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Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study investigates the flexibility and the precarity in Greece after the eruption of the crisis and the imposition of austerity measures. My research is based on a three and half -year fieldwork carried out in a multinational door to door marketing company located in Thessaloniki.

Paper long abstract:

The global financial crisis of 2007/08 and the imposition of austerity policies in Greece had incalculable effects on multiple levels, largely affecting the labor sector. More specifically, the austerity measures that were implemented by traditional parties through Memorandums led the country in a "chaotic situation", which resulted to the gradual impoverishment, the rise of unemployment and brain drain phenomenon, the transformation of the way of life and the degradation of work. Additionally, the notions of flexibility and precariousness have emerged during the period of crisis and, as Guy Standing noticed, a new dangerous class, the precariat, has been created. The protagonist, in this "class in the making", is a new type of worker, who is fungible, expendable and replaceable. This worker works in low-paid and uninsured jobs, while he/she spends his/her labor time between a short-period of work and a long-period of unemployment. It's no coincidence that the precariat, due to the consecutives labor changes and the deprivation of labor rights, face intense anxiety, psychosomatic problems.

This ethnographic study investigates the flexibility and the precarity in Greece after the eruption of the crisis and the imposition of austerity measures. My research is based on a three and half -year fieldwork carried out in a multinational door to door marketing company located in Thessaloniki. Specifically, this paper underlines the working conditions of precarious jobs in Greece of the crisis, through the case of a marketing company, as well as the effects of this typed of job on workers.

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This paper is based on fieldwork with a cooperative based in Barcelona whose members south to minimize their dependence on waged labor. Drawing from perspectives from the global South, I will decenter waged labor as an analytic in favor of foregrounding alternative work as a mode of provisioning.

Paper long abstract:

Across Southern-Europe, the restructuring of the relation between labor and capital has led to an increasing sense of insecurity, precariousness, and discontent across various social classes. Within this context we have seen the proliferation of alternative or diverse economies that strive to create labor relations that lie outside of the waged labor contract and are based on values such as trust, proximity, and solidarity. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork with an anti-capitalist cooperative cum social movement in Barcelona, I will argue that the literature on precarity and precarious labor is ill-equipped to analyze cases such as this where people eschew waged-labor and the supposed existential stability this kind of work is often thought to bring. Instead, I will follow recent anthropological perspectives from the global South that center how people fashion a worthy existence through different kinds of work that are often characterized as "precarious" or "informal" (Gandolfo 2013; Millar 2018; O'Hare 2014). I will show that the members of the cooperative actively sought to minimize their dependence on waged labor out of a desire to pursue a life lived outside of a more routinized, "capitalist" rhythm, even if this meant putting themselves in seemingly "precarious" positions. In this way, this paper contributes to the "decentering" of waged labor as an analytic and will instead foreground alternative work as a mode of provisioning in order to make sense of the shifting boundaries between the state, society, and economy in contemporary Southern Europe.

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In this paper, I will investigate the experiences of some jobless people in Turin, showing that unemployment is experienced as a double, social and material fall. Joblessness is a process of social disqualification affecting social identity, social status and relations, not only the income.

Paper long abstract:

Unemployment is a huge and structural phenomenon in the Mediterranean are and Southern Europe. In this paper, I will investigate the experiences of some jobless people in Turin, Italy, a city which is currently in a critical situation: Turin has been particularly affected by the long recession begun in 2008, because the economic crisis has intensified a long, uncertain and dramatic process of deindustrialization and transition toward post-Fordism. One of the consequences of the overlap between crisis and deindustrialization has been the massive growth of unemployment, whose rate is now well over 12%.

How this massive joblessness is lived in Turin? Among my interlocutors, unemployment is experienced as a double fall, a social as well as a material one. Joblessness is, for them, a process of social disqualification affecting social identity, social status and relations as well as income. Unemployed are seen as liminal figures, since they lack a definite status and are defined only in negative terms.

