Abstract
This research explores the conditions of parents in precarious employment in Italy (European Union) with an emphasis on (but not confined to) mothers from non-European Union countries of origin. The aim is to construct a critical understanding of the material conditions of workers and parents in precarious employment and their everyday struggles to achieve employment and income security, when this income security can be achieved only through the sale of labour-power in gendered and racialised labour markets. Their everyday lives are marked by their conditions of bearers of labour-power and crucially these precarious social conditions produce a pressure which tends to reduce precarious workers’ lives to ‘bare life’. Bare life is connected to the ‘bare minimum’ that these participants get in terms of income. This study aims to give a new interpretation to the concept of bare minimum through which precarious parents must arrange their lives. Gendered and racialising processes take place through the struggles around this ‘minimum’.
Introduction
Parents in precarious employment are the subjects of this research, which places a particular focus on (but not limited to) mothers from racialised backgrounds, their vulnerability and strength through this type of employment condition. One of the main themes of the study is that parents as precarious workers need to deal with the insecurity of income: they can only rely on wage labour in a labour market which is for them unpredictable. So, workers and parents in precarious employment often face meagre material conditions. They find themselves in these conditions because they tend to get the ‘bare minimum’ out of their paid employment: observations about ‘bare minimum’ are advanced in a number of studies on the gendered and racialised processes of the constitution of the working classes (Ferguson & McNally 2015; Gore & LeBaron 2019; Jubany & Lázaro-Castellanos 2021; Olivera-Bustamante et al. 2015), where it refers to the economic and political downwards pressure on wages, which only allows for minimal standards of living.
The argument of this article is that precarious workers as parents enact everyday struggles to get the ‘bare minimum’ of an income but also struggle against the reduction of their life to simple labour-power, and therefore against the reduction of their lives to ‘bare life’ (Ferguson & McNally 2015: 17). The mobilisation of the concept of ‘labour-power’ is central because an entire class of people are tendentially reduced to their simple capacity to work in order to get an income (Holloway 2010). This research on ‘precarious parents’ aims at understanding the everyday struggles of workers, who also have care work to accomplish.
There are a few studies on how job insecurity creates harsher conditions for workers through gendered and racialised processes (Agarwala & Chun 2018; Coppola et al. 2007; Ferguson & McNally 2015; Jubany & Lázaro-Castellanos 2021). However, these do not fully explore the ‘daily struggles’ of workers, parents, migrants and natives. Recent re-framings of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), as in the 2019 special issue of Capital & Class, 43(4), are particularly suited to this research because they understand ‘household structure, culture, and the economy’ as practices acted out by individuals, who reproduce them as well as challenge them (Bakker & Gill 2019: 516). Exactly because ‘race’ and gender are dynamic social processes, linked to ‘the economy’ and to the racialisation and gendering of labour markets (Bhattacharya 2017; Luxton 2006), this research shows that even ‘natives’ Italian men are not immune from the marginalising effects of these social processes.
Italy (European Union (EU)) was chosen as the site for this study because of its particular socio-economic circumstances. The country has been one of the points of destination into the EU for migrants during the 2010s. During this time, new generations have been pushed into precarity, while at the same time capital has been relying on immigrant labour to fill under-paid jobs in informal/unregulated sectors (Giannini 2016; IDOS 2019; Sacchetto & Vianello 2013). Moreover, the ‘familistic’ nature of the Italian welfare state has created an important convergence between native Italian and immigrant female labourers (Marra 2012). Italy has always been considered an important social ‘laboratory’ (Bouffartigue et al. 2017), where the social conditions of employment, labour-capital conflicts and social struggles often assume a European relevance. These conditions inform the background analysis of this study.
Precarious work and labour-power
Precarisation as socio-economic process produces worlds heavily segmented through gender and ethnic background as well as class (Agarwala & Chun 2018; Ba’ 2019; Ferguson & McNally 2015; Gore & LeBaron 2019; Shammas 2018). Indeed, in feminist political economy the concept of ‘precarious work’ describes the feminisation and racialisation of labour markets as well as the gendered division of care work (Luxton 2006). The specific ways through which the precarisation of employment is linked to gendered and racialised social processes are often analysed through macro-economic perspectives (Ferguson & McNally 2015) which tend to leave out the social elements of daily struggles (Kearsey 2020). So, while recent studies suggest that a close analysis of precarity allows an integrated approach to the ‘race-gender structures as the grounds of class privilege’ (Jubany & Lázaro-Castellanos 2021: 6), to the best of our knowledge little research aims at advancing an analysis of the general aspects of precarity as gendered and racialised work in conjunction with ‘structures of class privilege’ (for recent contributions in this area: Agarwala & Chun 2018; Stevano et al. 2021). This article differs from previous studies on this matter in the sense that it tries to construct a critical understanding of the material conditions of workers/parents in precarious employment and their everyday struggles to achieve income security, when this income security can be achieved only through the sale of labour-power (Holloway 2010) in gendered and racialised labour markets (Ferguson & McNally 2015). The everyday struggles of workers and parents in precarious conditions are often overlooked in favour of the analysis of the ‘logic of capital’. In this article, mobilising the concept of labour-power will facilitate the focus on these struggles, which necessarily reflect the efforts of workers and carers to achieve income security linked to gendered and racialised jobs.
