What is precarity?

Precarity is a concept developed by Judith Butler. Precarity means unstable employment and uncertain living conditions, which are entrenched in broader systemic frameworks built on inequality and exploitation. 

Precarity refers to lacking stable work and steady income, and the resulting harm, such as health risks due to malnutrition or inadequate health care, that accompany unreliable employment. In the precarity framework, lack of work is not due to laziness or ineptitude, but by political decisions or economic systems beyond one’s immediate control that create a situation of disadvantage for the purpose of exploitation. Precarity is not just any disadvantage, but specifically danger to one’s life due to lack of access to basic needs. While in other times and places, people with the least amount of economic resources are the most cared for. But not in the Western world, where our economy is instead built on exploitation of the most vulnerable. 

Informal, temporary, or contingent work is the predominant livelihood in the contemporary world, where examples of precarity are familiar: garbage picking (e.g., selling scrap metal or collecting plastic bottles for recycling), the gig economy (e.g., Uber driving), and selling petty commodities (e.g., street vendors selling USB cords, or small tourism trinkets). 

The modern world is no stranger to precarity, but minorities carry an unequal burden for precarious life. Our political-economic and social systems create this increased vulnerability based on the way bodies are characterized, especially along race and gender. In Butler’s (2009) words, precarity denotes a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (p. 25). In other words, exploitative political-economic systems calculate certain bodies as more valuable to the community than others, with poor and disenfranchised minorities on the lowest priority for life and highest likelihood for precarity. They are seen as a burden and cast aside as extra bodies that are unnecessary and de-valued, all the while being exploited for their cheap labor. 

Precarity is not just about employment status, but also about one’s increased likelihood of sickness, harm or death. In my research, the Uyghurs found themselves in situations of precarity due to political-economic systemic violence that denoted them as "uncivilized terrorists" and restricted access to the resources—namely, jobs and housing—of the city. The precarious conditions of life in the city where I lived devalued Uyghur bodies and lives. Precarity set the stage for the dehumanization that allowed their mass internment in 2017. Precarity meant they were always at risk. 

The Uyghurs are of course not the only ones experiencing poverty of urban life, as well as the exhaustion, stress, and alienation familiar to so many. Around the world, rural migrants as well as urbanites are no stranger to hard times in the city, especially economic dispossession and precarious living conditions. While people everywhere face uncertain, or non-existent, job situations, precarity is often based on value placed on certain bodies, especially those with minority race and gender markers. The most vulnerable in our current global political-economic system are those with the least amount of economic resources.