ABSTRACT
Covid-19 has radically accelerated global trends in the future of work. This chapter looks at the relationship between economic crises, including the Covid-19 Recession, and precarisation as an established dimension of this “future”. It addresses whether precarisation is best understood as a protracted process in which the risks of economic life are transferred gradually onto workers and households by capital and the state or as an intermittent but recurring phenomenon in which social and economic stability is interrupted by cyclical crises. To address this question, the chapter explores empirical relations between key dimensions of worker precarity—income insecurity, labour market insecurity and declining associational power—and major economic crises in affluent economies over the last 20 years. Global, national and sector-level trends show that precarisation has become a generalised process with long-term and short-term dimensions. However, the Covid-19 Recession has also exposed a dimension of machine-based precarity in which technology-enabled shifts in remote working, online fulfilment, and gig work have created opportunities for some firms and workers but deepened precarisation for others through an expansion of poor-quality jobs, employment insecurity and algorithmic management.