The concept of ‘labour-power’ is considered crucial because it refers to the simple capacity or potential of a human being to work. Marx links this potential to the bodily organism and specifies that it is a potential because it is not developed in any special way (Marx 1990: 135). This is crucial because of the reference to the simple potentiality of the human being and because of this apparent reduction of the human being to its un-qualified bodily capacities (Adorno 2019). So, in line with author’s own definition (Ba’ 2019), precarity can then be understood as ‘a field of social relations whereby workers as bearers of labour-power feel the pressure of insecurity and freedom to conform to an established understanding of work as competitive individual business’ (after Bonefeld 2014). Precarisation is predicated on the social enforcement of this economic understanding and SRT conceptualises this pressure as broad class pressure (Bhattacharya 2017). Following this insight, here racialisation and gendered processes are considered as not separated from the broader class pressure (Agarwala & Chun 2018; Bannerji 2005; Roberts 2017; Shammas 2018).
This definition of precarity is distinct from a structuralist understanding of precarisation, which stresses the socio-economic changes in ‘regimes of governance’ (Bernards 2018), whereby post-welfare ‘regimes of accumulation’ engenders a breakdown of Fordist industrial relations, drives down wages and can be associated with market-driven vulnerability (Kalleberg 2018). These approaches leave little agency to the working classes. Despite different theoretical frames of reference, our definition is closer to Standings’ (2011: 9) understanding of precarity as casual employment, which features at its heart temporal uncertainty. This temporal insecurity is here linked to the daily struggles of a class that can only sell their labour-power in order to ‘buy’ security and get the ‘means of subsistence’. For Vosko (2010: 2) and for feminist political economy, precarious worlds are those developing through wage-work combined with social processes linked to the necessity of ‘the majority of people [to] subsist by combining paid employment and unpaid domestic labour’ (Luxton 2006: 37). This broader understanding of the working class emphasises processes of class formation (Weeks 2011: 19), as well as gendered and racialising processes (Bhattacharya 2017). This formulation drawn from SRT does not privilege class over gender or ‘race’ but aims to consider social processes of classification based on work and on what counts as value-producing work. Therefore, ‘the pressure of insecurity and freedom’ is from the outset gendered and racialised in historical terms: Dalla Costa (1995: 10) links the period of ‘primitive accumulation’ to this historical background, when ‘the un-free, un-waged woman worker’ was formed for ‘the production and reproduction of labour-power’ (see also: Federici 2020). Recent studies on ‘primitive labour markets’ (Roberts 2017) and reproduction of unfree labour (Gore & LeBaron 2019), as well as the re-conceptualisation of the ‘lumpen’ category in Marx (Villanova 2021), provide further conceptual articulation of this pressure on women and racialised people. Precarious work as gendered and racialised work is then closely connected with the ways in which this class of people become the bearers of labour-power; thus, the way they deal with the pressure of insecurity and reproduce their social conditions constitutes the conceptual area in which this research is set.
The social reproduction of ‘normality’ and the reproduction of ‘bare life’
In this study, the reduction of workers to their labour-power will frame the analysis of workers who are in precarious employment and have parental (reproductive) responsibilities. This framing suggests the need for conceptualising the social reproduction of precarious work.
How does this social reproduction take place? The primacy of the economic over the social, and of issues of class over those of gender or other exclusionary social processes, represents theoretical dilemmas that have been debated for a long time (e.g. Aruzza 2013; Mojab 2015). Thus, there is a need to clarify the position of this study on whether there is an ontological primacy of labour in commodity production over the care work which generates social life. In their section, ‘Ontology and reification’, Bakker and Gill (2019) are right in observing that a methodological separation of commodity production and social reproduction leads to reifying one sphere over the other. However, there is also the substantial problem that commodity production is developed through the reification of the relations of production and the personification of commodities (in primis labour-power) that are to be exchanged (Bonefeld 2014): it is thus not possible to completely unveil reification in either sphere. This conceptual contradiction refers to a social contradiction (Adorno 2019), a contradiction in re. Indeed, Federici (2012: 99) insists on the ‘double character’ of reproductive work, a general human activity that valorises human beings in terms of integration (in the labour market, in capital), but also works against it. Here, this double character is fundamental to understanding how workers as parents reproduce the conditions of their subordination as much as they reproduce their life (and the life of others, that is, children). Thus, social reproduction is reproduction of ‘normality’ in all its conflictual aspects, including the reproduction of precarity as normality. This antinomic approach is necessary to frame gendered and racialised processes around precarity as processes of ‘reification’: that is, processes that tend to operate a transformation of the life of workers into bare labour-power (Federici 2020; Rioux 2015).
