Understanding Academic Precarity with Iris Marion Young: Who’s Responsible?

The idea for this new mini-series—Precarity and Philosophy—developed out of conversations with my co-editors Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Katherine Cassese over the past year. With this mini-series, I’d like to address precarity from a philosophical angle while also remaining close to its concrete manifestations within and beyond the university.

I am interested in how precarity operates, who is responsible for it, and what it means to have solidarity in a world driven by competition and scarcity. The moral meaning of precarity shows up, I find, in lived experiences. The wrongness of precarity manifests itself in how precarity impairs people’s lives, their projects, and their relationships. In this sense, I hope for this series also to consider phenomenological perspectives on precarity. It is important to note that precarity does not only impact human beings—here I am thinking of all the forms of life on the threshold of extinction. I’d like this series to consider neglected forms of precarity. This includes precarity in its non-human manifestations.

I cover some of these ideas in the post below. Having been a temporary lecturer for years, I have recently acquired a permanent contract. My time on temporary contracts has left me wondering about the complicated nature of responsibility and solidarity at universities in light of how they establish and perpetuate precarious forms of labor.

If you would like to contribute to this series by writing a piece or doing an interview, please get in touch with me here s.shahid@auc.nl. 

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For the students of Ethics, Autumn 2021, Amsterdam University College

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I. Precarity

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I came across an unsettling article about conditions at meatpacking factories that put workers at greater risk of contracting the virus. Since workers typically stand shoulder to shoulder at the assembly line, they are unable to maintain the Center for Disease Control’s recommended distance of six feet from one another. The loud noise of the machines forces them to shout when communicating, which produces a large amount of droplets and aerosols, increasing the risk of viral transmission. The lightning speed of the assembly line means that they cannot step away to sneeze or change soiled masks. Many of these workers are undocumented migrants with little to no legal protection. Because they live in multi-generational homes, they also risk transmitting the virus to their loved ones. Their situation is an acute example of precarity.

The workers at meatpacking factories are vulnerable to COVID-19 because, like all of us, they are human beings. Owing to their working conditions, however, they are differentially exposed to disease and death. Their working conditions, in other words, exacerbate their general vulnerability to the virus. Their precarity is manufactured.

Judith Butler points out that a hallmark of precarity is its differential distribution. We should not be misled by the fact that because we are all living beings—vulnerable to injury and death—we are all equally precarious. It is generally true that we are not invincible and we rely on each other for our survival and flourishing. This is why we have social, political, and economic regulations and institutions to protect us. But, as Butler argues, these protections are granted to some and not to others. And this is why some are more precarious than others.

Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection (Butler, Frames of War, p. 26)

I read Butler’s words back in 2020 when I was a temporary lecturer, and they continue to haunt me. I was teaching online, had access to high-quality masks, and was able to keep my environment relatively safe. Still, the pandemic filled me with dread for myself and my loved ones, near and far away. But the dread these meatpacking factory workers must experience, I cannot imagine.

II. Precarity at the University

The precarity of temporary lecturers is infinitely less glaring than the grim conditions of meatpacking factory workers. Yet academic precarity does have its own reality.

I am interested in the truth that academic precarity deeply troubles the life-purposes of precarious academics. Besides uncertainty about prospects of reemployment after end of contract, and the associated material insecurity, temporary lecturers face insecurity about their vocation in life. By the time you are a temporary lecturer, you have spent many years devoted to your field, and it now seems as if you have no place in the world where you can do what you do best. Precarity goes beyond contracts: it is an overwhelming sense of dispensability, isolation, and exhaustion that has consequences for every area of one’s life, including how one relates to one’s own intellectual talents. Precarity is a whole atmosphere, as I like to say. As much as one may try to refocus attention to other areas of one’s life, it is always there.  

Besides facing the pressures specific to precarious employment, teaching during the pandemic meant working tirelessly to produce online materials for students, while (for many) juggling childcare obligations alongside tending to family members who had fallen ill. That hard work made classes during a pandemic possible; but it did not seem to matter to management at universities. Temporary lecturers could still be dispensed with. In the United Kingdom, 54% of university staff are on temporary contracts which means they can be fired more easily, and these workers were, indeed, the first to be laid-off when enrollment numbers dropped during the pandemic.