This is the reason why their survival tactics cannot really solve their problems. Temporary and off-the-books jobs as well as their dependency on family and relatives, although necessary, can cushion the fall only partially and can rather increase their social disqualification.

Based on two years of ethnographic research, the paper shows that in order to fully understand unemployment we have to grasp its double nature, looking to its consequences on identity and status as well as its economic effects.

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Focusing on state-outsourced refugee resettlement programs and emergency shelters for asylum seekers in France, I explore the increasing use of short-term labour contracts and its impact on social workers' experiences of precarity.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have widely explored the impacts of a retreating welfare state under neoliberal imperatives of public efficiency on the provision of social services. Many have noted the importance of non-governmental players filling the void left by the downsizing state. Yet few have examined the growing "markets" of state-outsourced social work and what marketisation is doing to employment regimes and worker experiences of precarity.

My paper addresses the French state's recent moves to subcontract the social work of resettling refugees and sheltering asylum seekers to non-governmental "operators." In responding to state published "calls for tenders," non-governmental organisations with missions of social support vie to enter "markets" of social work structured by precepts of austerity and competition.

Focusing on a refugee resettlement program and two emergency shelter for asylum seekers in France, I ask: how do neoliberal precepts of austerity and competition condition labour contracting practices across the French field of asylum? How does the marketisation of social work impact workers differentially in their experiences of precarity? How does precarity effect social workers' approaches towards critique of the system of asylum?

Examining the increasing use of short-term labour contracts in the field of asylum, I argue that outsourced social work produces disparately precarious workers. Precarious job appointments impact workers differentially along race and class lines, producing not only economic but also administrative insecurity for those with job-dependent immigration status. Economically and administratively precarious workers, though critical of everyday asylum operations, remain averse to potential worker mobilisations challenging the system itself.

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This presentation, based on an ethnographic research, analyzes the role of tips and wages in structuring work and class experiences of casino workers in Portugal. Money as tips assumes new meanings and produces a contradictory class experience that stimulates the overexploitation of these workers.

Paper long abstract:

Historically, for casino workers in Portugal, tips were the most relevant form of remuneration, not the wage. Today, tips and wages represent similar quantities in the overall remuneration of these workers. But tips and wages are qualified in very distinctive terms and are regulated by two antagonistic moral economies. This presentation, based on an ethnographic research, argues that both work and class experiences of pagadores de banca (croupiers/dealers) in Portuguese casinos are structured by this contradiction. That is, a contradiction in money forms produces a contradictory class experience and location. Wage is mostly associated with bills, food and other difficulties to meet living standards. Tips, on the other hand, are used to justify the conspicuous acts of consumption, like trips, the purchase of houses, cars and motorcycles. The first is matched to the asymmetrical class relations in Portuguese society, to the degradation of work and to the power dynamics that subordinates them in the workplace, the other to a relation of partnership between worker and client, to feelings of happiness and gratification. If the first is associated with the general condition of proletarian wage work and with feelings of affiliation with the working class, the other legitimizes the subjective identification with practices and values of middle class subjects. Money as tips assumes new meanings and produces different class and work habitus. But, as tips engender a contradiction in class experiences of these workers, they also enable the reproduction of class relations and the production of consent among subordinate groups.

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This contribution present how several Italian mountain family farming enterprises integrated the neoliberal agri-food system through new labour regimes. Using the ethnography of two dairy cooperatives, it provides insights on the precarisation of rural work within the neoliberal food regime.

