Work as promise for the subject of employability. Unpaid Work as New Form of Exploitation

Titolo Rivista SOCIOLOGIA DEL LAVORO
Autori/Curatori Emanuele Leonardi, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya
Anno di pubblicazione 2017 Fascicolo 2017/145 Lingua Inglese
Numero pagine 19 P. 112-130 Dimensione file 128 KB
DOI 10.3280/SL2017-145007
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The realm of work has been at the centre of neoliberal transformation of societies. Turning labour into human capital gave rise to imprinting - exploitation beyond the wage-form or beyond what Marx called the subsumption of labour under capital. Employability is key to this phenomenon. While it does not guarantee employment, life itself becomes a promise of employability. This promise perpetuates even without being actualised. This is achieved via ‘transferrable skills’, which serve as an ‘instrumentation’ of employability. Framing subjectivities within and beyond work, these skills provide a mechanism for both governing people and justifying exploitation. The empirical material of this paper analyses EXPO 2015 in Milan, a context where unpaid work as an exploitative practice beyond the wage-form was particularly evident.

Il lavoro è stato trasformato profondamente dal neoliberalismo. La sua mutazio-ne in capitale umano ci permette di ipotizzare l’emergere di una nuova forma di sfruttamento – l’imprinting – oltre la forma-salario e al di là di ciò che Marx chiamava sussunzione del lavoro al capitale. Il discorso dell’employability gioca un ruolo chiave in questo processo. La vita stessa tende a essere percepita come progetto di occupabilità. Ciò si deve alla nuova centralità assunta dalle ‘compe-tenze trasferibili’, che fungono da ‘strumentazione’ dell’occupabilità. Condizio-nando le soggettività sia all’interno che all’esterno del lavoro, tali competenze giu-stificano sia il governo dei soggetti che lo sfruttamento. Il materiale empirico ana-lizzato nell’articolo riguarda l’EXPO milanese (2015), un contesto in cui il lavoro gratuito in quanto forma di employability e pratica di sfruttamento al di là della forma-salario si è dato in maniera particolarmente evidente.

Keywords:Imprinting; Occupabilità; Promessa; Lavoro volontario; EXPO 2015

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Emanuele Leonardi, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Work as promise for the subject of employability. Unpaid Work as New Form of Exploitation in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL LAVORO " 145/2017, pp 112-130, DOI: 10.3280/SL2017-145007