerian tradition, offer an integrative framework that emphasizes relationality and multidimensionality. This theoretical capaciousness is both generative and, potentially, paralyzing. How are we to hold these manifold relations and dimensions, operating at multiple scales, together? When precarity comes to encompass everything, do we lose sight of that which is particular? Indeed, there remain concerns about a continued obliquity and lack of analytical tools associated with this strand of precarity studies (Wilén, 2024). In what follows, I examine how geographers have—or have not—taken up this multidimensional conception of precarity in their analyses of work, demonstrating important, if limited, practical engagement with these interrelations. Particularly, this scholarship—either through unidimensional analyses, unidirectional analyses, or a focus on affect—often struggles to identify the mechanisms by which various dimensions of precarity interact and co-produce. This leaves important lacunae analytically and empirically, including with regards to resisting precarity, that I begin to address in the remainder of the article.

Geographies of precarious work

Judith Butler wrote Precarious Life over 20 years ago and its impacts on labour geography and labour studies should not be understated. And yet, much research on precarious work has remained understandably unidimensional with a focus on employment relations. This literature documents a retrenchment of the standard employment relationship—which connotes full-time, permanent, and often unionized work—following transitions to regimes of flexible accumulation and immaterial labour beginning in the 1970s ³ (Fudge, 2017; Harvey, 1989; Lazzarato, 1996). Precarious work arrangements, characterized by limited-term contracts, volatile remuneration, lack of benefits, and few workplace protections, have since proliferated, more recently through the expansion of platform and gig work (Ettlinger, 2007; Kreshpaj et al., 2020; Montgomery and Baglioni, 2021). Geographers studying these conditions have, among other crucial contributions, highlighted changing relationships to the home and to reproductive labour, experiences of aesthetic, affective, and emotional labour at the scale of the body, and new forms of spatial control under platform capitalism (Chang and Behrendt, 2025; Heiland, 2021; McDowell et al., 2007; Pulignano and Morgan, 2022; Willment, 2019).

The project of “unbounding” precarity in geography has also led labour geographers to move beyond unidimensional analyses of employment to set these relations in broader social context (Ettlinger, 2007). These interventions powerfully demonstrate how experiences of, and access to, work are shaped by other dimensions of life, highlighting a directionality whereby precarity in other domains can influence labour. Drawing on participant “life stories,” Dutta (2016) exhorts scholars of labour to look beyond the spatiotemporal boundaries of the workplace to understand the complex antecedents shaping labour market participation and agency, including family dynamics and experiences of poverty. Others have highlighted the contributory role of previous incarceration, citizenship status, and housing arrangements in funnelling workers into precarious segments of the economy (Gebrial, 2024; Muñoz, 2018; Richardson and Thieme, 2020). Exploring the inverse of this relationship, in which labour shapes other domains, scholarship on housing precarity has invoked the deregulation of the labour market and ascendent precarious work arrangements as factors influencing insecure housing conditions (Beer et al., 2016; Bobek et al., 2021). Indeed, precarious work is here shown to contribute to precarity in housing. While these interventions demonstrate how moving beyond unidimensionality can expand understandings of precarious work, they nonetheless retain a unidirectionality, leaving open questions of mutuality and co-productive relationships between different domains.

Others have focused on precarious work’s affective qualities. Worth’s (2016, 2019) research with young people in Canada considers how precarious work produces a more generalized “feeling” of precarity that “invades everyday life” (p. 441), demonstrating how this embodied structure of feeling among young people shapes orientations to futurity, making it difficult to conceive of, and plan for, the future. This is consistent with research out of the UK and Ireland that shows how precarious employment and regimes of austerity act as barriers to conceptualizing pathways towards stability among young people (Hardgrove et al., 2015; van Lanen, 2021). Plans for the future—or a lack thereof—also have material implications for contemporaneous action; young people experiencing precarity may continue to live with parents or remain in jobs they are overqualified for, disrupting normative life-courses and compounding issues of underemployment (van Lanen, 2021; Worth, 2016). Together, this work has impressively extended Butlerian understandings of precarity into labour geography via affect, demonstrating how insecure work can create a diffuse sense of precariousness that transcends a bounded political economy of employment. While this approach can capture how a plurality of forces conspire to produce subjective feelings of insecurity, less attention is afforded to interactions between different material dimensions of life. To be sure, by attending to the materiality of this affective structure, these studies do begin to connect precarious work with other domains, including how insecure work conditions can influence decisions about where to live. For van Lanen (2021) and Worth (2016), respectively, these relationships are mediated by housing unaffordability and generalized feelings of instability, revealing a directionality whereby insecure work produces conditions of insecure housing. And yet, as I will argue in this article, close attention to these interfaces between work and other material life dimensions can reveal a mutuality shaping various objective conditions of life, in addition to their affective corollaries and unidirectional consequences.