Following Federici (2012, 2020), the concept of labour-power is used to advance an understanding of this conflictual side of social life: that is, the struggles happening in the everyday social life of people who need to get by and care for others (see also: Ba’ 2019). In their study of precarious migrant and social reproduction, Ferguson and McNally (2015: 17) identify the pressure of an exploitative system imposing conditions whereby only the social reproduction of ‘bare life’ of the working class can possibly take place. Exactly because it is about the reproduction of ‘bare life’, this framing has the potential to highlight everyday struggles around the ‘bear minimum’ of income, wages and job security. Then, this ‘bare minimum’ refers to a materialist concept and points to a need for empirical research exploring the ‘plurality of life forms’ linked to social reproduction of the working classes (Bakker & Gill 2019: 517). Studies about racialised labour and gendered processes of exploitation clearly establish that precarity ‘forms a part of modern colonial capitalism and gender identity’ in a way that ‘women workers in particular are constructed . . . as a racialised surplus’ (Jubany & Lázaro-Castellanos 2021: 1; also see: Ferguson & McNally 2015). While not disputing these conclusions, this study aims at documenting forms of everyday struggles against the reduction of life to the bare minimum. Through the dialectical use of ‘bare life’ and its reproduction, this exploratory research aims to frame this very reproduction as the site of struggle.
De-naturalising the ‘economic’ and dialectical notions around the ‘bare minimum’
As outlined above, SRT (Bakker & Gill 2019; Bhattacharya 2017; Ferguson & McNally 2015; Stevano et al. 2021) and the work of Marxist-feminist scholars such as Federici (2012, 2020) elaborate a dynamic and broad concept of class where gendered and racialised dimensions feature centrally. As such, SRT provides a rigorous, critical frame for analysing paid work (whether secure or precarious) and for taking into consideration care and reproductive work. Intersectionality theory could equally be productively used to unpack the findings of this research; however, the above-mentioned framing of a general working class as defined by feminist political economy (Luxton 2006: 37; Roberts 2017) shifts the focus on a ‘pulsating system’ of social relations (McNally 2017: 107) underpinning wage relation and labour market contexts that are directly oppressive. Such a critical framing is perhaps less analytical than intersectionality, but here it is considered more useful because the radical insight of SRT recognises that the ‘economic’ is not a natural part of society and that the work that goes into the production of the ‘economy’ is gendered and racialised work (Bhattacharya 2017). Within this frame, there are studies that directly explore the merging of exclusionary social processes (of gender and ‘race’) through the precarisation of work (Agarwala & Chun 2018; Coppola et al. 2007; Ferguson & McNally 2015; Jubany & Lázaro-Castellanos 2021). However, these studies do not centralise the concept of labour-power, its reproduction and all the contradictions bursting through the social formation of this particular ‘commodity’. Yet, other studies suggest that the question of labour is crucial: for instance, Arat-Koc’s (2006: 86) research on migrant labour in Canada and its racialisation challenges liberal-feminist thinking, which, while ‘denaturalising motherhood’, ends up naturalising ‘forced separation of migrants from their families abroad’ on the basis of (naturalised) ‘economic forces’.
For this research, ‘labour-power’ as a concept combines two functions: it shows that as a special commodity, it impacts the lives of its bearers with effects that are often determined by histories of racialised and gendered exploitation (Ceceña 2014; Federici 2020). Labour-power also refers to the power with which its bearers are endowed: the power to create from below, to create for valorisation but also for life (Holloway 2010).
SRT is particularly relevant as it refers to a dialectic between the reproduction of ‘bare life’ (as explored above) and the sense of ‘dignified’ standards of social life, which emerge in studies about racialised women’s opposition to exploitation (Olivera-Bustamante et al. 2015: 378). Using qualitative data, this study aims to explore the dialectic between obtaining the bare minimum for reproducing labour-power and the everyday struggles against being reduced to ‘bare life’. While combining class analysis with gender and race lenses is not uncommon, we claim that dialectical notions around ‘bare minimum’ (and labour-power) as conceptualised above constitute the modest original contribution of this research.