Paper long abstract:

Until 1990s Italian mountain economy featured mainly small, often family farming enterprises involved in milk production. In such a context informal networks, as kinship ties, were a significant resource both in accessing means of production and organizing work. However, the following decades marked a shift towards more modern and business-oriented productive processes, resulting in an expansion in size of these enterprises and, contemporaneously, a decline in their number. At the same time, since alpine dairy production was progressively reinvented as heritage food, new figures moved into what appeared as a more secure and rapidly expanding business, whilst the entire supply chain was showing an increase in production costs. For the alpine farm system, adaptation to these new market circumstances was achieved by a diversification of household incomes, the use of migrant labour, and the restructuring of the dairy process thanks to new forms of productive organization, namely cooperatives. Focussing on the latter, this contribution will present the ethnography of a two working cooperatives that are both parts of the same Alpine dairy supply chain. By elucidating their differences as well as the manifold exchanges which take place between them, it will provide insights on how the integration into the neoliberal food regime through cooperative enterprises affected local social reproduction processes and finally resulted in more precarious livelihood in alpine rural areas.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation aims to present the dynamic formation of social network of these people, how they perceive work as a means of social inclusion and what are the processes through which they are looking for a job.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2014 hundreds of thousands of people have made their way from Asia to Europe via Greece. Those who safely arrived were settled in transitory hosting structures across the country. Although refugees are aware or hope that their stay in these places will be temporary, they follow practices (form interpersonal relationships with NGO's, other refugees, local community) negotiating their presence in the new environment. Access to the labor market is a primary objective of refugees to become self-sufficient, to improve their daily lives and thus be able to integrate into the host country.

This presentation aims to present the dynamic formation of social network of these people, how they perceive work as a means of social inclusion and what are the processes through which they are looking for a job. It is grounded in material collected during field research from September 2018 to March 2019 for the research program "From the boat to the apartment" of Aristotle University Taking into account refugees' multiple and diverse identities with reference to age, gender, ethnicity, legal status and class in this presentation we seek to highlight the problems of refugee employment and provide a more complete understanding of the strategies they follow for their social integration.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explains how the circulation of multiple currencies in the context of austerity allows people to gain adequate access to basic resources such as food, housing, healthcare, employment, and other essential services, focusing on the movement between formal and informal spheres.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 2008 debt crisis Greeks have relied on the circulation of informal currencies—trading goods and services without euros. These solidarity economies seek to reclaim community resources for local people in protest of the staggering inequalities precipitated by Greece's government debt, privatization of public assets, and structural reforms. People use local exchange trading schemes just to survive in a context where coinage is scarce. This paper explains how the circulation of multiple currencies enables people to gain adequate access to basic resources such as food, housing, healthcare, employment, and other essential services. Drawing on the currency experiment TEM in Volos, Greece, we focus on the experience of precarity and the informal economy, and the ways in which local peoples and migrants alike navigate formal and informal spheres to make ends meet.

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Paper short abstract:

Narratives of return Thai migrants demonstrate how Israel's migration regime and neoliberal logic fostered the normative environment for marginalization and exploitation of migrants and neglected to consider their claims as rights-bearing subjects and as participating agents in the Israeli locality

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on long term ethnographic research with Thai return migrants in one sending migration village community in Isaan region in Thailand, by itself heavily effected by neo-liberal policies and unequal social-economical disparities. The village's residents have been migrating in their hundreds to Israel and back for the past 30 years. Their hindsight migration narratives demonstrate how Israel's migration regime and neo-liberal logic fostered the normative environment for marginalization and exploitation of migrant workers and neglected to consider their claims as rights-bearing subjects and as participating agents in the Israeli locality in a way which goes beyond their economic function as workers.

Thais have been migrating to Israel to work in farms for the last three decades. This migration regime institutionalized both as part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and as part of Israel's shift from a collective welfare state into neo-liberal social politics. What started as a crisis management solution in order to replace the Palestinian work force quickly became an ongoing phenomenon creating total dependence on migrant workers in the agriculture sector in Israel. As part of these processes a new large-scale for-profit industry developed, with the state giving private manpower agencies a central role in all stages of the migratory and employment process and outsource the access to medical treatment for migrants to private health insurance companies. These and other state-designed control tools created the legal conditions for the commodification of migrant works by constructing the employer-employee relations as 'property-like' and the latter as a commodity