No fixed income. Irregular working hours and places. Constantly having to change jobs, and never being sure whether you can still work tomorrow. Temporary leases, so you can always find yourself on the street unexpectedly. Underpaid work under duress. Harassment at home and in the workplace. Increasing (study) debt. Lack of privacy, security, safety and future prospects.

Meeting on precarization
(Challenges for the 21st Century #2)
Friday 15 March 2013
From 20:00 o'clock
The Vowel
Van Broeckhuysenstraat 46, Nijmegen
Event on Facebook

Do you recognize these “symptoms”? Then you may suffer from "precarization". That's essentially just a technical term for something that many people experience on a daily basis. “Precarization” is the systematic loss of livelihood or legal security, of stability and self-determination.

This “development” does not come out of the blue. Under the guise of neo-liberal magic words such as "flexibility" and "efficiency", governments and companies have been making our daily lives more and more uncertain and unstable for decades. Employment agencies, anti-squat organizations and government services such as the UWV or DUO force us to be more mobile and flexible. They want us to conform to the whims of the employer or “service provider”. In this way we are slowly being reduced to mini-companies that have to compete with each other, for example in the labor or housing market.

Many of these precarization processes may have more to do with each other than we might initially think. What does this mean for the fight against precarization? In what ways is there already resistance to precarization, and is a joint struggle against these processes possible?

Breakthrough Organizes iIn collaboration with the Bond Precaire Woonvorm, a second meeting in the series of “challenges for the 21st century”, this time about precarization. What is it, what is being done about it, and what are the prospects for a joint counter-offensive? Four speakers will approach this problem from different perspectives: political scientist Merijn Oudenampsen, Bond Precaire Woonvorm employee Abel Heijkamp, Breakthrough activist Harry Westerink, and Alexander Beunder, member of the Critical Students Utrecht. Of course we are also very curious about your experiences and ideas.

For more information, see also the website of Breakthrough.