The counter-stories of parents in precarious employment
The research was conducted in Central Italy (Umbria) during summer 2019 using qualitative methods, specifically semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The aim was to collect accounts about personal and collective experiences, as well as conflictual and alternative points of view from those who directly experience precarious conditions. Thus, the data collection and analysis was inspired by the method of ‘counter-story telling’ of Critical Race Methodology (CRM) (Solórzano & Yosso 2002).
When recruiting participants, we approached state-owned job centres, local primary and middle schools that routinely use substitute teachers, a local Charity (Caritas) that provides support to care and domestic workers and the local trade union, which supports workers in casual employment. Central Italy, especially Umbria, experienced a long period of recession following the 2008 financial crisis, which undermined traditionally stable sectors, casualising employment for many lines of work. So, 15 mothers and five fathers took part. Criteria for taking part in this research were (1) having a non-standard, fixed-term or seasonal contract and (2) having caring responsibilities for at least one child. No specific ethnic background was required at the outset; however, the researchers knew that many service users of the local Charity Caritas were from North-African origin, and that there was a good chance that many of them would participate in the research. Eight of the participants were ‘native Italian’ and 12 were of non-EU origin: eight from North Africa and four from the Balkans. Among the female participants, five were single parents. All the other participants were married, a smaller proportion cohabiting. The age of their children varied from a few months to late adolescence. Each of the participants was interviewed at home for approximately 1 hour. Pseudonyms are used in this article. Participants’ occupations were temporary factory workers, care assistants, domestic workers or employed as labourers in the agricultural and construction sector. Administration workers at a Job Centre, socio-cultural mediators and teaching assistants also participated to this research. Even in this small qualitative sample, there is a tendency towards the racialisation and gendering of precarious work in low paid sectors such as social care, cleaning and agriculture.
Interview topics ranged from concerns about family life and caring to work vicissitudes, including employment and financial difficulties. Whenever appropriate, direct questions about racism were asked. Questions about employment tended to elicit an overall narrative of work life, which also reflected personal stories. Definitions and understanding of ‘family’ were left up to the participants: the large majority decided to focus on narratives of caring for children.
In this article, the accounts of ‘native’ Italians are mixed with those of participants from non-EU origin to avoid essentialising the ‘race’ of the interviewees, or to give them any sort of ‘authenticity’ on the basis of their skin colour or accent (Delgado Bernal 2016). The purpose is then to tap into singular accounts of people facing precarity in different circumstances. Although singular, these accounts often carry with them a collective sense, a memory that is not just individual and the exposition of these counter-stories aims to document how racialising and gendered processes are not simply an issue for people ‘of race’ and women. According to Solórzano and Yosso (2002: 32), counter-story is a method of telling the stories of those people whose views are not often told (i.e. those on the margins of society) and here the counter-story method comes to match the substantive issues of this research. Following this methodology, the subjective accounts of the participants can and should be taken as reflections of personal and collective practices of people facing exclusionary social processes. This ‘possible’ dimension of collective reflection (Delgado Bernal 2016) on practices allowed making general claims for this study, which are nonetheless to be taken as exploratory claims given the small-medium scale of this qualitative research. Broader epistemological assumptions are crucial to justify the claims made here: CRM assumes that no research starts from a tabula rasa (Solórzano and Yosso 2002), so accounts from participants are never simply statements of facts or reflection on lived experience. Their accounts assume the meaning of counter-stories because they tap into existing social struggles and substantiate the ‘cultural intuition’ of the critical theorist (Delgado Bernal 2016). Of course, this ‘cultural intuition’ needs to be framed within the reflexivity of the methodology itself, which in this case may be ‘charged’ with subjectivism. Here, reflexivity within the critical methodological procedure follows the awareness that not only there is ‘no knowledge without human interest’, but that cognition itself cannot be separated from the reflexive understanding of suffering and pain of people at the margins (Adorno 2005 (1951)). It is thus not ‘tragic knowledge’ what this exploratory research is after, rather the critique of existing social relations (Adorno 1990 (1966), 2019). CRM’s epistemological assumptions would reject accusations of subjectivism, maintaining that ‘every little piece (of social life) contains the macrocosm in the microcosm’ (Bannerji 2005: 146). This epistemological stance is suited to in-depth exploratory research; hence during the following exposition of our empirical material, singular episodes and particular stories will receive special analytical attention, as a way to explore general trends operating inside particular instances and particular subjects (following the ‘micro-logical’ approach of Walter Benjamin (1981)).
