In mid-March of this year, 35,000-40,000 students at CÉGEPs (pre‑university and technical colleges) and universities across Quebec went on strike for a week. Unlike the 2012 strike which was led by Coalition Large de l’ASSÉ (CLASSE), this year’s action was developed around a different organizing model and critique of the post-secondary education system in the province. The rebellion against tuition hikes and the theme of student debt at the heart of the 2012 strike have been replaced by a different analysis, one which places unwaged work at the center of the movement’s organizing. Inspired by the perspectives of autonomist-feminist organizers of the 1970s, the Comités Unitaires sur le Travail Étudiant (Student Work Unitary Committees, CUTE) have advanced a critique of the unwaged internships which are a key mechanism for the insertion of workers into labor markets. These unpaid placements are especially common for students in training for traditionally under-valued and …
Tag: precarity
Creative Economy and Labour Precarity: A Contested Convergence
The publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s trilogy coincides with the ascent of a dominant discourse on the so-called creative economy that presents media, communication, and cultural sectors as priority sites for market growth and job opportunity. Hardt and Negri’s work and the wider autonomist tradition supply elements for a counter- perspective on the vaunted creative economy. Of the vast lexicon associated with autonomist thought, two concepts—precarity and recomposition—are especially relevant to an oppositional response to the creative economy. The first part of the paper introduces a schema of precarious labour personas so to illuminate some of the multiple manifestations of labor precarity as an effect of post-Fordist exploitation. The concept of precarity is, however, more than a linguistic device highlighting labor conditions that are denied in dominant discourses on the creative economy. It also signals a promising laboratory of a recomposition of labor politics in which media and …
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