Beginning to address this question of mutuality is scholarship in labour geography concerned with migration. Of course, there exists a rich body of work on the precarious employment conditions of migrant workers in Canada and abroad, who are variably subjected to low wages, fixed-term contracts, and severely delimited or nonexistent labour market mobility, among other markers of precarity (Anderson, 2010; Fudge, 2012; Vosko et al., 2019). Animating much of this research is a critique of the state which, through immigration policies and the architecture of migrant worker programmes, produces precarious legal statuses and the conditions for highly exploitative employment relationships (Deshingkar, 2019; Reid-Musson, 2014; Strauss and McGrath, 2017). Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programs have served as potent case studies; identified by Walia (2010) as productive of an “apartheid of citizenship,” migrant workers are conferred a non-citizen, temporary status in Canada, severely restricting their mobility and access to state supports and protections. Consistent with Lewis et al.’s (2015) notion of “hyper-precarity,” these policy regimes deprive temporary migrants of access to the state’s securitizing functions and their ability to leave dangerous and hyper-exploitative work arrangements, amplifying the insecurity of precarious employment arrangements (Strauss and McGrath, 2017). Taken together, regulatory environments governing migration and migrant workers’ employment conditions interact to mutually-reinforce and co-constitute migrant workers’ precarious lifeworlds (Strauss and McGrath, 2017).

Indeed, we can read this work as operating at the interface between citizenship and labour, a relationship that is largely described in structural terms of state policy and immigration regimes. In this article, I seek to expand these interfacial analyses of precarious work to consider the role of housing and state supports, specifically. In doing so, I continue this attention to mutuality while also accounting for the contingency and shifting conditions of precarious workers’ everyday lives alongside structural forces—the fleeting moments that broader, policy-focused analyses may occlude. What is more, while this analysis foregrounds the interfacial dynamics of material dimensions of participants’ lives, I also integrate their descriptions of the affective experience of precarity where possible to highlight the interrelation between these two registers.

Youth homelessness and COVID-19 in Toronto, Ontario

Youth homelessness is an urgent issue in the city of Toronto, where 800–1000 young people aged 16–24 experience homelessness on any given night (City of Toronto, 2021). Disproportionately represented in this population are young people who experience marginalization based on other aspects of their social location, including those identified as Black, racialized, newcomers, Indigenous, and/or as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community (City of Toronto, 2021). While transitions to long-term, independent housing are the goal of extant social services and governmental initiatives, the city primarily relies on emergency shelters to address the crisis, providing temporary congregate housing and services to unhoused youth. These shelters are often premised on a continuum of care model, wherein supports are staged and education, employment, and/or sobriety are typically preconditions for transitions into independent housing, leading many unhoused youth to participate in the labour market and programmes designed for promoting labour market integration (Axe et al., 2020; Baker and Evans, 2016; Dolson, 2015; Gaetz et al., 2016). While the research sites for this project experimented with Housing First approaches in limited ways—primarily through pilot projects that offered housing subsidies to a select number of young people—the continuum of care continued to dominate service provision across all sites, with many young people explaining that they could not afford to exit the shelter without stable employment.

Despite this population’s existence at the intersection of multiple precarious life dimensions, including housing, employment, and social supports, there is a dearth of scholarship on unhoused youth’s experiences of precarity. Previous research has shown how lower levels of education and work experience on average—coupled with the instability and stress associated with homelessness—act as barriers to employment for unhoused youth (Gaetz et al., 2016). Others have demonstrated how these conditions relegate unhoused youth to highly precarious jobs, forestalling transitions out of homelessness (Dolson, 2015; Thulien et al., 2018). As Wirth (2021) shows, precarious work conditions are also enmeshed in a cyclical relationship with housing instability and government supports, unable to provide the necessary funds to sustain exits into independent housing and frequently rendering young people ineligible for the benefits they rely on.

