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The most significant trend in the Japanese labor market over the past two decades is the doubling of the percentage of the workforce hired as nonregular employees who do not enjoy job security or many other benefits routinely accorded regular full-time workers. Called the “precariat” (workers in precarious employment), they now constitute about 38 percent of the entire workforce, often employed under disadvantageous terms involving low pay, dead-end jobs, and easy termination. The spread of precarious work marks a tectonic change in Japan, a nation generally associated with job security and paternalistic employers. It correlates with a rise in poverty and inequality, carrying implications for the solvency of pension and medical care systems at a time when demands on these systems are increasing because of the graying of society. This paradigm shift has been caused by corporate cost-cutting and government deregulation of the labor market, one that hits women hardest as they are overrepresented among nonregular workers, undermining hopes for womenomics. The costs of job insecurity also discourage youth, contribute to deflation, lower productivity, boost suicide while lowering the marriage rate and fertility. Immigration could be a key policy option in addressing expected shortages of both skilled and unskilled workers, but there are no signs that the government will allow sufficient immigration to make much of a difference.

This introduction outlines Reichardt’s career, from promising indie auteur in the 1990s to a subsequent retreat from the spotlight to a triumphant return in the mid-2000s. The book’s argument is laid out here: chronicling the banal aftermath of crisis rather than its spectacular epicenter, Reichardt’s films establish emergency as an everyday experience. This section also claims that Reichardt focuses on two contemporary emergencies in particular: U.S. economic decline – and the rise of the new class known as “the precariat” – and environmental degradation – especially in the U.S. postindustrial Pacific Northwest. In this way, Reichardt is a filmmaker interested in uniquely American experiences of failure. Finally, this section offers synopses for all the Reichardt works covered in the book, including both feature films and short films.

Beginning in the 1970s, local boosters in the U.S. South offered lucrative incentives to attract foreign manufacturing firms, who, in turn, promised to uplift working-class southerners’ lives and modernize benighted rural areas with state-of-the-art “greenfield” plants and cutting-edge production techniques. Led by Japanese and German automotive companies, such as Nissan Motors in Smyrna, Tennessee, these “transplants” initially recruited a select group of “chosen” workers, most of whom saw themselves as middle-class “technicians” rather than as proletarianized factory workers. Despite subjecting their assembly-line workers to physically demanding conditions, the transplants’ strategy of hiring “chosen” workers thwarted organized labor’s attempts to unionize their plants. By the twenty-first century, however, foreign-owned transplants have increasingly filled positions with lower-paid temporary workers hired from third-party contractors. These “permatemps” regularly face deteriorating work conditions while lacking the employment security, benefits, and job stability enjoyed by the “chosen” workers. In effect, the South’s foreign-owned transplants have created a three-tiered industrial workforce, with “chosen” workers at the top, followed by a frustrated pro-union proletariat in the middle, and a “precariat” composed of temporary workers at the bottom.

Markus Müller analyses the control of the precariat in Latin America, emphasising the role of informal practices alongside state agencies, especially the role of the police in ‘clearing out’ the poor and marginalised to make way for urban development. Official agencies are also assisted by a variety of non-state actors including vigilante groups, death squads, militia or corporations. Such non-state actors are still largely absent from the Western European context but the issue of the over-emphasis on the penal system at the expense of both other security agencies such as the police and wider range of non-penal agencies from welfare, housing, education and urban planning is an important theme in criticisms of Wacquant.

This chapter sets out the general theoretical and empirical terrain of the book, drawing attention to continuities and discontinuities both in the provision of welfare as an attempt to tackle or at least contain poverty and in the shape and nature of employment in the UK. It defines some of the key terms we use in this book. The chapter highlights the recent turn in research to understanding the dynamics of poverty and it also explains the broader research programme in which the study was located. The chapter also contends with some important, contemporary myths about the demand for and supply of labour. The chapter highlights the broad landscape of changing employment and welfare conditions. The chapters which follow, in the middle of the book, paint a finer portrait of the consequences and reality of these changes as they are lived by people in low-pay, no-pay Britain.

This final chapter connects the findings of the research with broader debates, research and theory in respect of work, unemployment, labour markets and welfare. Particular attention is focussed towards the myth of the high skills economy, the growth of underemployment and poor work and the idea that we have witnessed the rise of a new class at the bottom of society – ‘the Precariat’ - characterised by its general insecurity and precarious work opportunities. The final part of the chapter gives a critique of current political and policy approaches that bear on questions of work, welfare and poverty, highlighting their potential to seriously worsen the conditions and prospects of the sort of people whose testimonies provide the backbone of this book. It argues for – and describes - policies that would tackle the insecurity and poverty of low-pay, no-pay Britain, particularly strategies ‘to make bad jobs better’.

This chapter discusses the role of the labour market, the precarious and overqualified forms of participation in the labour market widely used by young people in university to support themselves, and the role of internships and summer jobs. This chapter engages with the most recent debates on the precariat, showing that the precarious forms of jobs are not just creating a new class, but are also intersecting with the existing forms of socio-economic inequalities. This chapter discusses the use of labour market resources by each profile, showing that while some young people can selectively pick qualified labour-market participation, others need to over-rely on labour-market participation to sustain their experience in university.

