Does precarious work divide the working class?

Deliveroo workers, who are in precarious work, on strike (Photo: flickr/Steve Eason)

Work in Britain today is precarious for millions of people. But precarious workers are not a ­separate class without power. They can be part of and lead the fight against ­exploitation and oppression.

The number of precarious workers has risen by a dramatic 31 percent since 2011. The number of people with secure work has risen too, but only by 11 percent.

Workers on ­precarious contracts include care ­workers, call centre operatives and an army of people working for platform companies such as Uber, Deliveroo and DoorDash.

Workers on insecure ­contracts can also be doing casual or seasonal work, be self-employed or on zero hours contracts—where there is no expectation they will be offered any fixed hours.

These sectors rely on migrant workers. Migration Observatory points out that 9 ­percent of workers from outside the European Union worked in a non-permanent job in 2022. That compares to 6 percent of EU migrants and 5 percent of those born in Britain. 

Some precarious jobs are hidden in less obvious places. Oxford University is one of the oldest and most prestigious workplaces in Britain. It has huge numbers of workers on precarious contracts who deliver much of its teaching.

Oxford colleges raked in an income of over £660 million last year. Yet two thirds of academic staff there do not have permanent contracts. Low pay is a consistent feature of precarious work. Workers with insecure contracts earn an average of 35 percent less per hour than workers on median pay.

Some on the left argue that precarious workers form a separate class. Guy Standing first published The Precariat—The New Dangerous Class in 2011.

Standing argued that ­capitalism has been restructured over the past few decades. He described how precarious work was the outcome of ­neoliberal policies that eroded regulations and pushed risk onto the individual worker. 

Standing refers to three groups of workers. The “salariat” are professionals who are in stable jobs and have pensions and other benefits. The “proletariat” are manual workers with more secure jobs. The “precariat” have jobs that don’t offer them security or status.

He says that the demands of this new class have little to do with the concerns of traditional trade unions, which are focused on the industrial workforce that is increasingly irrelevant.

Standing described these workers, who have been betrayed by the liberal political consensus, as a “political monster” about to make its appearance. When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, Standing said that the monster had arrived.

Standing argued that the existence of a layer of casually employed workers puts pressure on those with ­permanent roles. He described how Hyatt Hotel workers in the United States worked an eight-hour day. They were told that they could be replaced by agency workers who had been forced to accept a 12-hour day.

The bosses always look for ways to force workers to compete with each other. But this does not mean there is a conflict of interests between precarious workers and secure workers.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels referred to a reserve army of labour in the nineteenth century. They understood how unemployed and underemployed people could be used to discipline people in more secure jobs.

The working class includes those tired out by working for long hours, and those who desperately need to work. Secure and insecure workers do not form two hostile camps.

Many people have insecure jobs when they are young, or when they have young family, or when they are too exhausted to continue working full time.

When workers with ­precarious contracts win more security, it benefits the whole working class. When workers with secure jobs win higher wages or better conditions, it raises the confidence of the whole working class.

Workers have forced their bosses to give them secure work by uniting and fighting for their right in the workplace.

In late 19th century Britain, the London docks were one of the country’s biggest employers. Dock workers had to turn up every morning and fight  each other for a day’s work. Anyone who spoke out would not be hired. In August 1889 these ­humiliated, divided workers fought back in what became known as the Great Dock Strike.

Engels described the dock workers as the “odds and ends of all trades, fighting every morning at the dock gates for an engagement”.

He witnessed how these “odds and ends” could ­transform their lives through uniting in struggle. “If they can combine”, he wrote, “and terrify by their resolution the mighty Dock Companies, truly then we need not despair of any section of the working class”.

This mass strike involved 130,000 workers and closed the Port of London dock. It won the key demand of sixpence per hour, the “Docker’s tanner”. This strike inspired a wave of walk outs among the low skilled and previously hard to organise workers.

The “New Unionism” of the 1880s is not just interesting history. Workers today are being drawn into collective organisation and into struggle in the same way—in Amazon ­warehouses, fast food chains and universities.

In 2021, Uber drivers won a High Court case, which ruled that they are employed by the company. They are not self‑employed, it said, and are entitled to a minimum wage and to holiday pay.

Two Oxford academics who had worked at the university for 15 years also won a tribunal case against “sham ­contracts”. They argued that they are ­employees and not “personal services” providers, as the university described them.

In 2018, hundreds of McDonald’s workers walked out on strike and shut down branches in their fight for a £10 an hour minimum wage and for more choice over their contracts.

The strikers also raised other issues with their working conditions such as sexual harassment and injuries from working with deep fryers.

And university workers across Britain have taken determined action over both pay and conditions including the rate of casualisation in the sector over the past few years.

The university workers’ strikes faced a vacillating trade union leadership that stopped short of the kind of action needed to end casualisation. But the strikes did show how temporary and permanent workers can come together on the same picket lines for the same aims.

In some cases ­precarious workers have joined established trade unions such as the UCU universities’ union or the CWU communication’s union  in call centres.

Smaller unions, such as United Voices of the World, have shown that it is possible to unionise previously unorganised groups.

Workers in insecure jobs will fight back against the uncertainty which overshadows their lives, against the constant pressures to prove their worth to the bosses and the humiliation of competing for shifts.

Many precarious workers lack employment rights such as paid sick leave or holidays. They do not get paid for travelling between jobs, for time spent waiting for an order on a food delivery app or the admin involved in applying for shifts.

Capitalism is a dynamic system and the nature of work is always changing. But it is important also to highlight areas of continuity. Seven out of every eight workers in Britain do still have permanent jobs.

Many are employed by big employers. The NHS has 1.5 ­million workers. Heathrow Airport employs more than 7,000 people directly and nearly 80,000 including those ­outsourced to other companies.

There are pressures on bosses to employ people in insecure roles. But it is also in their ­interests to retain employees that they have invested in hiring and training.

According to the 2021 census, job tenure—measured as the number of years in the role—is 9.8 years on average in the public sector and 6.7 years in the private sector. These figures have actually gone up.

In the hospitality sector, employers have been struggling to recruit enough people. Some  industry bosses are discussing the need to improve conditions so they can retain workers.

Although most people are not on precarious contracts, threats of redundancies can still contribute to their real feelings of insecurity.

Today, precariously employed workers continue to fight back and demand better pay and conditions. All workers face the same stress over the cost of living, the same demands to work harder for longer for less whether they have a contract or not. The so‑called “salariat” is not a ­privileged elite.

Capitalism creates its own gravedigger by drawing ­workers in ever greater numbers into its factories, call centres, ­warehouses and service industries. Those workers will find ways to exercise their collective power.

Insisting that the needs of ­precarious workers are distinct from those of others is a dangerous diversion—all workers have the power to shut down the system.