Research on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic indicates an exacerbation of traditional markers of precarity for this population during this period. Following government directives and desires to protect staff from the virus, many organizations providing non-essential services shifted their services online or shuttered temporarily, reducing the availability of supports (Farnish and Schoenfeld, 2022; Noble et al., 2022). Sectors of the economy that traditionally hire unhoused youth also contracted in response to public health ordinances, leading to increased unemployment and fewer job options (Noble et al., 2022; Rew et al., 2021). Far from a monolithic group, research has also demonstrated particularly adverse impacts for unhoused youth identified as Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, and recent migrants (Abramovich et al., 2021; Noble et al., 2022). Despite these emergent findings, the qualitative experiences of unhoused youth and their experiences of precarity are underexplored in the literature (see Dolson, 2015; Watt, 2020), and insights from the COVID-19 pandemic with regards to the precarious conditions of young people and unhoused youth are few.

This article draws on qualitative results from a large mixed-methods study on the experiences of unhoused youth, between the ages of 16 and 24, in Toronto during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was conducted by a research team based out of a large youth shelter in the city, led by two principal investigators and coordinated and assisted by a team of four additional researchers, including me. Interviews were conducted between January and March 2021, during the pandemic’s putative third wave (Detsky and Bogoch, 2021). Public health measures intended to slow transmission of the virus mandated the closure of broad swathes of the service economy during this time, and stay-at-home orders limiting mobility were in place between November 23rd, 2020 and February 16th, 2021 (Fox, 2021; Office of the Premier, 2020). The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB)—financial aid of $2000 per month for eligible Canadians (Government of Canada, 2021)—continued to be available to all eligible Canadians who had not yet exhausted their 28-week limit, and the Pfizer vaccine was in the process of being incrementally rolled out to high-risk populations. At the time of data collection, however, it was not yet widely available to most participants (Mishra et al., 2021). As an essential service, shelters in the city continued to operate throughout the pandemic, albeit under strict health and safety protocols, including mandatory masking, fewer in-person services, and reduced access to common and recreational spaces.

After receiving ethics clearance, participants were recruited through a multipronged approach; flyers were distributed to four downtown shelters, and staff were encouraged to inform young people about their ability to participate in the project. An organic by-product of the $50 honorarium for participants’ time and expertise, snowball sampling was also used as young people shared study details with their networks in the shelter. Interviews were semi-structured, consisting of questions about participants’ experiences during the pandemic, including employment, education, mental and physical health, and access to CERB and other social supports. Considering the risk to health and safety associated with in-person activities at this time—and in accordance with local public health directives, individual shelter policies, and research ethics board requirements—all interviews were conducted over the phone or video conferencing platform depending on participants’ preferences and accessibility needs, and ethnographic fieldwork was not feasible. Interviews ranged in duration from 20 minutes to 1 hour.

Following data collection, results were analyzed using the qualitative coding software Quirkos, which facilitated coding by multiple research team members to increase the codebook’s reliability. Analysis was conducted using an inductive approach to thematic analysis, with codes generated organically and iteratively from the interview data (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Major themes related to precarious work, citizenship, and CERB—which form the basis for this article—emerged from this grounded analysis.

Interface I: Housing

For participants in the study, work was inextricably linked with their experiences of—and aspirations for—housing. Given the imperatives associated with the continuum of care, which often necessitates obtaining employment prior to receiving support in transitions to independent housing, many participants turned to the labour market to generate income and exit the shelter. Three young people described relatively stable employment experiences during the pandemic and anticipated exiting the shelter after accumulating sufficient savings, their jobs positioned as a salve for other precarious life dimensions. After relocating to Toronto from the suburbs and living in shelter during a bout of unemployment, Zach was able to find a job during the pandemic and had, at the time of the interview, been working for 4 months. When asked if the pandemic had been isolating for him, Zach’s response revealed the centrality of work, both in his everyday life and plans for a more secure housing situation in the future:

I’m more focused on my job and, like, saving money during the pandemic because I’m in the shelter right now, so . . . And I’m in debt too because I fell into debt. So, I have to pay my debt back and save money, get a place. And then, yeah, I’m just like focusing on that stuff so I can get through everything.