Migrants’ and natives’ normality between crisis and daily struggles
Sergio Tischler (2020) understands critical theory as the ‘perspective of the negated scream of humanity in the categories of political economy’ (p. 144). It is possible to hear this scream between the lines of participants’ accounts: economic precarity then appears as something that has always existed, not only from their purely personal point of view. The act of recollecting their individual past becomes the mirror for a marginalised collective history. Following the conceptual frame indicated above, it is important here to present simultaneously the accounts of natives and migrants. Franco is an Italian ‘native’, father of one, cohabiting with the mother of his son and has a university degree. He is a socio-cultural mediator and his occupation is dependent on short-term projects funded by local administrations.
For how long have you been in precarious employment?
Bachar is of North African origin; he is married and father of three; his income depends on casual work in the agricultural and construction sectors. It has not always been like that his employment conditions have deteriorated since the economic crisis of 2008–2010. This outcome has been quite typical for migrants living in Italy (see IDOS 2019; Sacchetto & Vianello 2013). Bachar moved from Morocco to Italy more than 20 years ago; he feels well integrated in the local area; however, he says,
Bachar uses the plural: he reconnects his accounts to a collective memory (see also: Marra 2012). His accounts of how they have managed to have some semblance of normality (and even a degree of happiness) despite their meagre material conditions reflect a ‘counter-story’ about everyday personal and collective struggles. There is a similarity with Franco’s accounts who, despite coming from what can be described as a conventional middle-class background, reveals the effects of precarisation in the following way:
What is the major obstacle that prevents you from doing the job you have been trained for?
These accounts transmit a sense of antagonism: for them, precarity has always been the case, although they implicitly suggest that it should not be ‘normal’. In that sense, the accounts from a native and from an immigrant can be considered in the same counter-story, which is about stating that ‘it is not a personal problem’. They struggle against the conditions of precarious employment; it is a daily struggle to make things work for them and for the people they care for. Their struggles are different but involve the same absence of secure wage-earning.
Sonia narrates a different, gendered condition of precarity. She is a native Italian and works in administration at a Job Centre. She is married (her husband is a warehouse worker) and they have two young daughters. In the interview on precarious work and family life, she narrates about the difficulties of having a contract that expires at the end of every year, the problems that it generates and the obstacles it imposes on planning for the long term. However, her accounts convey a sense that she has a normal life, with a normal job and a normal family. Sonia narrates that she is able to accomplish a decent standard of life for her children and that, in the end, her job is ‘not too bad’, especially if compared with the precarity that some people coming from outside the EU may experience. However, most of the care work that goes on inside her family is performed by her. During her non-work time, she ‘dedicates all the attention to the girls’. As she and her husband both work full time, the normality of family life requires precise planning and preparation: Sonia gets up at 5.30 every morning to prepare for the day ahead, from school items for the children to the meal for the evening. Thus, despite the positive tone of her accounts, her story about everyday life illustrates that her ‘normal life’ requires dedication, commitment and care work. This is a gendered work that is put in place to ensure the smooth-running of family life (Giannini 2016).
Racialisation, precarisation and daily struggles
In the previous section, similarities between natives and immigrants were considered within stories of daily struggles ‘in and against’ precarious employment (Holloway 2010), where the ‘normality’ of family life requires the gendered work of mothers. In this section, the accounts of two sisters from Tunisia are analysed in depth to provide an exploration of process of precarisation and racialisation. Through the micro-analysis of these two cases, this exploratory research aims to investigate how the macrocosm of gendered and racialising processes maybe contained in the microcosm of these two participants (Bannerji 2005: 146). Their accounts report of harsh working conditions and financial difficulties which are very common for the rest of our racialised participants.
Samira, the older, has a university degree in Literature from her country of origin, but since she has been in Italy (for 20 years), she has experienced years of precarious employment in a number of sectors. She is currently employed as support staff for the Red Cross. She has one teenaged son; her husband died in a work-related accident. She works with a company that has the ‘legal license to hire and fire at will’. She is not paid regularly and she works long shifts of 12 hours; moreover, ‘the wages are not really enough to get by’. Being a widow since her son was a toddler, she has found the task of being a mother extremely tough. Precarious work, with unreliable payment, is a major source of anxiety. She also reports that there are times when she finds it difficult to see her son during the day. The experience of direct racism features in her narrative and she reports old racists tropes of the kind: ‘keep quiet and be thankful that you have a job’. She is accused of taking jobs from Italian natives and because of that she feels she has to work doubly hard to demonstrate that she is a good and committed worker (see also Ferrero & Perocco 2011).
Her younger sister Bochra has been in Italy for a shorter period. She has a high school certificate and has been trained in tailoring in her native country. After a period as a barmaid, she now works in a factory as a tailor-worker; however, the wage is barely enough to get by. She has a 2-year-old daughter, but the father has been unemployed since her birth and now she is divorcing him for a series of personal and financial reasons. Bochra narrates difficulties in childbirth: the labour was so hard that she went into 3 days of a coma. Contrary to her sister, Bochra said that she did not encounter racism.
