Crisis and the Precarious Labour Market: After COVID19

This paper discusses new forms and normalization of precarious work in relation to the role of crisis and its different phases as well as interlinkages to other parallel, induces or coming crises. The use of crisis, as well as state- and private global enterprise management of crisis by increasingly fragmenting the global value chains sometimes leaving localities in the global South with dead ends and overused resources, restructuring of the labour forces, inducing unemployment, increasing precarity in the labour market parallel to state interventions that increasingly put pressure on migrants to establish themselves on the labour market – to obtain a residence permit or work permit can besides being a remarkable contemporary cynicism also be understood as a continuous renegotiation of the relation between the global South and North. Empirical examples on the normalization of precarity on the labour market are from the Swedish context linked to a global level and show how the interconnectivity between different interest areas and actors has increased. This also needs to be understood in relation to precarious employment that takes form in a more complex way – in relation to different forms of crisis, war, economic debt, waiting for asylum etc. The findings on the developments of a increasingly precarious labour market in relation to a post-COVID 19 situation with a global work crisis as well as economic crisis, energy crisis, emerging wars and conflicts suggests that new routes into the precarious labour market has been created thus also new vulnerabilities and new norms of atypical work, precarious labour flexibility and where labourers to a higher extent also invest in a highly uncertain and precarious future. This paper suggests that these processes also are linked to a more cynical and complex use of crisis, the prolongation of certain crises and the mobility of crisis.