Another truth in which I am interested concerns the loss of voice and relationship under conditions of precarity. One of the most worrying aspects of precarity is how it impairs the ability to express one’s disagreements in institutional contexts. If you are already deemed dispensable, you are unlikely to speak your mind if it might even slightly diminish your chances for a new contract. Over the months, temporary lecturers have privately expressed their concerns to me about how universities in the Netherlands have handled workplace health protections during the pandemic. Many universities decided to move back to in-person classes even before vaccinations were widely available. As I write this in early December, the test-positivity rate of the virus in the Netherlands is 23.5%, but unmasked classes are still running. Temporary lecturers are unlikely to move their classes online on their own behest or ask students to wear masks if they are not institutionally mandated. They are afraid they will get badly evaluated by students, damaging their chances of acquiring future contracts, and they worry that they would be denied another contract if they stuck out as problem employees.

They [temporary lecturers] feel they are ‘dispensable’ and do not want to ‘rock the boat,’ as they are afraid they will not be offered any more work, contracts will not be renewed, and/or they will receive poor references. As one respondent stated, ‘Basically, you keep quiet and then it works, but you feel forced into doing that’ (Precarious Pedagogies? The Impact of Casual and Zero-Hour Contracts in Higher Education).

It is important to keep in mind that precarity also impacts non-academic staff members, such as canteen workers, maintenance workers, and receptionists. These workers are essential; they keep our universities running. They take care of administrative tasks, feed us, and keep our environments clean. Not many of us academic staff members know—or care to find out—what conditions our fellow non-academic staff are working under. With my campus closed during lockdown, I heard that the canteen workers may not be able to keep their jobs. How is it possible, I wonder, that our wealthy institutions with their multimillion-euro endowments cannot take on the responsibility of paying the salaries of canteen workers?

III. Precarity and Structural Injustice

Who is responsible, and how can things change? Precarious contracts are a feature rather than a bug in the operation of neoliberal universities. They are an example of structural injustice, a systemic injustice that is produced and reproduced within institutions and societies at large. Structural injustices are the yield of a “confluence of many individual actions within given institutional relations, whose collective consequences often do not bear the mark of any person or group’s intentions” (Iris Marion Young, “Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice,” p. 4). This is especially what makes structural injustices difficult to tackle—it is not clear who, in the end, is responsible for establishing and perpetuating them.

For example, in the summer of 2020, together with my colleagues I (anonymously back then) contributed to a statement against precarity. The statement highlighted the statistical overrepresentation of women and other minorities on temporary contracts nationally and demanded a revision of protocol and agreements that serve to lock people out of secure jobs at our institution. Now, our statement was a letter to “management”—but who is management really? Who has the authority to revise institutional guidelines or protocol? The organizational structure of my institution consists of some of the usual managerial structures (Directors, Dean, Board, etc.). But because my institution is a joint initiative of the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, structures of management are cross-institutional and, therefore, roles and responsibilities are highly dispersed.

When an appeal, as this statement, is made at any university, despite differences in organizational structures, it seems the chain of responsibility moves higher and higher, from manager to manager, or it ultimately terminates in impersonal constraints that have to do with budgetary limitations or some overarching issue that implicates all universities in the country, on the continent, or perhaps even the whole world.

That there are constraints (e.g., the budget, etc.) according to which any institution runs goes without saying. In an institution with a moral core, however, it is the budget that should be negotiated and not whether workers can be exploited. We are told that our institutions’ hands are tied. It simply is what it is. Calls to end precarity are often met with the rejoinder that precarity is an irresolvable and pervasive issue at all institutions, the implicit idea being here that this institution cannot be expected to fix it.

