Michael D Higgins says job insecurity fears must be addressed

Large swathes of the active populations of European countries are trapped in chronic job insecurity and their fears and aspirations need to be addressed, President Michael D Higgins has said.

Delivering the Edward Phelan lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), he said a new class of people with precarious employment, sometimes known as a "precariat", had emerged from the most recent period of globalisation.

“Unlike the proletariat - the industrial working class on which social democracy was built - the precariat is defined by partial involvement in labour combined with extensive ‘work-for-labour’, that is, a growing array of unremunerated activities, often internships of various sorts, that are required to get access to remunerated jobs.”

Mr Higgins said the extension of the “precariat” had been accelerated by the recent financial crisis.

He also maintained that the shift towards precarious employment did not just affect those in low-skilled jobs. He argued that recent analysis of the education sector showed that a considerable volume of teaching and research work was carried out by “temporary lecturers”, “adjunct lecturers”, and so-called “teaching assistants”, who had no job security and must repeatedly resume their exhausting hunt for the next short-term contract.

‘Defining challenge’

Mr Higgins said that “responding to the needs, the fears and the aspirations of those citizens among us who do not enjoy security of employment is a defining challenge for our times”.

“It is a task not just for those who claim to represent the most vulnerable in society, but for all democrats, for trade unionists in all sectors, for workers’ representatives on permanent contracts, and for tenured staff in our universities.”

“Were no genuine alternative to be articulated and translated into a plurality of policy options, populist politicians and heinous religious preachers alike will find it easy to exploit the fears and insecurities of precarious workers. This issue lies at the heart of the crisis which confronts European democracy.”

Mr Higgins said we cannot afford to let social cohesion unravel under the combined effects of the commodification of labour and the depoliticisation of economic policy.

“Distinguishing between populist manipulation of the masses and genuine empowerment of the citizenry through the democratic appropriation of debates on economic issues, it is important to affirm forcefully that no single economic paradigm can ever be adequate to address the complexity of our world’s varying contexts and contingencies.

“Decisions in the economic and financial fields should always remain amenable to political debate; they should not be abandoned to the automaticity of rigid fiscal rules, even less so as economists disagree over the theoretical soundness of such rules.

“We need to foster widespread economic literacy, supported by a pluralist scholarship and accountable policy options in a deliberative democracy.”

Mr Higgins said he was calling for an examination of the assumptions associated with a brand of economics that recast the market as a general principle for regulating the economy, treating labour, land and money as if they were pure commodities.

“The recent economic crisis has shown, on the contrary, that markets do require an institutional framework within which transactions between economic agents can be conducted under the auspices of a third party that guarantees their fairness over the long-term of human existence.

“Without such overarching regulatory authority, contractual relationships would run the risk of reverting to arbitrary logics and the expression of the will of the strongest.”