‘Precarious parents’ in Italy: A study on gendered and racialised labour-power

Abstract

This research explores the conditions of parents in precarious employment in Italy (European Union) with an emphasis on (but not confined to) mothers from non-European Union countries of origin. The aim is to construct a critical understanding of the material conditions of workers and parents in precarious employment and their everyday struggles to achieve employment and income security, when this income security can be achieved only through the sale of labour-power in gendered and racialised labour markets. Their everyday lives are marked by their conditions of bearers of labour-power and crucially these precarious social conditions produce a pressure which tends to reduce precarious workers’ lives to ‘bare life’. Bare life is connected to the ‘bare minimum’ that these participants get in terms of income. This study aims to give a new interpretation to the concept of bare minimum through which precarious parents must arrange their lives. Gendered and racialising processes take place through the struggles around this ‘minimum’.