Rather than assuming they simply had two different experiences, or different personalities in confronting the same conditions, it is useful to assume that both sisters struggled against racialisation in different ways. Bochra presented her story in an emphatic and defiant language, which can be summarised as follows: she has decided what to do in her life, it was all her choice, and all the ‘accidents’ which happened to her are just ‘accidents’, nothing that can change her as a person. For instance, she narrates her relationship with her husband and the decision to initiate and pursue the divorce as an act to gain more independence and more control over her life. She proudly proclaims herself an ‘optimist’ and despises those who always complain about work. On the contrary, Samira’s accounts tell of a racism that can only scandalise rather than offend her. Her counter-stories of racism metaphorically hold a mirror against it to show it as monolithic and irrational; these counter-stories try to avert its medusa-like petrifying gaze. While narrating episodes of racism, she dismisses them, as if they were beneath her dignity. She states that racism is a ‘war between poor’, and in narrating her stories she systematically refers to a hierarchical structure existing within her sector that exploits people while diverting attention to inessential factors (that is: foreigners vs natives, see: Ferrero & Perocco 2011).
Within the circumscribed qualitative approach developed here, it may be possible to read that these counter-stories narrate struggles against precarity and racialisation, and implicitly refer to a ‘dignified life’ that Critical Race researchers find in indigenous communities who struggle against exploitation and state-sponsored racism (Ceceña 2014; Olivera-Bustamante et al. 2015). The circumstances are obviously different, but here it is important to stress the element of ‘struggle’, while the reference to ‘dignified life’ is implicit, or ‘negative’ (Tischler 2009) in the sense that without it, there would be simple adaptation on the part of participants. These two sisters ‘answer’ to the conditions of racism in personal terms. However, this exploratory analysis suggests that struggle against the very concept of racism and an implicit sense of dignity are key elements. In the same way, working-class people struggle to avoid the ‘misery’ of being objectified within the conditions of pure labour-power (Holloway 2010).
This section proposed an interpretation of participants’ accounts as counter-stories about struggles through precarisation and against the de-humanising effects of the racialisation of work. These counter-stories may be framed as futile subjective struggles only at the price of accepting the point of view of capital, whereby the power of living labour (workers’ general social activities) ‘costs the workers nothing’, as it may be regarded as their ‘natural property’ (Marx 1993: 269). Accepting their narratives as counter-stories makes sense of the daily struggle of people at the margin, exactly when they struggle to construct social life ‘from below’.
Motherhood through precarity
In this section, gendered and racialised aspects of precarious work are interrogated more closely, comparing the stories of native Italian and immigrant mothers who are in precarious employment. This is crucial because framing ‘the worker’ as wage labourer and as care worker aims at complicating the stereotypical features of the working class, usually depicted as White, male, factory workers (Bakker & Gill 2019; Jubany & Lázaro-Castellanos 2021). The pressure on workers to valorise labour’s activities is not new, but through precarity it is felt in more immediate terms, and also in different terms, according to gender and ‘race’. The study of the difficulties of working for wages in precarious employment while also caring for children allows an exploration of ‘the social reproduction of normality’ as formulated in the theoretical sections. The physical and conceptual point where these two sets of social activities meet is the point when mothers return to work after a not-so-generous maternity leave (sometimes unpaid). The accounts of the separation of the new mother returning to work and the child going to nursery for the first-time present similarities for the Italian and the immigrant mothers:
Oh God, in the first few days, they [nursery staff] told me. . . how much she cried . . . and then after, after the first twenty days . . . the first day she did not cry. . . that I left her. . . she told me: ‘Bye mum’. . . then I left. . . that day. . . cannot tell you how much I have wept!
In a similar narrative, Monica (teaching assistant, married, mother of one daughter) tells the interviewer how heartbroken she was when, returning to work, she had to leave her child to the care of a nursery – her daughter ‘so tiny’ in the hands of others. This kind of narrative can be framed as part of the modern ‘motherhood discourse’, in the sense that mothers, in an interview, have to show that they are responsible mothers and deserve the badge of ‘good mothers’. Uncritical acceptance of this discourse may overlook the un-freedom existing for mothers in the ‘private sphere’, whether they are in secure or precarious employment. It is reported here nonetheless because of a clearly stated general experience of pain when participants leave their babies behind. In comparison with mothers in secure employment, these workers have to literally gamble that they are not going to be made redundant; hence, the decision to go back to work and leave their children to be cared for carries more risks. Within the free-market society, the knot of freedom and un-freedom may be an insoluble contradiction reflecting the historical condition of mothers/carers as unwaged workers in a waged economy (Dalla Costa 1995). Exactly because they formulate contradictory and conflictual experiences, these narratives are all the more salient in qualifying the ‘normality’ of everyday conflicts.