This chapter tackles the seventh and final criterion for a good benefits system: The tax and benefits structure should reflect the labour market of today, and should remain serviceable as the labour market changes in the future. The ways in which the labour market is changing are described, and how to characterise today's labour market is discussed: whether as subject to seismic change and towards virtual organisations and a sizeable ‘precariat’, or as subject to slow adjustment in the direction of a somewhat more flexible labour market. The ways in which employment pattern changes and changes to the family are connected are explored. The combination means that we need a secure income floor to enable individuals and households to handle change and risk. If there is to be a period of constant change, then rather than a benefits system that will suit today's circumstances, one is needed that will suit a variety of possible future scenarios. Universal benefits are found to be the best option. The chapter concludes that the best benefits system to provide the conditions for ‘the good life’ is one based on a Citizen's Income.

Chapter 5 investigates the factors and circumstances that allowed the workers to switch from managing the effects of precarious employment to challenging its causes, first through the founding of an association of daladala workers, and then through a partnership with the Tanzanian transport trade union. Drawing on correspondence between the Transport Union and the workers’ association, and on interviews with the leaders of the workers’ association, of the trade union, and with transport workers themselves, the chapter explores the strategy chosen by workers to make demands for rights at work on employers and the state. The analysis stresses the significance of this case study by engaging with the wider literature on globalization and its impact on labour possibilities, and more specifically on how to organize the unorganized in the informal economy and the goals which workers’ political mobilization can (or cannot) achieve in increasingly liberalized and informalized economies.

Drawn from analyses by Hayashi and McKnight, Mōri, and Noiz, and personal interviews with activists ECD, Oda Masanori, Matsumoto Hajime of Shirōto no Ran, and others, this chapter recounts the prehistory of vehicular sound systems in protests in the 1990s, the original reclaim-the-streets rebellion in 2003, conflicts with the police, ECD’s protest anthem, and the subsequent adoption of the format for precariat (precarious proletariat)/freeter (temporary worker) rights and anti-globalization movements. Several of the central characters became involved with antinuclear demonstrations, carrying over some practices.

Today’s migrants are an integral part of the global precariat, this chapter argues. This involves millions of people flitting among insecure jobs without an occupational identity or secure access to social benefits. Precarians are ‘denizens’, rather than ‘citizens’, deprived of rights that citizenship normally includes. The precariat is divided into three categories, each politically ‘dangerous’. Migrants slip into each of them; variously depicted as ‘villains’ causing the spread of precarity, ‘victims’ of the same process, or ‘heroes’ praised for their ability to survive under unsavoury conditions. There is a need for a political strategy strengthening all types of rights that the precariat lacks. The chapter concludes by proposing a Precariat Charter oriented towards the needs, insecurities, and aspirations of migrants.

This chapter argues: first, if inequality is not mediated during economic growth and structural change, middle-income countries (MICs) may, in the future, face a new kind of middle-income poverty trap. Second, that this middle-income trap is neither inevitable nor unavoidable. It can be characterized as follows: rising inequality constrains the growth of a secure middle-income group and instead creates a new ‘precariat’ group living precarious lives, just above absolute poverty but not by a large margin, and not in a sufficiently secure position to drive economic growth and pay significant taxes and thus drive political change and more significant welfare regimes. In short, there is an opportunity cost of rising inequality during economic development: the elimination of absolute poverty and the emergence of a secure, consuming class in the foreseeable future. Third, this trap provides a basis for continuing development cooperation with MICs which is different from ‘traditional’ aid.

This introductory chapter begins by telling the story of Elena, a Bulgarian women who found herself without employment following the privatization of the garment factory she had worked in her whole adult life. It explains how she survived the transition to a market economy by scrounging together informal work of various types. This book is centrally concerned with what regulatory strategies can best improve the working standards and lives of Elena and workers like her around the world. It goes without saying that employment creation policies and those that foster industrial growth are crucially important for improving Elena’s well-being. This book is not aimed at addressing these types of policies, however. It is concerned with the realm of regulation—hard laws, soft initiatives and other institutions that shape behaviour and set incentives in particular directions. The chapter describes the prevalence of informal, low paid work worldwide and defines core terms. It concludes by summarizing the outcome of the global search conducted in this book for realizable policy responses to this persistent problem.

Frank O’Hara’s work at the “Museum of Modern Art” is read as marking a moment when the subversive potential of distraction was refolded back into the logic of vocational modernity—ultimately becoming refigured as a new hyper-self-conscious mode of depoliticized productivity (O’Hara’s preoccupied persona on the page fell well within the remit of his cosmopolitan profession). The coda ends with a discussion of the ways in which “continuous partial attention” and the new “flexibility” might be resisted (particularly within the academy), and reflects on how the possibilities of a living sensuous activity might fall outside the divisive logic of market-driven productivity and be reaffirmed..