Deliverers in a hurry of generalized uberization, butchers of junk food pigs, over-qualified professionals of culture and education on the cheap, workers in sweatshirts or new proletarians of the delocalized digital chain of customer services: this series “The new proletarians” paints the portrait of a new world of exploited and precarious work.
Dominique Sirois-Rouleau’s curriculum vitae stretches on pages and pages and pages, with in passing the mention of a doctorate (obtained in 2014), a bunch of course loads and other jobs of high intellectual standing: exhibition curator, art critic, adviser to the Ministry of Culture. She is also a mother.
Dominique Sirois-Rouleau has officially directed the Vidéographe creation center since the summer of 2021. This is her first almost full-time salaried job (32 hours per week). She is 42 years old.
“I have long been a precarious intellectual,” sums up the director, taking up an increasingly controlled designation to designate professionals like them, hyperqualified, but living from contract to contract, in publishing, in teaching, in culture.
“I run an artist-run centre,” she continues in her office in a somewhat dilapidated building in the Plateau Mont-Royal. We don’t have a lot of resources. I am happy with the flexible schedule. I would have found it too hard to go from 100% autonomy to a restrictive program of five days a week. »
Teach for free
His first career goal was to become a professor of art history. It has multiplied the steps expected to achieve this: excellence scholarships, international conferences, scholarly publications, course loads, doctorate and post-doctorate. She has done and done well just about everything that could be done.
“The majority of teachers in office could not be hired today, she observes. The level of requirements has increased significantly. I had children, I didn’t want to go abroad. What was expected of me in terms of accomplishments became insane compared to what I wanted to be as a person. »
The nerd in training and then in action has therefore multiplied freelance writing, research, curating, paid a few thousand dollars each. The course loads (between one and three per year) brought him between approximately $10,000 and $30,000.
“My salary ranged from $18,000 to $30,000 or $35,000 a year, and in a very unpredictable way, teaching the courses that the permanent professors don’t want, what I call crumbs,” she says. When you say that you have a doctorate, people imagine that you are making a cake. I don’t come from an educated background. When I started my cégep, I had already beaten all my relatives with my school career. Who learns gets richer? This is not my case, and doubly: in academia and even more so in culture. »
The University of California, Los Angeles recently angered by posting an unpaid assistant professorship. And the offer came from the Department of Chemistry!
Olivier Aubry, president of the Union of Professors and Teachers at UQAM, explains that at the undergraduate level, its members give about 60% of the courses, and up to 80% in certain departments. His union represents nearly 2,100 lecturers, almost double the number of regular professors.
“The biggest cost for a university is the payroll of professors,” said Mr. Aubry. With a large percentage of precarious teachers, the savings are obvious. »
Himself holder of a doctorate, Mr. Aubry has been teaching since 2013 in the Department of Biological Sciences. The “structural” like him earn their living by teaching while some professionals (lawyers or accountants, for example) do it as hobbyists. Contracts are paid between $8,500 and $11,000 each, regardless of the preparation required.
“I taught a certain course for the first time last year and was paid below minimum wage counting the hours it took to get there,” says Aubry. For us, the main problem is the precariousness of contracts, with which comes financial precariousness. »
An invisible tribe
L’International Organization of work defines precarious employment as work that does not offer sufficient rights and protections, thus associated with greater financial insecurity. An analysis made by the HillNotes data from Statistics Canada establishes that in 2018 a quarter of jobs in the country could be considered precarious, with the highest representation in the retail, information, culture and education sectors, but also in already more disadvantaged categories of the population (women, immigrants, Aboriginals, etc.).
“The employment statuses concerned are very heterogeneous in their relationship to precariousness”, explains the Frenchman Cyprien Tasset, who defended a thesis entitled Precarious intellectuals, genesis and realities of a critical figure, defended in 2015. “The precarious intellectual becomes more of a typical attractor, a narrative core around which examples are clustered by resemblance rather than a category with a criterion-based definition. »
This flexible category was popularized by two essays published in 2001 and 2009 by the French couple Anne and Marine Rambach. Starting from their own situation as screenwriters-editors and relying on some thirty interviews, they portrayed a “class of hybrids” comprising underpaid graduates, an “invisible tribe” made up of museum, librarians, translators, editors, photographers, journalists or lecturers.
The Rambachs were interested in intellectual workers excluded from the statutes linked to salaried and civil service by temporary contracts. They estimated the number at around 150,000 in France twenty years ago.
“I think I had internalized a worried anti-intellectualism about the very principle of pursuing an academic career,” said Mr. Tasset frankly to explain his choice of subject of study. I wanted to work on my own contradictions, if I may say so. »
He himself “had a lot of trouble” as a nerd. He is now more interested in the sociology of the environment and risks. He ended up finding a “fairly long-term contract” in an agricultural training establishment.
The question of the linkage between training and the labor market inevitably arises. Casualization is often presented by social engineers or neoliberals as an inability of the working machine to absorb an overflow of graduates in certain sciences and disciplines, obviously the soft ones, deemed useless by the utilitarians. The disputes of May 68 or the Maple Spring have been described as effects of this downgrading.
Likewise, the desire to praise the situation of the precarious nerd as a wonderful and free life choice, or as a new relationship to youth work, throws smoke and mirrors, says Mr. Tasset. Yes, in the video industry, some freelancers may work alternate months or work from the Bahamas. But for the rest ?
“We cannot count on two or three examples to set them up as generational phenomena: the dispositions into which young people enter the workplace are much more contrasted and varied, indicates Cyprien Tasset. Age, generation and class effects are much stronger. The discourse on the relationship of young people to work has had precedents and has generated phenomena of the order of managerial panic. In the 1970s, the bosses were already worried, based on contested cases, about the fact that “young people” in general had a differentiated relationship to work, no longer wanted stable careers and no longer invested themselves as before. We now have similar cases. »