Capitalism has allowed for massive expansion in East Asian governments and economics but at the expense and exploitation of precarious labor. Market operations become both “benevolent but also coercive, enhanc[ing] commodification and exploitation of labor power” (Song 2007). Capitalist enterprises have attempted to squash marginal increases in profit out of all parts of corporate and industrial processes but while fixed and variable costs for tangible goods are limited in reduction by their material costs, labor can be extorted and is rapidly replaceable. These neoliberalist tendencies in such a profit-driven economy have shifted the burden of risk and work onto the individual and off of the state and private corporations. As a result, precarious work is the incorporation of the risks associated with “uncertainty, instability, and insecurity in employment” (Kalleberg 2013).
Precarity has driven transiently employed youth and individuals, profiled by capitalist ideology to be more “at risk” and able to “naturally embrace risk” (Driscoll 2007), to pursue alternatives to traditional pathways from school to employment. Although these non-institutional lives have been reframed as developing “creative cultural capital” (Song 2007), their increased independence and freedom is still an innate cost of the lack of stability and disregard offered by capitalist mechanisms in society. Individuals, and youth in particular, have shouldered the necessity to self-develop their skills to be competitive in the global marketplace and workforce.

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