The Rise Of The Precarious Class? Conceptualising Inequality Among Young People In The Context Of Labour-Market Change

Casual, insecure and variable patterns of work are rising across the developed world, particularly for young people. Academics and policy makers have used a range of terms to capture the 'grey zone' that falls between worklessness on the one hand, and relatively secure full-time employment on the other. This 'grey zone' varies significantly in size across first world countries and is likely to expand under the current turbulent economic conditions. Although sociologists have both introduced and critiqued various terms used to represent insecure and fragmented work forms, there have been few attempts at a theoretically driven conceptualisation that ties the new conditions to broader processes of change in advanced capitalist societies and links structural change to new forms of consciousness. While the idea of a framing the experiences of fragmented and casualised work in the new economy as a new class, for example the precariat, has some attraction, there are also difficulties with the conceptualisation. One of the core problems relate to the fact that not all young people who are structurally located in the precariat by virtue of their employment in casual or insecure forms of employment represent a disadvantaged or marginalised group. For some the experience of precarious employment is alleviated by access to other resources, such as family support, and they escape some or all of these precarious work conditions as they get older. Drawing on evidence from a number of countries, and primary data from an ongoing mixed-methods study of youth in Australia, in this paper we describe some of the ways in which changes in the labour market are affecting young people, consider the adequacy of representations of precarious and fragmented positions as the basis of a new ‘class’ and propose an alternative way of conceptualising ‘individualised’ structured inequalities in the new economy.