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This introductory chapter provides an overview of precarious labor in the video game industry. The emergence of video games as a medium goes back to a moment of “refusal of work” when Pentagon scientists, tasked with beating the USSR during the Cold War, ended up creating ludic experiences on their work computers during times of boredom. Today, contemporary video game production is a serious, lucrative business. Tracing Studio Desire's transition from its early days as an independent studio to a financialized structure after its acquisition by Digital Creatives in the 2000s, this book examines the inequalities that structure the lives of game developers in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It unpacks Studio Desire's story as it unfolds through four interlinked processes: rationalization upon acquisition, spatialization, financialization, and precarization. Among these, precarization anchors the whole story.

This chapter explores how the relationship between labour relations, healthcare policy, and institutional arrangements shape care work through a combined focus on situated work experiences in the feminised and increasingly multi-cultural municipal healthcare sector and on policy discourse and policy framing in Norway. The chapter identifies and describes labour relations, labour experiences, and the part-time employment ‘culture’ in the care services, and the ways healthcare services and care work are envisioned in recent policy. Development in the labour market over the last decade, spurred by amongst other thing migration and the welfare state ‘crisis’, has changed the institutional conditions of labour. Based on examination of political discourse and on data from fieldwork in three Norwegian municipalities, the chapter aims at a multi-level analysis of labour relations in the municipal care sector in order to show the ways a ‘shifting institutional ecology’ opens for precarity of labour in Norway. The key argument of the chapter is that the shifting boundaries of politics have created problems where labour falls outside of the policy frame, something that contributes to a debasing of (care) work as a political category and to the emergence of precarious labour, often naturalised as flexibility, in the public care services.

If the issue of work has acquired a high political profile in France over recent decades, the question of the sans papiers, of undocumented migrants and their potential place within the Republic, has become equally highly politicised. However, these two issues are rarely seen as being intrinsically connected, protests in favour of the rights of the sans papiers typically being couched in humanitarian terms, with little reference to questions of political economy. This is equally true of many filmic representations of the sans papiers, which reinforce this notion of sans papiers as victims deserving of humanitarian aid, rather than as active agents. This chapter draws on Emmanuel Terray’s notion of ‘délocalisation sur place’ or ‘on-shore off-shoring’ to argue for a better understanding of the role the sans papiers play within the contemporary French jobs market, epitomising the logics of flexibility, modulation, and precarity that now characterise its functioning. Armed with this interpretative framework, it re-reads a number of films and novels featuring undocumented migrants, uncovering the insights concealed behind their overt humanitarianism, insights into the interrelationships between undocumented migration and the shifts in employment analysed in earlier chapters.

This chapter shares critical reflections of duality in light of precarious work in sex industries and mainstream markets. Marxist concepts of alienation, estrangement and species-being along with contemporary labour arrangements such as zero-hours contracts, provide theoretical and practical contexts for feelings of disillusionment among Contributors who, after investing time and money in educational attainment, landed shitty, temporary, low paying square jobs. Contributors who hold roles in public trust, and those who have been on (sick) benefits, share how trapped they feel in gig economies across markets. As sex workers, they suffer the violence of being excluded from civil participation in policy discussions about the labour market and how sex industries ought to be regulated. Although duality provides flexicurity, many would rather have secure employment in the disciplines and fields that they trained in. The penalties associated with being out to the state as a known sex worker means that privileged lobbyists inform policy instead of the diverse populations of people active in UK sex industries, who can provide insights into who trades sex and how to reduce harm and exploitation relative to the changing design of sex industries for diverse on/off-street and online sex industry workers.

Chapter 4 draws on semi-structured interviews with 18 organizers of Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and Who Needs Feminism? The chapter interrogates key experiences and the affective dimensions of starting, running, and managing a feminist campaign. The chapter outlines four key arguments: First, we posit that organizing feminist campaigns involves highly affective, invisible, precarious, and time-consuming labor. Second, we demonstrate how involvement in these campaigns can inspire “feminist awakenings” among organizers. Third, we suggest that while mediated abuse is a common experience, it is not universal; rather it operates on a continuum, and evokes varying responses from its victims, including being motivated to continue their activism. Finally, we map how feminist activism is often exhausting and draining, and individual and collective care strategies are needed to prevent activist burnout.

The stories and experiences of migrant mothers and their Hong Kong–born babies are at the heart of this book. They are set against the backdrop of global capitalism and transnational mobility. The Asian “world city” of Hong Kong provides a meeting ground for young Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers; South Asian and African traders, refugees, and asylum seekers; Western tourists and businessmen and local Chinese residents. Their personal stories provide insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship, and point to the consequences, creative responses, and tragedies of labor and migration policies. This chapter introduces the idea that migrant workers are never only workers, regardless of the policies and laws that restrict them and narrowly define them as such. The chapter introduces the key concepts of bare life, citizenship, precarious labor, and humanitarian reason, and it proposes that laws and policies relating to migrant labor and non-citizenship often produce the very problems of “illegality” that they seek to avoid.

Chapter 8 examines the consequences of industrial restructuring, which began in the early 1990s and continues to the present day. The great majority of state-run and collective enterprises have been privatized, and all firms—including those in which the state has retained a stake—have been turned into shareholding companies. Tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, and permanent job tenure has been replaced by much more precarious employment relations. As work unit communities have been transformed into profit-oriented enterprises, workers have been reduced to hired labor, losing their status as legitimate stakeholders and eroding the foundations for workplace participation. Shop-floor self-management has been replaced by harsh disciplinary regimes enforced by bonuses, fines, and the threat of dismissal, and staff and workers congresses have been sidelined. Workers, whose influence is now explicitly seen as compromising efforts to maximize profits, have been disenfranchised.