The First Precariat?

Abstract

The transformation of global capitalism, labor, and class relations in our own day is having a marked effect on how we study those subjects historically. Yet, as happens repeatedly in our historical discipline, insights gained from the juxtaposition and recognition of deep structural affinities between the present and the past also carry the risk of a distorted mirror effect. What questions we carry to the past and what lessons we, in turn, extract from it must be handled with care. As couriers between worlds of time as well as space, our work as historians inevitably reflects the ignorance as well as intelligence attending the message (as well as the messenger) of the given moment. With these caveats in mind, I want to explore the link between today's global crisis in worker welfare—perhaps most commonly summoned up by the twinned terms “neoliberalism” and the “precariat”—and a new historical preoccupation with coerced laborers of the past. With due deference to the aims of this collection, I will concentrate on the connection between the coolie question, as it developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the plight (and possible strategies) of low-wage global workers today.

A complexidade do trabalho precário na Atenção Psicossocial Territorial: reflexão crítica sobre o contexto brasileiro

“…No mundo ocidental, embora em posição periférica, portanto, mais vulnerável, o Brasil partilha, desde a década de 1970, uma crise internacional do capital, política, social e econômica, caracterizada no específico mundo do trabalho por contratações do tipo part time, sem benefícios sociais, com baixos salários, além da informalidade, em que os riscos ocupacionais passam a ser assumidos pelo trabalhador, e não pelo empregador ou pelo poder público. Os trabalhadores, atomizados, despolitizados, encontram-se por sua única conta, diante do capital oligopolista, financeirizado e sem pátria 12,13 .…”

The complexity of precarious work in Territorial Psychosocial Care: critical reflection on the Brazilian context

“…In the western world, although in a peripheral position, therefore, more vulnerable, Brazil has shared, since the 1970s, an international capital, political, social and economic crisis, characterized in the specific world of work by part-time hiring, without social benefits, with low wages, in addition to informality, in which occupational risks are assumed by the worker, and not by the employer or the public authorities. Workers, atomized, depoliticized, find themselves on their own, facing oligopolistic capital, financialized and stateless 12, 13 .…”