At first glance, Zach’s experience elucidates an intuitive relationship between housing and employment: that income is, for those in Toronto without access to generational wealth, necessary for affording rent. A closer interrogation of this interface, however, reveals the mediating effects of institutional practices that structure this relationship—themselves socially determined and varied across shelters and regions. Indeed, whereas the continuum of care disciplines labour market participation as a precondition for exits from shelter, Housing First approaches extol the stabilizing effects of independent housing as a foundation for pursuing stability in other domains, including employment (Gaetz, 2014). Implemented to varying degrees in some youth shelters across Canada, Housing First for youth is typically enacted through the provision of “immediate access to permanent housing with no housing readiness requirements” (Gaetz et al., 2013)—markedly different from Zach’s experience. Produced by conditions determined by shelter policies, as well as funding and directives from multiple levels of government, Zach’s experience reflects how housing models institutionalize the primacy of labour market participation to accessing housing.

For those fortunate to find relatively stable and remunerative employment, like Zach, security in one dimension was positioned as allaying the precarity of another, crystallized in the potential for permanent housing and feelings of hope for the future. Speaking of his job, he said “it’s perfect it’s good . . . I want to move to, like, the downtown area, get my own place close to my job so I don’t spend money on tokens and just like – yeah.” And yet, positive employment experiences were aberrant in the sample, with the vast majority of participants sharing stories of protracted job searches and periods of unemployment, as well as highly precarious work arrangements in the pandemic economy that interacted with their housing in complex ways. Attention to Ettlinger’s (2007) “microspaces” of everyday precarity helps articulate a layered bidirectional interface between work and housing, structured—but not overly determined—by the logics and violences of racial capitalism. Rohan, a refugee who had recently landed in Canada, described the mutuality of precarious work and housing conditions using a spatial metaphor; with no apartment and no job, he lacked a “base” from which to build his life:

I just went in the shelter because I didn’t have a place, work, nothing to move on from with my life, so I had to . . . when you want to do something you have to start from the base. If you don’t have the base, you can’t go forward. I need like a space and the work.

For Rohan, this confluence of housing and employment precarity was the material component of a more generalized sense of insecurity, difficulty planning for the future, and a contributor to poor mental health: “physically I was well, but mentally I was no good.” This experience is consistent with recent research on homelessness among refugees in Canada, many of whom arrive with debts associated with migration and limited institutionally recognized education, impeding both housing accessibility and economic participation (Francis, 2021). Housing discrimination, insufficient supports and subsidies, and difficulties navigating the housing system can act as additional pathways into emergency shelters, like the one Rohan found himself in (St. Arnault and Merali, 2019).

Facing limited opportunities on the labour market, Rohan began working in platform-based food delivery, work made more precarious by its seasonality. Indeed, Toronto’s weather conditions proved an obstacle to steady income during winter months: “I work Uber Eats sometimes. Depending on the weather, I ride my motorbike. The other day it was snowy and it’s hard to work during this time.” Echoing previous research on the platform economy that highlights how risk and operating costs have been assumed by workers misclassified as independent contractors (De Stefano, 2015; Pinsof, 2016), Rohan’s ability to work was also contingent upon possessing an electric bike. This condition of precarious employment—a downloading of risk—collided with the everyday insecurities of shelter life when Rohan was required to store his electronic bike outside:

I had a motorbike, an electric motorbike that I used to work at Uber Eats. So, when we go in the [shelter], I tried to speak with staff to see if I can put the motorbike in my room, but they said we’re not allowed to, so I had to put the bike in the parking lot. After some days that bike, which cost almost $2200, was stolen. I spoke with the staff and all that, but they didn’t do much on that. And I think that they just told me the most ignorant opinion. They told me ‘Oh you are working so you can go buy another one to work again’.

