Prekariat i nowa walka klas [The Precariat and the new class struggle]. By Jarosław URBAŃSKI

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12011
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Author: Piotr Żuk
• Date: 01 March 2016

International Labour Review166

prove simpler to achieve than others, and more enduring in its effects. In that sense, the

author’s analysis and arguments also have the potential to travel well beyond their deep

roots in the discipline of law, English or otherwise.

Colin Fenwick

Head, Labour Law and Reform Unit,

Governance and Tripartism Department

Prekariat i nowa walka klas [The Precariat and the new class struggle].8

By Jarosław URBAŃSKI. Warsaw, Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2014.

274 pp. ISBN 978-83-62744-54-1.

The systemic changes which took place in the central and eastern European coun-

tries in the early 1990s not only affected them politically but also deeply changed the

structure of their economies and employment. In Poland, in 1990, 52 per cent of the em-

ployed labour force were in the public sector and over 47 per cent in the private sector;

by the end of 2013, the proportions were 23.7 and 76.3 per cent, respectively.9 Moreover,

the greater the structural transformations of the economy and privatization, the weaker

trade unions became. Unions were thus relegated to strongholds in industrial plants,

public health-care centres and educational institutions – i.e. workplaces generally re-

lated to public services. By March 2015, union membership had dwindled to as little as

6 per cent of the general labour force and only 11 per cent of employees. In the private

sector, Poland’s rate of unionization was even lower – with workplaces often without

any representation at all. No wonder that Polish society is experiencing a growing need

for strong trade unions.10

This trend results from a growing sense of instability of employment at the work-

place level. One of the many factors driving this process is employment “precarization”

– the theme of Jarosław Urbański’s book. The author has two daily occupations – on the

one hand, he is a committed sociologist and, on the other, he is an activist of the new

“Workers’ Initiative” trade union. Thus, the book is written from these two perspectives.

While this does not always make for a clear structure of argumentation, it enables the

author to supplement his sociological reections with plenty of factual and empirical

information derived from his observations as a participant.

The book consists of four chapters and a conclusion. In the rst chapter, the au-

thor draws on studies of the working class by Italian and French researchers from the

1960s and 1970 s in an attempt to explain his methodological position, namely: it is im-

possible for an outsider to grasp people’s workplace problems and to describe related

dynamic changes. He argues that his socio-political activities combined with sociologic-

al deductions enable him to comprehend Poland’s contemporary working class not as a

class that is disappearing, but as one which is going through profound transformations.

The conventional conception of “workers” has indeed increasingly missed the point,

whereas new analytical categories such as the “precariat” make it possible to capture

the functioning and life of people employed in today’s conditions. How the precariat dif-

8 Editor’s note: The publication of this review of a book available only in Polish owes much to its di-

rect line of descent from the conceptions developed by Guy Standing in The precariat: The new dangerous class

(London, Bloomsbury, 2011), as an illustration of their ever-growing cogency.

9 These data are from the database of the Central Statistical Ofce, available at: http://stat.gov.pl/en/

[accessed 12 April 2016].

10

Opinions on miners’ trade unions and their protests, Public Opinion Research Centre, Warsaw, May 2015.