A Closer Look at Precarity
This article (an important read) argues that precarity is much more than unstable employment. It’s a way of understanding how insecurity is produced, experienced, and distributed throughout society. Rather than being simply an unfortunate byproduct of modern economies, precarity has become a central feature of contemporary capitalism and an important concept in anthropology.
Here are the main ideas:
1. Precarity is more than insecure jobs
Most people first think of precarity as temporary work, gig jobs, or unemployment. And those are certainly examples, but anthropologists use the term much more broadly. Precarity includes: Economic insecurity. Uncertain housing. Weak social support. Political vulnerability. Anxiety about the future. Living without reliable institutions to depend upon
The point isn’t simply that people have unstable work. It’s that uncertainty begins to shape every part of life.
2. There are two major ways scholars understand precarity
The article describes two broad schools of thought.
The first views precarity as a fundamental human condition. Human beings are always vulnerable. We all depend upon one another, and life itself is uncertain. Some scholars emphasize this universal precariousness. The criticism of this view is that if everyone is precarious all the time, then the concept loses its usefulness because it cannot explain why some groups experience far greater insecurity than others.
The second sees precarity as a product of neoliberal capitalism. This is the approach most often associated with labor markets. Beginning in the late twentieth century:
stable long-term employment declined
unions weakened
welfare protections shrank
flexible, temporary work expanded
risk shifted from institutions onto individuals
Under this view, precarity isn’t natural. It’s politically and economically produced.
3. The “good old days” were never good for everyone
One of the article’s strongest arguments is that the common story can be misleading. People often compare today’s gig economy to the postwar era of stable employment. But anthropology asks: Stable for whom? Many groups (including women, African Americans, immigrants, agricultural workers, domestic workers, and much of the Global South) never enjoyed that supposed stability. For them, insecurity has always been normal.
The article therefore cautions against treating precarity as something entirely new. It may be new for parts of the middle class, but not for humanity as a whole.
4. The Global South has lived with precarity for generations
Anthropologists studying Latin America, Africa, and South Asia point out that informal work has long been the dominant way many people survive. Street vendors. Day laborers. Domestic workers. Family economies. Informal trading networks. These aren’t exceptions. For much of the world, they are the economy.
This perspective challenges the assumption that full-time permanent employment is the historical norm.
5. Precarity affects emotions as much as economics
The article emphasizes that insecurity changes how people experience everyday life. People begin living with:
constant uncertainty
chronic stress
fear of losing what they have
weakened community ties
isolation
anxiety
Even workers with relatively secure jobs often organize their lives around the possibility of losing them. Precarity therefore becomes a lived emotional condition, not merely an economic statistic.
6. Anthropology asks how people adapt
Rather than only measuring poverty or unemployment, anthropologists study how people actually navigate uncertain lives. They examine:
informal economies
mutual aid
family support
neighborhood networks
migration
new forms of political organizing
People rarely survive through markets alone. They survive through relationships.
Why I Think this Article Resonates with My Work
As I was reading it, I couldn’t help noticing how closely it aligns with the work I’ve been developing around bottom-up community infrastructure.
The article spends considerable time describing how modern institutions increasingly shift risk onto individuals. When government programs become fragmented, employment grows unstable, or formal systems fail to provide security, people experience greater precarity.
My work begins at almost the opposite end of that story.
Instead of asking, “How do we create another program?” I’m asking, “How do we rebuild the local social infrastructure that makes communities capable of supporting one another?”
From my perspective, precarity isn’t only an economic problem; it’s a social infrastructure problem. When neighborhoods lose trust, participation, local knowledge, and reciprocal relationships, every disruption becomes more dangerous because people have fewer places to turn. In that sense, the article helps explain the diagnosis.
My work is trying to build part of the treatment.
I think this is one of the reasons that I find the phrase “bottom-up community infrastructure” is so compelling. It reframes resilience as something that emerges from relationships, participation, and local capacity rather than solely from institutions or funding.
And that strikes me as a valuable contribution to the conversation around precarity.
What Does Precarity Mean to Us?
The word is usually used to describe unstable jobs, the gig economy, or people living paycheck to paycheck. And certainly that’s part of it. But I think it’s pointing toward something even deeper.
Precarity isn’t simply a lack of money. It’s a lack of certainty. It’s the feeling that you’re one unexpected bill, one medical emergency, one lost job, or one broken relationship away from everything beginning to unravel.
Or, unravel more quickly than it already is.
Spend any amount of time working in a community resource center and you’ll see it everywhere. A mother loses childcare and suddenly she can’t make it to work. A missed paycheck leads to an eviction notice. Transportation breaks down, appointments are missed, healthcare gets delayed, employment disappears. Each problem creates two more.
From the outside, these look like separate crises. They aren’t. They’re symptoms of fragile social infrastructure.
For generations we’ve assumed that institutions would provide stability. Government programs. Nonprofits. Employers. Insurance. All important. All valuable. But over the last several years we’ve watched those systems become increasingly strained. Funding runs out. Waiting lists grow longer. Programs disappear. Case managers spend more time trying to find resources that no longer exist.
We’re asking institutions to carry more weight than they were ever designed to bear. And the answer isn’t abandoning those institutions. We need them. The answer is rebuilding the layer beneath them.
Community.
Not community as a social media slogan. But real community as real infrastructure. Infrastructure is the foundation that allows everything else to function. Roads allow commerce. Water systems allow cities to exist. Electrical grids allow modern life. A system is something you build to accomplish a task. But infrastructure is something that allows countless other things to happen. Roads don’t deliver groceries. They make grocery delivery possible. The electrical grid doesn’t educate children. It makes education possible. Likewise, community social infrastructure doesn’t solve every social problem. It creates the conditions in which communities can solve more of their own problems.
Human relationships are infrastructure too. Community is infrastructure too. And strong communities aren’t built by just distributing resources. They’re built by increasing participation. The greatest untapped resource in any community isn’t money. It’s the willingness of ordinary people to help one another. When neighbors know one another, information travels. Skills are shared. Problems are solved earlier. Isolation decreases. Trust grows. Small acts of participation prevent large crises from developing.
That’s the kind of infrastructure that rarely appears on a government budget, yet every healthy community depends on it. This is what KommunityKoin has always been about. It isn’t another social network. It isn’t a rewards program. It isn’t an app competing for people’s attention.
It’s an attempt to make participation visible. To recognize the countless small acts that already hold communities together. Helping an elderly neighbor. Mentoring a teenager. Organizing a neighborhood cleanup. Sharing knowledge.
Showing up.
Most of these things have tremendous value, yet almost none of them are measured. Our economy recognizes transactions far more easily than contributions. But communities aren’t built by transactions alone.
They’re built by participation.
The more visible participation becomes, the more it grows. People begin to recognize one another. Trust begins to accumulate. Networks begin to form. And those networks become the very thing people rely on when life becomes uncertain.
That’s how we reduce precarity.
Not by pretending uncertainty will disappear. Life will always contain uncertainty. But uncertainty feels very different when you know your community knows your name.
The strongest safety net has never been a program.
It’s always been people.
If the years ahead bring greater economic uncertainty (and I’m sure they will) we’ll certainly need better policies, stronger organizations, and wise leadership.
We’ll also need something else. We’ll need neighbors.
Because the opposite of precarity isn’t simply prosperity. It’s belonging to a community. Or, Kommunity!
Cheers, friends,