Rohan’s experience of precarity, here, cannot be analytically reduced to a unitary dimension. Living in shelter rendered him vulnerable to theft—as is well known (Heerde and Hemphill, 2016)—and the loss of his electronic bike exacerbated his already-contingent relationship to work. With no recourse through the shelter and lacking employment protections as an independent contractor, his source of income and path to independent housing were simultaneously removed—an analytically fleeting interaction between employment and housing that nonetheless had dramatic effects on his experiences of precarity in each domain. Indeed, mutually constituted by the insecurity of shelter and work life, Rohan’s experience of both was compounded and prolonged. Further, as Gebrial (2024) incisively identifies, the very conditions of platform work that formed one axis of this interface—alongside the abandonment Rohan experienced by the state and attendant experiences of housing insecurity (Francis, 2021)—are themselves products of racial capitalism, with racialization constituting “a key organizing principle” (p. 1170) of platform work through the racialized misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors. Threaded through this interface was a sense of powerlessness and frustration at shelter workers’ ostensible indifference to the impacts of the theft. After being told to “buy another one,” Rohan sought support and direction from another staff member who was similarly dismissive, leaving him to feel alone in confronting the situation: “that sucks, you know. If you’re a staff you have to show me a way to go.” Despite these disappointing interactions, Rohan was insistent that the shelter needed to do more to ensure the safety and wellbeing of residents: “they have to be more serious about you, because you are their responsibility right?”

Interface II: Social supports

To mitigate the economic devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada—including the over 3 million workers who lost their jobs in the first month alone (Clarke and Fields, 2022)—the federal government implemented the CERB programme in March of 2020, providing eligible workers experiencing pandemic-related unemployment with $2000 a month for up to 28 weeks until May 2022. To qualify for CERB, individuals needed a social insurance number and a formally recognized income of at least $5000 earned in Canada in the preceding year (Government of Canada, 2021), eliminating access for those without formalized legal status, people who experienced unemployment the year prior, those who relied on informal and unrecognized forms of work for income, and those who were young and had yet to engage in employment previously. Given these restrictions, participants in our study were disproportionately ineligible for CERB, with only nine sharing that they had received CERB at the time of the interview.

Participants’ experiences with CERB’s inaccessibility were intimately connected to past and future precarious work arrangements. Several participants who had worked informally in the past year lacked the necessary documentation to prove their income and employment history, demonstrating the self-perpetuating function of precarity in unhoused youth’s lifeworlds. Nishil moved to Canada several years prior to the pandemic, first studying at a Canadian college and then working in the restaurant industry under a temporary work permit while he pursued formal citizenship. Despite restaurant work being notoriously insecure and underpaid, Nishil’s wages were sufficient to rent a small apartment downtown where he lived until the onset of the pandemic, a situation he associated with a sense of security: “I had my own place, I was working at the restaurant as a chef . . . Yeah. I was on a good track, like very good track.” In late March of 2020, following the implementation of lockdowns in Ontario, Nishil was laid off, initially surviving off savings before moving to a shelter. While CERB was available, he was unable to access the documents necessary to prove his eligibility from his former employer:

I used to work at a restaurant, and they were very hard to find the records for. I applied [to CERB] at the end of September or first week of October. One week after I applied, I called them like every day for ten days straight, and every day I had to wait for two or three hours for someone to connect to. They told me, ‘We accelerated your process, and we are trying to get records of your employment from the place you used to work.’ After 19 days I had to call ten straight days again, like I have been calling, and they can’t even get the records from the owner. I don’t know, after five or ten more days I call them back, I was frustrated and I told them that I don’t want anything, just withdraw my request and they told me, ‘OK we withdraw your request, and we are not able to take your records. If you are able, you can provide us your records of employment.’ So, that’s the story of CERB.

Manifest in a lack of formal record-keeping, precarious dimensions of his work prior to the pandemic militated against Nishil’s ability to achieve stability through state supports, leading to feelings of frustration after repeated unsuccessful calls to government representatives and, ultimately, an inability to receive the CERB benefit. These experiences echo research on the impact of precarious employment for workers navigating the social safety net, which has found that those misclassified as independent contractors under precarious work relationships frequently contend with ineligibility when applying for social insurance programmes (Albiston and Fisk, 2021). For unhoused youth, this is particularly problematic given high rates of informal and under-the-table employment, which frequently lacks formal documentation and presents further challenges to economic and housing stability (Dolson, 2015; Gaetz and O’Grady, 2002). As a result of this situation, Nishil described a relationship to time and life progression associated with rupture and waiting, an affective feeling of temporal suspension and uncertain futurity (Jeffrey, 2008; Worth, 2016):

Yeah. I was on good track, like very good track, I completed my studies . . . got my work permit, everything was going good, but I had to then save this whole one full year for nothing. [. . .] I have to start from the small job again, so it’s going to be start over again for everything, except studies, yeah.

