Precarious capital and privilege
Precarious: dependent on circumstances beyond one’s control; uncertain;unstable; insecure.
I want those interested in social and economic justice (as if the two can be seperated) to think more about the role precariousness in people’s lives. Below, I’ll explain why. Much of the theory behind this was not developed by me but by the Dutch Union of Precarious Housing and other people.
We often think of people as either having or not having things. Be they physical capital like money, legal capital like rights, or social capital like status and privileges. This is often presented as a black and white situation: either you have it or you don’t. But reality is often much more complex than that.
As an example, let’s look at homes. In the black and white image, people are either housed or homeless. But when you look at the reality, there is a whole spectrum of housing situations.
Owning your own house without a mortgage. Very secure. Only if you were to have large debts could a judge force you to sell your house.
Owning your own home with a mortgage. Pretty secure. Only if your income were to change to the point where you could no longer afford your mortgage could you be evicted. This is not easy for the lender.
Renting an apartment with good tenant rights. Fairly secure. Only if your income were to change to the point where you could no longer afford your rent could you be evicted. This is easier for a landlord to achieve than it is to kick out a home owner.
Renting an apartment on a temporary contract with dodgy tenant rights. Quite precarious. Your housing situation is secure only for the duration of your contract and only if you continue to pay the rent, and even then there are conditions under which you could be evicted.
Motel hopping. Very precarious. If your money runs out for even a day, you are on the street immediately.
Renting without a signed contract. Extremely precarious. You are at the mercy of your landlord’s whim.
Squating. Extremely precarious. You can be forcibly evicted at any time.
Homeless.
All people in cases 1 to 6 are not homeless, but the precariousness or their housing situation differs greatly. As a result, the lives they can build differ. Few people in highly precarious housing conditions would consider their situation a safe one in which to have and raise kids. You can’t build safely on precarious foundations.
There are more things in your life that can be secure of precarious: your job, your legal status, the custody over your children, your social status, your health, and more.
Oppression can increase the precariousness of any of these things. For example, disabled parents and parents of colour are far more likely to lose custody over their kids over minor incidents than abled and white parents. The custody they have over their children is more precarious. Black teenagers are much more likely to go to jail over petty crimes than white teenagers. Their rights are much more precarious than the rights of white teenagers. In some cases, privilege is precarious. For example, a trans man in the company of transphobes has male privilege only as long as his trans status is hidden. When he his outed, transphobes are going to treat him like the woman they thing he is. Passing privilege is also a precarious privilege. And like with all the things mentioned above, you can’t build safely on precarious foundations.
Precarious situations are like domino’s that topple each other. The more aspects of your financial, legal and social capital are precarious, the harder you’ll fall. If your job is the only thing in your life that is precarious, losing your job is probably going to be something you can recover from. But if your job and housing are both precarious, losing one is highly likely to result in losing the other. If the custody over your kids is also precarious, you might lose all three within the same week.
When we look at what people have and fail to consider whether all they have is secure or precarious, we miss a huge part of the picture. Someone may have a fine living space, a cool job, a great reputation and no infringements on their rights other than exist for every other citizen. But if their living space is on a temporary renting contract, they can be fired from their job at a moment’s notice and their membership of a minority group makes it likely that they will be judged harshly for small mistakes, then all they have can come crashing down in an instant. Their life is totally different from someone with the same living space, the same job, the same reputation and the same rights, but none of the insecurity.
We are living increasingly precarious lives. Look at the way the world has changed since the start of ‘the crisis’ and what you see is a ‘depression’ that took away a lot of secure jobs and houses and a ‘recovery’ that replaced it with highly precarious ones. In places where unemployment is decreasing, the new jobs are not the secure pre-crisis jobs, but highly precarious jobs with temporary contracts that can be terminated at short notice. We’re told to be more ‘flexible’ as employees, but this is just a euphemism for more willing to accept temporary precarious employment contracts. Corporations and governments are constantly inventing new ways to make our housing contracts, employment contracts and basic rights more precarious.
We may statistically see some form of ‘recovery’ from the financial crisis, but we’re all closer to being that person who can lose it all again in a day. Precariousness has become the foundation of the lives of the 99%, and of course no one is more effected by that than those whose lives were already more precarious because they did not have all the stability that white, cis, abled, straight, neurotypical, healthy privilege provides.
Precariousness is more and more of the reality of our lives and it’s something we’re going to have to be more aware of if we want to fight back against our social and economic oppression.
