Abstract
This article explores the themes of precarity and precarization by looking at specific historical conjunctures in the recent history of Portuguese capitalist development, relevant because of their enduring influence in shaping the mutual constitution of state-led projects of accumulation and development, dominant waged regimes and emergent normative livelihood models and projects. The broader aim is to locate and understand precarization as an ongoing process limiting the options and conditions of ‘wage earning’, and the kin-based, classed and generational structures of feeling through which ordinary people imagine and aspire to be ‘livelihood earners’. It is argued that addressing the dialectic between being a wage earner and a livelihood earner is absolutely central to a deeper understanding of precarization and its multiple manifestations.
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Notes
This article is based on two blocks of ethnographic fieldwork in Portugal. The first, between 2008 and 2009, in Lisbon, among young precarious call centre operators working in a private telecommunications company (Matos 2010). The second, during 2015 and 2016, in Setúbal, a post-industrial city located 50 km south of Portugal’s capital city, undergoing the ongoing effects of austerity policies. This latter research was developed within the context of the ERC-funded Grassroots Economics project, based at the University of Barcelona, coordinated by Susana Narotzky. For more information please see http://www.ub.edu/grassrootseconomics/.
Images cherished by the regime and its allied classes (e.g. the conservative rural oligarchy), broadly deployed by the ministry of propaganda.
The corporatist dictatorship of Estado Novo put an end to the First Republic (1910–1926) and the timid gains, in terms of rights, entitlements and expectations, accomplished for the working classes. During the First Republic, in spite of a high degree of political instability and divisions inside the Partido Republicano Português (Portuguese Republican Party), important welfare, educational and agrarian reforms projects were on the parliamentary agenda. Nonetheless, relevant groupings on the left representing worker’s interests grew further apart from the mainstream politics of bourgeois compromise (Chilcote 2010). Some of the former groupings included the national workers’ union—the União Operária Nacional—founded in 1913, which, under anarchist control, changed its name to the Confederação Geral do Trabalho (General Confederation of Labor (CGT)) in 1919, reaching 120,000 members, and the Partido Comunista Português (Portuguese Communist Party (PCP)) founded in 1921. These left groupings contributed to a period of high labour agitation, pressuring for left reforms to be carried out, that led to 518 strikes during the First Republic in contrast to 91 during the last decade of monarchy. It is beyond the scope of this article to detail the internal and external factors that facilitated the advent of fascism in Portugal—a theme of great controversy among Portuguese historians. This background information is meant to underline the non-neglectable importance of the corporatist legacy in shaping generational discontinuities in horizons of expectations vis-à-vis work, rights and entitlements, as will become clearer further ahead in this article.
In 1911, 75.1% of the population was illiterate, 69.3% in 1940, 48.7% in 1950 and in 1960 40.3% were still illiterate. That is, in 1940 Portugal had the level of illiteracy that Spain had in 1900, and in 1950 the same Italy had in 1910 (Carreira 1996, p. 436).
Portugal joined the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1959 and in 1972 signed a commercial agreement with the European Economic Community (EEC).
Feminist approaches to the economy stress the porous and tension connections between public and private, economic and familial, production and reproduction (Yanagisako 2012; Bear et al. 2015). For instance, Yanagisako (2002), shows how in the Italian Como silk industrial sector the expansion of entrepreneurial activity and the opening of new firms was intimately linked to gendered, familial and generational livelihood projects centred on the ideas of masculine autonomy, freedom and independence.
Throughout this article, parental generations encompass those born between 1940 and 1960; most of whom with 4 to 7 years of certified schooling; and a rural-urban internal migratory experience. Young generations of precarious workers are broadly those born after 1974.
The predecessor of the present Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses (CGTP—General Confederation of the Portuguese Workers), created in 1970 and organically linked to the Portuguese Communist Party.
In a comparative perspective, in Portugal, the tensions between socialist aims and emergent neoliberal capitalism, during the late 1970s and 1980s, are more shaped by the contested legacy of the revolutionary process (1974–1976) among political forces and the IMF intervention in the country in 1977 and in 1983, which resulted in further flexibilisation of labour laws, than by revisionist trends of the European left (i.e. Eurocommunism). The Partido Comunista Português (Portuguese Communist Party (PCP)) did not condemn the Prague Spring of 1968 and maintained itself aligned with the Soviet Union up until 1989. In the 1990s the PCP will go through a serious internal crisis in which many members abandon the party, but will again assert in congress its ‘Marxist and Leninist matrix’, organizationally based upon democratic centralism. PCP maintains a fixed electoral support (between 8 and 9%), due to its role as the major opposition party during the dictatorship, particularly in the southern rural areas of the country.
Santos et al. (1990) defines ‘welfare society’ as the networks of relationships of inter-knowledge, mutual recognition and mutual help based on kinship and community ties, through which small social groups exchange goods and services. Interestingly, the ways in which the Portuguese welfare society facilitated the development and expansion of labour neoliberalisation processes in the 1970s and 1980s anticipated the political and ideological visions entailed for the ‘Big Society’ by the Conservative-Liberal democrat coalition government in the UK (2010–2015).
In 1991 the number of persons holding a higher education degree was 18,671 and by 2010 had grown to 78,609. See http://www.pordata.pt/Portugal/Diplomados+no+ensino+superior+total+e+por+nivel+de+formacao-219.
The ways in which the idiom of precarity in Portugal articulates generational discontinuities as a failure of social reproduction resonates with findings among post-socialist contexts. Pine (2017) notes that in Poland, the events of 1989 and the adhesion process to the EU in 2004 have unsettled practices of kinship obligations among generations and contributed to the re-mapping of work skills and knowledge transmission. In this process Pine identifies the emergence of ‘lost generations’: “generations written out of the meta narrative of national political economy because there is no longer a place for them or a way for them to fulfil the obligations that they had previously undertaken, or generations who choose a new path which takes them away from the practices of kinship reciprocity, although not necessarily from the emotions, ideologies or moralities. In both cases what occurs is an inability of generations, at least in certain classes and contexts, to reproduce: a failure of reproduction” (p. 33).
It is estimated that between the 1950s and 1974 2 million Portuguese have left the country.
Moury and Standring (2017) show that the Troika’s best pupil’ willingness to ‘go beyond the Troika’ allowed the Portuguese government to legitimately pursue an agenda of neoliberal structural reforms, for which popular consent would be reduced with an electoral mandate. It is suggested that the right-wing coalition government mobilised specific strategies of depoliticisation, aiming at reinforcing the national imperative of the proposed reforms, around the main ideas of national ‘credibility’, ‘necessity’ and ‘lack of alternative’.
The austerity conjuncture intensifies moral struggles over the social meaning and political legitimacy of precarity among different social and political actors. Left-wing oppositional political parties, anti-precarity social movements and trade unions mobilise the precarity terminology as a way of stressing the radicalisation and acceleration of the neoliberal reconfiguration of employment and labour relationships and the general impoverishment of large sectors of the population. In contrast, the government increasingly linked the economic imperative of labour flexibility to a moral grammar of justification grounded on the idea that the excessive protection and privileges of older workers was preventing younger generations from accessing the labour market. The lack of work, stability and rights of young precarious workers was rhetorically articulated as the result of the excessive rights, protections and entitlements of older generations. Precarity was thus re-signified as a moral form of generational justice.
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Matos, P. Locating precarization: the state, livelihoods and the politics of precarity in contemporary Portugal. Dialect Anthropol 43, 15–30 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09543-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09543-8