Precarious work, as defined by Kalleberg and Hewison, describes the uncertain, unstable, and insecure environment in which employees bear the risks of work and receive limited—if any—social benefits and statutory entitlements (271). In the wake of economic and financial collapse in late twentieth-century Asia, alongside the introduction of new neoliberal policies, governments and businesses alike adopted a more hands off approach to the welfare and betterment of the individual. While instability and insecurity in the workplace are defining features of any capitalist society, precarious work has emerged in a new form where standard employment is no longer a fixed idea, and precarity describes a new class of people.

Throughout Precarious Japan, Anne Allison borrows Guy Standing’s construction of the precariat, by first suggesting that precarity is a word of the times, and then analyzing the effects of economic instability felt by undereducated and underemployed Japanese citizens and the ways in which this instability transcends Japan’s borders and affects all societies (6). Beyond the growing population of individuals making a living through unstable working environments, precarious work is also associated with various consequences that affect the home, livelihood, and psyche of the employed. Affect, or the way in which the world affects people and the way these people affect the world around them, plays a peculiar role in precarity because the fixed structures of family, identity, gender, etc. are called into question by the nature of insecure working conditions. Thus, precarity is not merely just a result of faulty economies, but rather the new lived realities of those deemed dangerous, cheap, or even expendable. It is also important to note that precarious working conditions are made possible on a national—even global—scale through neoliberalism by allowing the government to shift responsibility of personal hood and development from the state onto the individual; consequently, a vulnerable class of people, responsible for their own wellbeing, gets thrown into an unstable category where they become abused and marginalized.

References

Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. Print.

Kalleberg, A. L., and K. Hewison. "Precarious Work and the Challenge for Asia." American Behavioral Scientist 57.3 (2013): 271-88. Print.

Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Print.

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