Precarious Employment and Everyday Class Struggle

Precarious Employment and Everyday Class Struggle: A Critical Theory Approach explores how insecure forms of employment are woven into the daily lives and struggles of workers today, forming a fundamental feature of contemporary capitalism.Precarious work, it argues, is not simply a contractual condition affecting marginal groups, but a social, economic and political force that keeps people tethered to the always-uncertain opportunities of paid work. Precarity is not the identity of a separate class, the “precariat”; it is a defining feature of capitalism itself, rooted in the wage relation and the subordination it demands. Drawing on the lives of workers too often dismissed as “marginal”, the book shows how coping, resisting and seeking stability — even when unorganised and politically unrecognised — express deeper class antagonisms. Methodologically, it reads rich empirical material through an advanced Critical Theory lens, showing how everyday experience and theoretical analysis illuminate one another. Moving beyond a class identity rooted in the white male industrial worker, it offers a renewed understanding of class centred on unequal labour and wage relations. Where wage labour is people’s main source of income, the constant effort to secure enough hours, keep a job and protect basic living standards becomes a form of everyday class struggle.This innovative new contribution to the literature will be essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students and researchers in sociology, labour studies, political economy, and critical social theory.