During the York University strike of 2018, workers on the picket line found themselves being watched
Imagine getting an email from your boss titled “Your monthly performance.” That uneasy feeling gripping you is related to the possibility that you have done something that will put your job at risk. This anxiety is not the result of a known or specific threat – rather, it comes from the anticipation of possible dangers that have not yet manifested. Whereas fear is characterized by emotional responses to known threats, anxiety is a chronic insecurity that arises out of what is unknown.
What links precarious work to anxious workers is this chronic insecurity. Modern work increasingly lacks predictability, security, and material or psychological support. Precarity is a form of insecurity that treats workers as disposable. Such feelings of disposability are then channelled into management rhetoric – brand management, anger management, parental management, time management – all of which, according to the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, offer anxious workers the illusion of control in return for the ever greater internalization of insecurity. Typically, though, anxiety and insecurity – in the workplace and beyond – are treated as individual problems rather than collective ones. Writing in the New Inquiry, Isabell Lorey points out that under the yoke of neoliberal capitalism, self-management is becoming part of the structural fabric of our workplaces, and has developed into an indispensable tool for controlling workers.
This story is from the November/December 2018 edition of Briarpatch.
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This story is from the November/December 2018 edition of Briarpatch.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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