Based on the material obtained from focus group interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the article analyses the mechanisms used by employers towards employees, as well as the adaptation strategies applied by those in precarious employment in Poland. The authors’ considerations refer to anti-worker changes introduced under the pretext of the pandemic in the capitalist labour market: layoffs and cuts in wages, manifestations of discrimination against precarious workers and the potential attitudes of employee self-defence. The authors conclude that it is almost certain that under the conditions of post-pandemic capitalism, the number of the precariat will grow and the neoliberal system will want to retain as many of the anti-worker solutions introduced in the shadow of the pandemic as possible. JEL codes J70, J81, J28

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10353046211067255

The precariat pandemic: Exploitation overshadowed by COVID-19 and workers’ strategies in Poland

Imagining the Copperbelts

Decline and Fall: Crisis and the Copperbelt, 1975–2000

/pdf/boom-time-revisiting-capital-and-labour-in-the-copperbelt-4d8vqyr2og.pdf

Boom Time – Revisiting Capital and Labour in the Copperbelt

The research field of labour precarity is loaded with largely isolated empirical studies focusing on specific forms of precarious labour. This article is a preliminary attempt towards a more system...

The making of labour precarity: three explanatory approaches and their relationship

The paper presents a critique of the discourse of precarity that assumes that regulated era labor relations in advanced capitalist economies represent the norm, while ‘irregular work’ represents a ...

Danish Khan

Papers

Rethinking informal labor in peripheral capitalism: the dynamics of surplus, market, and spatiality