30.3. Precarias a la deriva and Precarious Lives

Precarias a la Deriva is an initiative between research and activism which arose from the feminist social center La Eskalera Karakola in Madrid, initially as a response to the general strike in Spain in June of 2002. Faced with a mobilization which did not represent the kind of fragmented, informal, invisible work that we do – our jobs were neither taken into consideration by the unions that called the strike nor effected by the legislation that provoked it – a group of women decided to spend the day of the strike wandering the city together, transforming the classic picket line into a picket survey: talking to women about their work and their days.

 

From this first tentative experience came the impulse to organize an ongoing research project. It is clear that we need tools for talking about and intervening in new kinds of work -this terrain of labor which often doesn't even have a name - so we set out to map the territory, with one eye always set on the possibility of conflict. This is a bid for survival arising out of our own needs: networks to break solitude, words to talk about what is happening to us.


But who is this 'us'? We depart from a tentative category, almost an intuition: can we use 'precariousness' as a common name for our diverse and singular situations? How can we both seek common names and recognize singularities, make alliances and comprehend difference? A freelance designer and a sex worker have certain things in common - the unpredictability and exposure of work, the continuity of work and life, the deployment of a whole range of unquantifiable skills and knowledges. But the difference in social recognition and the degree of vulnerability is also clear. How shall we articulate our common need without falling back upon identity, without flattening or homogenizing our situations?

We chose a method that would take us on a series of itineraries through the metropolitan circuits of feminized precarious work, leading each other through our quotidian environments, speaking in the first person, exchanging experiences, reflecting together. These derives through the city defy the division between work and life, production and reproduction, public and private, to trace the spatial-temporal continuum of existence, the double (or multiple) presence. More concretely: for a few months an open and changing group of us went almost every week on a wandering tour through the important spaces of daily life of women (ourselves, friends, close contacts) working in precarious and highly feminized sectors: language work (translations and teaching), domestic work, call-shops, sex work, food service, social assistance, media production.

we know that precariousness is not limited to the world of work. We prefer to define it as a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the full development of one's life.