Call for Submissions: “Precarious Labour”

Briarpatch Magazine invites submissions for our November 2007 “precarious labour” issue. This issue will provide a critical lens on the most pressing issues facing Canadians at work, and the struggles of various sectors of the workforce for dignity, fair pay, and job security.

Briarpatch Magazine presents readers with accurate, accessible, engaging information about the world we live in, and provides the tools, strategies, and inspiration to assist in the fight for a better one. Briarpatch promotes a structural understanding of social and environmental problems and supports grassroots efforts to address them.

(Please note that queries for this issue are due on July 10, with first drafts due August 10.)

What do we mean by “precarious labour?”

The concept of precarity has emerged in recent years as a useful description of daily life under neo-liberal globalization, as well as a potential banner for uniting various movements in the fight against it. The key question we will seek to answer in this issue is: What usefulness does ‘precarity’ have as both a description of the emerging conditions of work and life in 21st century Canada and beyond, and as an organizing principle for challenging the ravages of neoliberal globalization?

We are looking for investigations and analyses of the following – and much more:

• the status of live-in care-givers and/or migrant farm workers in Canada and the legal mechanisms that keep them vulnerable;
• the struggles of the “service class” – the mass of mostly young, mostly part-time workers in the burgeoning service industry;
• the international movements of peasants and farmers for secure livelihoods;
• the efforts of marginalized populations (people of colour, Aboriginals, single mothers, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, or others) to achieve income security;
• the struggles of First Nations for control of land and resources;
• the radical tactics of anti-poverty activists;
• the challenges facing the labour movement in Canada today;
• practical tools for organizers working with precarious segments of the population; and
• creative strategies for seizing the opportunities and confronting the challenges that precarity presents.

We aim to cast a broad net with this issue, so certainly don’t feel constrained by the options presented above.

We want your feature articles, op-eds, investigative reports, news briefs, interviews, profiles, reviews, poetry, and artwork on topics related to labour and precarity.

Queries are due by July 10. If your query is accepted, your first draft will be due on Friday, August 10, 2007. Unsolicited submissions will be considered, but we encourage you to send us a query first. Your query should outline what ground your contribution will cover, give an estimated word count, and indicate your relevant experience or background in writing about the issue.

Please review our submission guidelines before submitting. Send your queries/submissions to editor@briarpatchmagazine.com.

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More about “precarity”

“At once celebrated and vilified, ‘precarity’ is a social condition created by the new reality of casual, flexible, temp and contract work. It is also a response, a lifestyle and a movement – maybe one of the most important movements of this generation. In their search for material security in the collapsing welfare states of Europe, precarity activists have begun exploring whole new models of social organizing. Most importantly, they are developing radical new visions of the future.”

Adbusters, November/December 2005

“Precarity describes the situation of temp or flex workers, ranging from workers in supermarkets and other big commercial chains to artists and employees of the service industry. Their working conditions are generally characterized by instability, often lacking contracts, health insurance and pension plans, which has important repercussions for everyday living. This group of workers is also characterized by a lack of political institutional organization and hence the bargaining power to influence state and industry regulations, let alone take action to alleviate the systemic barriers that keep them precarious. […] In this context, precarity may be typologized according to three figures: the “chainworker,” the “brainworker” and the migrant worker.”

Alessandra Renzi and Stephen Turpin, Fuse Magazine, January 2007

“In three words, [the precarity network] should be green, wobbly and pink, in order to be effective. It should lay out a cogent ecological program to reform society, a creative wobbly strategy to organize and unionize the weak and excluded, a pink emphasis on non-violent action and gender equality so to project a queer outlook on the world. It would have to speak to the young, women, immigrants. It would have to address the grievances of the service class, and put to good use the networking talents of the creative class. It would be transnationalist in orientation and multiethnic in composition.”

Alex Foti, Greenpepper Magazine