Work Precarisation and New Inequalities: The Role of Migration

In the neoliberal era, precarity has become a general condition in the life of workers. The structural precarisation of labour is a global process, which has taken place heterogeneously according to national contexts, sectors, qualifications, and labour market stratifications. Besides young people, low-skilled older workers, and women, it has mainly affected migrants, who have suffered from labour precarity combined with the weakness of their legal and social status. At the same time, migration is also involuntarily an agent of spreading and widening precarisation—often a testing ground where new forms of precarity are trialled before being extended to other groups of workers. This essay looks at precarity from two angles: the impact of it on migrant workers and the role of migration in the exacerbation and extension of it. It first analyses the process of structural precarisation of labour, highlighting how it has become even more extreme in recent years. It then examines the precarisation of migration in Europe over the past two decades and its role in paving the way for a wider enlargement of precarity. Finally, it considers the Italian context as a striking example of this two-fold process.