precarity

Precarity is a state of existence in which someone’s mental health or financial security is out of their control because they don’t have a regular income.

A person who cannot find regular work will have a hard time paying their bills. Equally, this could affect their mental health, causing anxiety, worry, anger, and other negative emotions. Someone in this situation is in a precarious, or uncertain, position. They are experiencing precarity.

Precarity can also be used to describe businesses and financial markets. For example, if you want to invest in a public company, but the company’s market is somewhat stagnant, your investment might be described as precarious and the market as filled with precarity.

Example: In my neighborhood, a lot of people experience precarity and are often looking for work.

The first records of the term precarity come from around the 1950s. It combines the term precarious, meaning “uncertain or insecure,” and the suffix -ity, which form nouns expressing a state or quality. Precarity effectively means “a state of uncertainty.”

What are some words that share a root or word element with precarity? 

• precarious
• precariously
• precariat

What are some words that often get used in discussing precarity?

• demographic
• economics
• income
• population
• quality-of-life
• region
• security
• stability
• uncertainty
• vulnerable
• wellness

Precarity is normally used in the specific context of financial instability.

It’s clear that one of the many crises of 2020 is how many people don’t understand colleges, universities, how they work, how they are funded, and how much precarity there is at all levels.

But when schools mass close in 2021/mass fire talented teachers, folks are gon learn.

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) March 30, 2020

I think more millennials and particularly women are turning against "hustle culture" and the constant search for traditional career validation – the inevitable result of years of burnout, layoffs and employment precarity

— amil (@amil) November 4, 2019

I’ve never really watched a tiny house show (forgive me @tressiemcphd) but is all of this just an exercise rebranding mobile/trailer homes for middle class respectability? It seems oddly like a cultural reckoning with economic precarity by rebranding it aspirationally.

— @anildash@me.dm and anildash.com (@anildash) May 29, 2021

Is precarity used correctly in the following sentence?

“Luis had a hard time finding work because the construction industry is full of precarity.”