I mentioned earlier that ‘neoliberalism’ provides a strong but overwrought explanation for the organisation of contemporary work as flexible and as precarious. In Part One of the book, I have shown that economic explanations tend to dominate questions about work. They are persuasive, but they are always partial. All-powerful but nebulous forces such as ‘neoliberalisation’ (see also globalisation, technology and economy – the four horsemen of the infernal alternative) need more delineation, especially when applied to explaining precarious lives. Familiar arguments return again: what kinds of work are being considered in claims to increased precarity, what complexities are being downplayed in the sweeping claims of a new world of work? Paid work has always had precarious elements if you look beyond the labour aristocracy of unionised (male) manufacturing in countries with decent welfare state settlements. Day labouring has long been common in construction; agricultural work relies on desperate seasonal workers; domestic service workers are vulnerable to being dismissed (without employer references) if they don’t show respect or respectability. So in the glorious days of full employment and good working lives, there were many without protection, both those in and outside of formal employment. Misrecognition demands re-description and re-evaluation, so that variegations, exceptions and silent currents might be noticed. These redescriptions might be emotionally and pragmatically important for finding alternatives to exploitative work.

Despite all the talk of marketisation and commodification, there are outsides to neoliberalism. A small story from Dimitris Dalakoglou gives one example. New roads funded by the EU were built in post-socialist Albania. Albanian people work at building and maintaining the roads, and drive the cars and lorries that carry through the goods and people that show how much Albania has changed, and which marks its singular position in the global economy. Economic change and new work stems from these open borders. It’s recognisably Albania, but it’s also recognisably changed. This deregulation connects the actions of the state, the work lives and debts of Albanian citizens, and the production and consumption of goods and services in Albania and elsewhere. Neoliberally informed deregulation is the simple explanation, but it misses what Dalakoglou finds: that people just use the roads because they now can when they couldn’t before. They like doing it. They do it for sensory, aesthetic, political and cultural reasons. Everyday life is not reducible to economic explanations.