‘All that is solid melts into air.’ These words from The Communist Manifesto, first published in London in 1848, were written as a poetic depiction of the destructive and creative dynamism of capitalism. Reading them today makes you feel as if they were written with the last couple of years in mind. Much looked as if it were solid, but melted into air.
Social security payments, for example, were once actually seen as a means of preventing poverty, not prescribing it. A job was once seen, at least for some, as being not only the best guarantee against poverty but the path to economic security. Now it seems, however, multiple jobs are required to stave off poverty.
According to a recent ACTU report, there are now ‘867,900 Australians working multiple jobs, the highest number since the ABS began tracking secondary jobs in 1994.’ And there are now a record number of Australians working three or more jobs, 209,100, a 10.8 per cent increase from June 2020.
We’re living in a society where, according to the report, workers who do multiple jobs still earn 17.5 per cent less than the national average. And women working multiple jobs are significantly worse off than men, earning almost $10,000 less per year than their male counterparts. Of those holding multiple jobs, 53.7 per cent are women and 55 per cent are under 35.
This surge in people working multiple jobs is being driven by employers offering insecure work. Where employers, encouraged by neoliberal governments, assiduously press for ever greater levels of insecurity and precarity as a means of increasing short-term profits by lowering wages, as well as aggressively fragmenting the working class, they do so for one reason only: because they can.
The very word precarity, Eloisa Betti reminds us, comes from the Latin root precor (pray) or precarius (obtained by praying). When our jobs, or anything else for that matter, are insecure, we are expected to feel like those who hold the power over us are best approached with an attitude akin to prayer.
"At its best, politics is the collective means of achieving our shared hopes."
And this precarity is not an accident of history. It is designed to place people in a position of assumed powerlessness. It functions most effectively for its instigators when people are isolated from each other, atomised, fragmented, convinced that their malady is theirs alone. It is important that we tell ourselves the