The idea of transversal social unity in shared precariousness is closely linked to the insight that ‘all life is work’, in the sense that value is transformed from labour into capital right across the social field, not just in jobs. But ‘all life is work’ doesn’t mean all work is the same.

… As a noun, ‘precariousness’ is both more unwieldy and indeterminate than most. If it is possible to say anything for certain about precariousness, it is that it teeters. This is to begin by emphasising some of the tensions that shadow much of the discussion about precarious labour. Some of those tensions can be located under various, provisional headings which bracket the oscillation between regulation and deregulation, organisation and dissemination, homogenous and concrete time, work and life. …
[continuing on:]
…Yet, capitalism is perpetually in crisis. Capital is precarious, and normally so. Stability here has always entailed formalising relative advantages between workers, either displacing crises onto the less privileged, or deferring the effects of those crises through debt. …
[to:]
…. precarity might well have us teetering, it might even do so evocatively, for better and often worse, praying for guarantees and, at times, shields that often turn out to be fortresses. But it is yet to dispense with, for all its normative expressions, a relationship to the adjective: to movement, however uncertain. ‘Precarious’ is as much a description of patterns of worktime as it is the description, experience, hopes and fears of a faltering movement ­ in more senses than one, and possibly since encountering the limits of the anti-summit protests. …

I think ‘precarity’ here is referring to short-term contracts and agency work, with no proper stability and continuity of the employment relationship or stability of income; poor quality of working conditions; no access to social protection through the employment relationship.

Precarity is the most widespread condition of labour and life in Europe today. It affects everyone, everyday, in every part of life: whether chosen or imposed, precarity is a generalised condition experienced by the majority of people.

Precarious people are now the corner-stone of the wealth production process. Notwithstanding this, we are invisible and count for nothing in the traditional forms of social and political representation or in the European agenda.