The Making of Precarious Habitus: Everyday Struggles of Precarious Workers in Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract

This PhD is a critical analysis of work and precarity in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. It investigates the structural constraints and everyday struggles of vulnerable precarious workers who work within insecure modes of employment such as part-time, casual, sub-contractual and temporary agency work. Working in unprotected precarious jobs results in precarity, a broader concern that prevents workers from both anticipating the future and living well in the present. It signifies a socio-economic condition and a process that systematically subjects increasing numbers of people to uncertainty and social vulnerability. As an intentional consequence of anti-worker employment policies, workers struggle to get by in an environment of precarious work and life, forcing them into submission and the acceptance of exploitation. Because women, Indigenous peoples and non-Western migrants are disproportionately represented in precarious work, the thesis critically analyses precarity in the longue durée, considering the historical connections between precarity and capitalism (the mode of accumulation) and between precarity and colonialism (the structure of dispossession). Theoretically, the thesis offers a holistic view on precarity, considering both the history of real-life precarity and the trajectory of precarity as a sociological concept. Drawing on ethnographic work based on 26 semi-structured interviews with precarious workers (21) and union representatives (5), together with analytic auto-ethnography, I analyse precarity beyond the relationship of paid work. I introduce the concept of precarious habitus, a particular set of social dispositions that signify everyday struggles of precarious workers and social harm issues associated with it. Influenced by Bourdieu (1990b; 1998b), I think about precarity in relation to deep structures and the crucial role of the state, as opposed to the whims of the 'free market'. Precarity, therefore, is not understood as an individual condition, much less an economic necessity, but rather as an imposed relation - a mode of domination. This research reveals the making, the active process of precarious habitus, both at work and beyond that impacts upon the everyday life of individual workers, their families, and New Zealand society as such.