Temporary workers can probably recognize their institution in Iris Marion Young’s characterization of structural injustice:

Structural injustices are harms that come to people as a result of structural processes in which many people participate. These participants may well be aware that their actions contribute to the processes that produce the outcomes, but for many it is not possible to trace the specific causal relation between their particular actions and some particular part of the outcome”  ( “Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice,” p. 7)

There are too many people, too many factors involved in producing precarity. Managers do make decisions; but aren’t they themselves encumbered by institutional structures that are outside their sphere of agency? If responsibility is so diffuse, can we reasonably expect managements within institutions to be held accountable for precarity? Isn’t it, after all, something called neoliberalism with its global stranglehold that is responsible for ills such as precarity?

IV. Precarity and Responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility is the hallmark of structural injustices. And because the question of responsibility is complex, structural injustices are often presented as “misfortunes rather than injustices”—as such they are supposed to be “circumstances we must live with rather than try to change” (“Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice, p. 7). Neoliberalism is itself an ideology that normalizes structural injustices as a natural or inevitable state of affairs. The fact is, however, that structural injustices are enabled by people. And wherever human agency has a role to play, there is responsibility. But the question is, how should we understand responsibility in a context where it is scattered and diffuse?

A first step to understanding responsibility under structural injustice, according to Young, is expanding our conception of responsibility beyond a blame-oriented so-called liability model of responsibility, which stems from common sense, phenomenological, and legal perspectives on responsibility. According to the liability model, an individual (this can be a person or a collective entity, such as a corporation) is responsible for committing a harm if that individual is causally responsible for the harm. On the liability model, furthermore, an individual is blameworthy if the individual in question voluntarily commits the harm. The liability model works well when there is a clear causal link between an agent and a harmful outcome. With multiple factors and agents involved in structural injustices, the situation is not as clear as an assault or even a corporation releasing toxins into the environment.

While it is true that given the diffuse and large-scale nature of structural injustices, we cannot rely on the liability model to assign responsibility, the liability model of responsibility is not exhaustive. Here Young introduces the idea of political responsibility. On this model, a person can be responsible for a harm without committing the harm voluntarily and without being blameworthy. While we tend to think of blame and responsibility synonymously, some harms call upon our responsibility even when we cannot be blamed for causing them.

Young’s understanding of responsibility—to which I came only recently—would have helped me as a temporary worker. It would have given me a clearer sense of the nature of responsibility under structural injustices. The language of blaming particular individuals did not entirely fit my situation, which gave me the sense that because no one is blameworthy, perhaps nothing can be done. Political responsibility takes us outside resentment and dejection to a more nuanced conception of responsibility. For instance, an individual may not be blameworthy for causing climate change, but she is still responsible for it. While blame requires that our past actions causally link us to a harm, political responsibility asks us how we can change the present and the future. You have fallen off of your bicycle. I didn’t push you. But I am responsible to get you back on your feet. The question isn’t whether I caused the harm—the question is, given where I am, what can I do for you?

Political responsibility is […] individually distributed: transformation in structures that produce or perpetuate injustice can occur only when many individuals take responsibility for making such transformation.(Iris Marion Young, “Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice,” p. 19)

Now suppose you are a manager hiring a temporary staff member. If it were up to you, perhaps this employee would have a tenured position with its social, psychological, and economic securities. You are certainly not the causal source of their precarity, and therefore not to blame for it, but you are still responsible for it—you participate in, and enable, a system that makes people precarious. Do you press higher management to consider changing structural precarity? Are you mindful of the staff member’s precarity when assigning them a set of tasks? Do you take every available opportunity to give workers the best contract they can have? And do you treat them as respectfully as you may treat permanent members of staff? Similar questions can be asked of permanent members of staff, many of whom, perhaps unwittingly, end up participating in the exploitation of temporary workers.

Taking personal responsibility is crucial for political responsibility. However, it is only part of the answer. Given the entwinement of persons, processes, and protocol in structural injustice, responsibility is (almost) always both personal and shared. This point is crucial, since understanding structural injustice on the liability model, which is suited for cases of discrete and individual wrongdoing, not only occludes the phenomenon of structural injustice but undermines attempts to address it. Our participation in institutions is not solitary; we participate with others. And because we are collectively responsible, we must also act collectively.