Without access to government supports, many participants were, once again, forced into highly precarious work arrangements that were not remuneratively sufficient for exiting homelessness. Simon, who briefly received CERB funds before being deemed ineligible, described pursuing work with a temp agency that could offer gigs “once, maybe, a week [. . .] Sometimes there’s work, sometimes there’s no work.” Among these participants who were barred from accessing CERB, the programme functioned in a manner redolent of workfarism, albeit with a reversed directionality disciplining labour market participation through an absence of state support and a retrospective penalty for unemployment, as opposed to contingently meted out supports in exchange for normatively defined pathways to work (Peck, 2001). Together, precarious relationships to work and social supports were mutually reinforcing and co-productive, with informalized employment histories precluding participants’ access to state supports which, reciprocally, funnelled them back into precarious segments of the labour market.

The interface between work and social supports also presented opportunities for expressions of agency, with some participants resisting the boundedness of CERB’s eligibility requirements and strategically filling out their applications to circumvent the government’s restrictions when they did not qualify. Exemplifying this, Matthew had struggled to find work prior to the pandemic—something the emergence of COVID-19 and associated mental health concerns only exacerbated—which resulted in him lacking a sufficient income history to access the benefit. Despite this barrier, Matthew did not hesitate to falsify his earnings from the previous year on his application, something he described as being “simple as anything; a baby could do it”:

I’ve been applying for CERB and I’ve been claiming CERB, but I am not necessarily eligible for CERB. And I can be honest about that because I’ve been trying to maintain contact with the government but I’m sorry, they’re the stupid ones for throwing money away and then giving us resources that people who have no income, and then come from a background of which I come, being in the system and being in the criminal system, I’m obviously going to utilise. Understandable?

In fabricating his employment history, Matthew simultaneously resisted the government’s restrictive eligibility requirements and a precarious labour market that he was being disciplined into joining, fashioning an alternative means of getting by, if only for 28 weeks. While the cross-sectional nature of this study did not allow for follow-up interviews with participants, recent research has demonstrated the dangers of these resistive efforts to claim CERB, epitomized by recent moves by the Canadian state to recoup funds that were dispensed to those who did not qualify according to their restrictive criteria (Alini, 2024). This was presaged by Talia, who was dissuaded from applying because she feared governmental retribution: “I heard you have to, like, pay wads of money back to people.”

Conclusion: Towards a networked understanding of interfaces of precarity

Drawing on the experiences of unhoused youth in Toronto, this study develops interfaces of precarity as a theoretical construct to map the mutually constitutive and multiscalar relations between precarious work and other dimensions. Returning to the article’s epigraph, experiences of work—for Erin and other participants in this study—could not be siloed from other facets of life. Indeed, participants in this article highlight a co-productive relationship between housing, social supports, and work—material dimensions of life that were most prominent in the sample and resonate with earlier research on unhoused young people in Canada (Gaetz et al., 2016). Previous empirical literature on precarity has frequently examined questions of labour, housing, and other material dimensions of life as distinct areas of inquiry to identify the structural and affective insecurities that increasingly characterize these domains (inter alia, Chang and Behrendt, 2025; Ferreri and Vasudevan, 2019; Joronen and Griffiths, 2019). Others have explored precarious work’s interlinkages, including among unhoused youth, demonstrating the adverse effects of precarious work on access to housing (given insecure and unstable incomes) and the inadequacy of state supports to sustainably transition unhoused people into long-term independent housing (Shier et al., 2012; Wirth, 2021). By assuming an approach attentive to the microspaces and ephemeral moments of work (Ettlinger, 2007), as well as the integrative framework for theorizing precarity offered by Butler (2004) and others, this article builds on these largely unidirectional analyses by foregrounding the spatiotemporally contingent collisions through which precarious life is co-produced and differentially experienced through work, housing, and social supports, bridging structural conditions and everyday vulnerabilities. Through this lens, work experiences are analyzed not as bounded to a particular set of workplace relations, but rather in relation to a wider constellation of social, material, and institutional conditions that shape, and are shaped by, work.

