From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks

In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley id entifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts t he tory of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: "My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be". Jayadev continues: ‘What c oncerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working condit ions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to re claim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with ar tistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precario us f rms of labour?

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