It is crucial to add that the pain of separation for mother and child following maternity leave is certainly general. However, the interpretation of these accounts does not imply that all mothers would prefer to stay home with their children. For the research participants, the issue was the conditions of returning to work after maternity leave, which was ‘very soon’ for Bochra (on the pain of seeing her income reduced drastically) and was linked to the unmissable ‘opportunity of a seasonal contract’ for Monica. Given the circumstances of a non-generous welfare system regulating maternity leave, especially for mothers in non-standard contracts (Marra 2012; Roberts 2017), these narratives imply that their labour-time must be exchanged for the ‘minimum’ of an income and that this exchange limits their personal freedom (Holloway 2010).
Federici (2012) insists on the ‘dual character and the contradiction inherent in reproductive labour’ (p. 99). Bochra and Monica are mothers who through precarity reproduce labour-power as well as producing commodities (clothes) or services (teaching children). But their accounts hint at something different, a different social order: their accounts can only make sense if there are ‘externally imposed standards’ (Federici 2012: 99) against which they struggle, that is, they have a desire to exert more control over their time. Reporting their accounts through this frame suggests conflicts and contradictions that have political significance (Federici 2012: 99). These struggles are to be connected with the reproduction of and antagonism against the ‘bare minimum’ discussed in the theoretical sections of this article.
Precarity, normality and bare life
This section investigates how the concept of ‘bare minimum’ can make sense of participants’ accounts of everyday life. As discussed in the theoretical sections, within precarious employment, the ‘bare minimum’ is that which is given to racialised and gendered labour power to reproduce itself, to reproduce its ‘bare life’.
While the migrants and non-natives maintain that there is always food at the table and that often holidays are arranged, at the same time, they tell of financial difficulties in paying utility bills and having to get help from the local Charities. In time of crisis, these participants are not able to send their children to the local swimming pool or to afford the fees for school trips. They ‘get by’ and report of having constant worries about employment insecurity, which means income insecurity. They narrate of a normal life arranged through difficulties. However, through their narratives, it is possible to interpret ‘counter-stories’ about what their normal life should imply: normal life should be food on the table and bills sorted. Normal life should also be about being able to send children to the swimming pool and on school trips. So, if, on one hand, precarious employment and racialisation produce a social pressure on their lives towards ‘bare life’ (Ferguson and McNally 2015: 17), towards a life which simply reproduces itself and the labour-power for the workplace, on the other hand there is a sense that a ‘normal life’ should be something different, something less precarious: this is also what they struggle for. Thus, normality here is framed within the concept of the ‘bare minimum’, a minimum which is open to contestation through their daily struggles (Federici 2012).
Despite the difficulties that participants of non-EU origin face working and living in a foreign country, while also devoting much of their ‘free’ time to the care of their offspring, their stories are not centred on recriminations or self-pity. They describe a labour market that is becoming increasingly difficult for them (Ferrero & Perocco 2011; IDOS 2019) because ‘there aren’t any jobs out there. . . not even for the Italians’ (Bochra). Marginalisation on the basis of their backgrounds emerges indirectly, for instance, when Bachar says that ‘we do not bother anyone’, so ensuring the interviewer understands that they are a family who conducts a ‘normal’ life in that provincial part of Central Italy. Implicit in this account is the awareness of stereotypes of North African families coming to Italy, ‘stealing jobs’ and resources from the natives, and creating difficulties for the local social order (see also: Ferrero & Perocco 2011). These accounts outline how there is an imposed racialised understanding that ‘normal jobs’ are for native Italians.
For the racialised group of participants, this normality through precarity has a root in the labour-power they sell to the local employers. For instance, while Bochra and Samira describe their work life, the interviewer asks about experiences of racism: so Bochra narrates her lack of experiences of racism, but her sister Samira maintains that she did experience it although she explains that they work in different sectors:
She (Bochra) works in a factory, it is not that she works in another sector. . .
Here it is possible to see how Samira displays an awareness of the pressure on workers and therefore pressure on their labour-power. The above quote is not a factual proof that ‘labour is exploited’, but it shows an awareness that as long as their labour-power is fruitfully employed ‘inside’ the commodity production sphere, then it can only be treated as equal to other labour-power and their bearers. So, the kindness of the bosses towards Bochra (reported during her interview) may be motivated as much by their humanity as by their stakes in her capacity to produce surplus value.