In addition to representing an empirical contribution—highlighting the primacy of housing and social supports in co-producing the work experiences of unhoused youth—these interfaces also help to extend precarity studies more broadly, materially grounding the “slipperiness” of multidimensional approaches to precarity and expanding scholarly understandings of precarity’s relational character. Much of the recent literature on multidimensional and ontological precarity has emerged from Butler’s (2004) notion of precariousness, or the inherently relational interdependence of human and non-human life. When precariousness is unevenly distributed under capitalism, this relation becomes striated, epitomized by Lorey’s (2015) notion of “relational difference,” differentially positioning subjects vis-a-vis vulnerability. Theoretical scholarship on precarious work, similarly, has emphasized employment precarity on a continuum, with different conditions of work existing in relation to one another in ways that are co-productive (Strauss and McGrath, 2017). This article continues this attention to relationality to demonstrate the dynamics between different material domains of workers’ lives, with housing and social supports engaging in a reciprocal relationship with work. These interactions also had implications for participants’ feelings of insecurity and disrupted their orientations to futurity, demonstrating the imbrication of the affective register in these material interfaces (van Lanen, 2021; Worth, 2016).

Interfaces of precarity, accordingly, reveal the multiscalarity of these co-constitutive relations. Present in Rohan’s experience of the interface between housing and work, for instance, are a range of determinative factors; shelter policies prohibiting indoor bike storage, legal misclassifications of gig workers as independent contractors, and broader conditions of racial capitalism structuring platform economies (Gebrial, 2024), among other factors, operating simultaneously as insecure housing and working conditions came together to deepen and protract precarity in both domains. The scale of the body and the affective register are implicated here too, with these objective conditions intertwined with subjective feelings of insecurity, isolation, and uncertain futures. Interfaces of precarity thus not only demonstrate the relationality between life domains but also capture the dynamic scalar relations at play in these moments of collision. This offers both a grounded account of, and tool for capturing, the complex topology Lauren Berlant enumerates in their taxonomy of precarity, which captures diverse experiences and relations ranging from those that inhere in the body to political-economic processes of global capitalism (Puar, 2012).

While this article shows how interfaces of work with housing and social supports are meaningful, they also necessarily braid together into networks of precarious life dimensions. Indeed, interfaces of precarity, as a theoretical construct, facilitate analyses that expand our understanding of precarious work as mutually constituted in relation with other material dimensions of life. The term interface is employed to capture this relationality, in which different dimensions interact in ways that are co-productive. This continues the work of Strauss and McGrath (2017) and others, who methodically unpack the co-productive dynamics of migration and precarious work arrangements, revealing the grounded richness of analyzing work in relation to other dimensions of life. A corollary of this analytic utility, however, is a limitation: namely, that interfaces presented here are limited to dyadic partnerships. Future research could continue the inquiries contained in this article to consider the constitutive role of other domains, including healthcare, kinship networks, and education, but also how these interfaces network and interact at various nexuses to move beyond these productive, if limited, dyads.

The consequences of analytic siloes are not merely academic. Social services and organizations that attempt to redress some of the violences and injustices highlighted by participants in this study are also frequently “siloed.” At shelters, employment services are often separate, physically and/or administratively, from those addressing housing (Diamond, 2020). Unions who focus exclusively on so-called bread and butter issues to the neglect of broader questions of social justice figure similarly (Scipes, 2014). Unbounding precarity invites us to think through what unbounded responses might entail: workplace integration social enterprises (WISEs) partnering with shelters and social workers. Labour unions working with community organizations and social movements, including housing advocates and tenant unions, to advance social and economic justice beyond the workplaces they represent. Indeed, these efforts are already underway, in social unionist movements and WISEs, including in Toronto (Leslie et al., 2024; Ross, 2007). In essence, a consideration of interfaces of precarity necessitates treating a multidimensional problem as such in the pursuit of radical social transformation.