V. Precarity and Solidarity

When K., the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial, asks a bureaucrat to justify the law, based on which he has been wrongfully arrested, the bureaucrat replies: “that is the law. Where could there be a mistake?” It is not only because they are sprawling and labyrinthine that modern-day institutions can be described as Kafkaesque. It is also because modern bureaucracies stand in a Kafkaesque relationship to agency. The law is incontrovertible.

Hannah Arendt, whose work Young cites as an inspiration for her idea of political responsibility, describes deification as a feature of bureaucratic thinking in The Trial. The bureaucrats K. encounters treat the law as if it were part and parcel of divine law governed by unassailable necessity. They are unable to recognize that it is their own participation in the law that makes the law what it is.

[H]e described men who looked upon the laws of society as though they were divine laws-unchangeable through the will of men. In other words, what is wrong with the world in which Kafka’s heroes are caught is precisely its deification, its pretense of representing a divine necessity (“Kafka: A Reevaluation,” p. 72).

Arendt’s work points us to the dangers of letting our agency slip away. Young, too, asks us to consider the ways in which our agency connects with outcomes to perpetuate institutions and their injustices. It is, therefore, no surprise that Young’s conception of politics takes its lead from Arendt’s political action. In its Arendtian sense, “the political refers to phenomena and movements of collective action, where people work together to form public works and institutions” (Young, “Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice,” p. 11). Political responsibility asks us to consider justice when we work together to make our institutions possible.

When we work at a university, we are all responsible in different ways and to different degrees for the structures we enable. For instance, permanent staff members and course coordinators benefit from the existence of precarious workers who can take over courses (often on short notice). Has a temporary staff member taught a course repeatedly? Does a course (regularly) require extra lecturers? Then coordinators and other staff members should show their solidarity for these lecturers by collectively making the case that they are hired on better contracts. The same should be argued for canteen workers and other non-academic staff that provide crucial infrastructural support at universities but enjoy little representation. The push has to be persistent.

Precarity within the academy […] must be resisted through collective solidarity across varying levels of privilege and vulnerability. Casualization is both a product of and the thing that makes the corporatization of the university possible; challenges facing TT [tenure-track/tenured] and NTT [non-tenure/tenure-track] faculty are two sides of the same neoliberal coin. (“Precarity is a Feminist Issue: Gender and Contingent Labor in the Academy”) 

To think of our responsibility concretely, Young asks that we understand our relation to structural injustice through questions of connection, power, privilege, interest, and their entanglements. Ask, for instance, to what degree you are connected to the injustices at hand and reflect on how particular actions at the institution are connected to the production and reproduction of precarity (connection)? To what extent can you, given your position and influence, play a role in ameliorating precarity (power/privilege)? It is rarely in the interest of the powerful to change the status quo. Where management is unwilling, it is up to permanent members of staff to push for change (interest). Here Young would ask that it is those who are the targets of structural injustice that should set the agenda for change.

That temporary lecturers should be involved in decisions about their fates cannot be emphasised enough. One way in which institutions can tackle precarity is by refusing to renew temporary contracts. This would certainly eliminate precarity but it would also dispense with the workers who have long served the university, depriving them of the little security that they have. The moral way is to issue long-term contracts—at the very least—and permanent contracts for structural needs. It is also crucial here that the meaning of “structural need” is not bent to disfavor the temporary worker. All the more reason to invite temporary lecturers to the table, as any truly democratic institution would.

Beyond the question of responsibility, it is important to reflect on the sources of insecurity and distrust at our institutions. They are likely to corrode relations between people and impair solidarity. Institutions, sometimes unwittingly, have a way of pitting people and their interests against each other. And when people feel threatened or discounted, they become less likely to look beyond their own interests. We’ve all had this experience during our time at universities—resources are (apparently) scarce, and competition, in subtle ways at times, governs the general atmosphere. We must ask: can we be good educators under these conditions? And what kind of conditions would bring out the best in us as people and educators?

Solidarity, for Young, is not merely a sentiment; it necessitates action. The question of solidarity takes us outside the university, too. The meatpacking factory workers I described at the beginning of this post exist on the far edge of the spectrum of (neoliberal) precarity. They, like temporary workers at universities, together form a class of workers who are denied security. What are the possibilities of solidarity, I wonder, between forms of labor?

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.