Precarious Work and Reproductive Insecurity

IntroductionOne common justification of precarious work is that it is merely temporary, that it enables young people, for example, to work part-time while they complete their qualifications, and may facilitate work-family balance, especially for women with young children. However, empirical evidence suggests that precarious work increasingly follows at least some workers from youth into prime working-age. This paper explores what happens when precarious work is not transitory, but coincides with critical points in the life course; how it affects individual capacities to make long-term commitments and decisions as they transition from youth into adulthood.We draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with 16 precarious workers, between the ages of 25 and 45, who work in professional occupations for which they have the relevant tertiary qualifications. What distinguishes them from 'typical' professionals is that they are in precarious employment arrangements, predominately on casual contracts or in freelance work. Such workers are not among the most precarious of all workers. Nonetheless, how precarious employment impacts these workers matters to both social theory (e.g. Beck 1992: 97) and social policy. Tertiary educated and professionally employed workers should be best equipped to successfully navigate the transition from youth to adulthood while precariously employed. If these workers struggle despite their education and social capital, then the impact of precarity on other social groups is likely to be higher. Consequently, the experiences of precariously employed professionals are significant in their own right and as a useful barometer of the capacity of other precarious workers with fewer qualifications and opportunities to flourish when precarious work persists from youth into later life.Our paper's main claim is that the combination of precarious work and individualised care regimes can disturb the transition to adulthood. We focus on just one potential marker of 'adulthood' - the capacity to make reproductive choices. Reproduction is one critical turning point in the life-course, and also raises the fundamental issue of what policies and employment standards can enable humane social reproduction under contemporary economic conditions. Our subjects' experiences of what we term 'reproductive insecurity' show how precarious work and individualised social policies combine to extend experiences of dependence and adolescence into prime-age - and potentially beyond. We also highlight how reproductive insecurity is in addition to, and in some cases can compound, existing well-documented health risks and impacts of long-term precarious employment.This paper has five sections. After defining precarious work, we highlight how precarious work cannot be viewed as simply a temporary or transitory state (Section 1). We then introduce the concept of 'reproductive insecurity' as indicating the challenge long-term precarious work can pose in the transition from youth to adulthood (Section 2). After introducing our research approach (Section 3), we examine how the professionals we studied understand the relationship between their working conditions, their perspectives on adulthood and their family formation decisions (Section 4). The reproductive insecurity that precarious work induces can disrupt the transitions to adulthood. Addressing this insecurity may not require returning to standard employment norms; however, as our final section (Section 5) argues, it does require policies that enable precarious workers to have security in the life course, even in the absence of secure employment.1. Precarious Work: Definition and Justifications.The concept of precarious work is contested (see Chan 2013: 364), but we interpret precarious work according to Burgess and Campbell's (1998) multi-dimensional model. Following Standing (1997: 8-9), Burgess and Campbell (1998: 11) distinguish seven main aspects of precarious employment: job insecurity, employment insecurity, work insecurity, income insecurity, working-time insecurity, skill reproduction insecurity, and representational insecurity. …