So, the exacerbation of insecurity is experienced as pressure on their standards of life, as a reduction of their life to ‘bare life’ and hence the potential reduction of their lives to simple living labour-power (Federici 2012). Nonetheless, the participants show an agency that is based on their daily struggles, struggles enacted through the pressure of precarious employment and through their confrontations with racialised and gendered labour markets. These struggles may produce relative achievements. For instance, Samira tells of an individual long-term struggle to recover and regain what has been eroded by precarity and marginalisation: the loss of her home environment, her home-acquired qualifications and the loss of her husband (who died in a work-related accident). Her life trajectory and her struggles are not uncommon (see IDOS 2019; Sacchetto & Vianello 2013): Samira’s determination is especially shown in the way she has been struggling to secure a stable upbringing for her only son, prioritising his educational attainment in Italy and sending him to university. She can claim some success, despite being in precarious employment, having to get by with a low, insecure income. On the basis of narratives (and counter-stories) of this kind, it is possible to say that even in precarious employment, and through gendered and racialised labour markets, participants show the determination not to be overwhelmed by unfavourable circumstances: this determination is here linked to their everyday struggles.
Normality as precarious condition can hurt: Elira is Albanian, but settled in Italy more than 20 years ago, she is a single mother of a 6-year-old and now works as a domestic cleaner. Elira has seen ‘better days’ in terms of employment: she used to be a small business owner, managing a local children’s clothes and accessories shop. After the economic crisis of 2008–2010, she had to close it down and faced a long period of uncertainty in employment as well as in personal terms because she went through a divorce. Elira’s accounts are quite dark and pessimistic; she cannot see how she will get out of precarity, while her living standards are being eroded. Other participants, native Italians, expressed dark thoughts about the future too; for instance, Fabio (native Italian, administrator in a job centre, married and father of one) concludes his interview expressing bitter pessimism about the future, although he reported material circumstances which are far more comfortable than Elira’s. These thoughts can be dismissed on psychological grounds as a sign of understandable human anxiety about the future. This echoes other studies about precarity where the future comes forth as an ominous temporality (Ba’ 2019; Giannini 2016). Nonetheless, these accounts tell of the real possibility of precarious livelihoods becoming permanent or even degenerating into poverty. This fear of not being able to succeed, of descending into a state of pure helplessness, must be linked with the constant pressure these participants feel about the reduction of their own value to the valorisation of their labour-power (their capacity to work in wage labour). These accounts are counter-stories and not simply ‘lived experience’: as well as anguish, such thoughts convey reflections or memories that are not strictly personal, replicating a sense of being inside an automatic, rigid system which is alien to them. These are counter-stories of people who feel the pressure to be reduced to pure bearers of labour-power, to be reduced to bare life.
Conclusion
This article has presented theoretically driven empirical research, exploring the conditions of parents in precarious employment in Central Italy. The focus is on the everyday ‘social reproduction’ of people at the margins: workers and parents from a non-EU background but also ‘native’ Italians in insecure jobs. Focusing on caring and wage-work as central moments of normal everyday life and as general activities for social reproduction, this research tries to advance a critical understanding of the conditions of workers/parents in precarious employment and their everyday struggles to achieve income security, when this income security can be achieved only through the sale of their labour-power, that is, their capacity to be in paid employment.
In this research, people as bearers of labour-power are shown as differentiated according to gender and ethnic background: gender and ‘race’ as social processes constitute the labour markets and shape the care work they are expected to perform. Not only gender and ‘race’ as social processes are intertwined with the precarisation of employment conditions, but to an extent they overlap. So, this research shows how ‘native’ Italians are involved in the same social processes, although they usually benefit from different material circumstances.
Thus, precarity as the ‘normal’ condition of the immigrant labour force, which affects native Italians as well, is connected to everyday struggles against the reduction of their lives to ‘bare life’ (Ferguson & McNally 2015). We claim that the dialectical understanding of the concept ‘bare life’ is an original contribution to the study of precarity as a social phenomenon. The tendency to reduce subjects into objects through which labour-power is reproduced emerges from the interpretation of participants’ narratives. Participants tell of the ‘bare minimum’ within which their lives are conducted and this condition has been interpreted as the social reproduction of ‘normality’. However, participants also contest what may constitute the ‘bare minimum’ for their work and for their lives: for them, it is not ‘normal’ that their lives must be dependent on an insecure job and linked to the unpredictable whims of the labour market, a labour market that produces ‘normal jobs’ mainly for Italian men.
While observing that normality as precarity hurts, this research has tried to emphasise the aspect of daily struggles (and to an extent successful struggles) of these working-class parents, which represents an aspect partially ignored in other research on precarity, class, gender and ‘race’. The aim was to present the participants as subjects who are perhaps causing small cracks on the surface of the social reproduction of labour-power as creator of value.
