The recent vast upsurge in social science scholarship on job precarity has generally little to say about earlier forms of this phenomenon. Eloisa Betti’s monograph convincingly demonstrates on the example of Italy that even in the post-war phase of Keynesian stability and welfare state, precarious labor was an underlying feature of economic development. She examines how in this short period exceptional politics of labor stability prevailed. The volume then presents the processes whereby labor precarity regained momentum— under the name of flexibility— in the post-Fordist phase from the early 1980s, taking on new forms in the Craxi and Berlusconi eras.

Multiple actors are addressed in the analysis. The book gives voice to intellectuals, scholars, politicians and trade unionists as they have framed the concept and debates on precarious work from the 1950s onwards. Views of labor law experts, politicians and public servants are investigated in regard to labor regulations. Positions of the very precarians are explored, ranging from rural women, industrial homeworkers and blue-collar workers to physicians, university researchers and trainees, unveiling the emergence of anti-precarity social movements. The continuous role of women’s associations and feminist groups in opposing labor precarity since the 1950s is prominently exposed.

Dr. Eloisa Betti is Adjunct Professor of Labor History at the University of Bologna.

Acknowledgments and Note to the English Edition

Introduction
I. Labor precarity as a historical phenomenon
II. Historicizing precarious work in the Italian Republic
III. Precarious workers: A readers’ guide

Chapter 1. The Other Face of the Boom: The Discovery of Precarity
1.1. The invention of precarity: Paolo Sylos Labini’s contribution
1.1.1 The inquiry into Sicily
1.1.2 The Fuà–Sylos Labini proposal for economic planning
1.1.3 The reception of Sylos Labini between Rome and Geneva

1.2 Precarity thy name is woman: genesis of a debate
1.2.1 The CGIL’s female trade-unionists
1.2.2 The Union of Italian Women
1.2.3 Communist Women
1.2.4 The National Commission for Women Workers

1.3 Against precarity: the fight for "job stability"
1.3.1 Invisible precarity: industrial homeworkers
1.3.2 Precarity in the field: The dream of being employees
1.3.3 Against bogus seasonal work: Food workers
1.3.4 For a secure annual wage: Construction workers
1.3.5 Precarity on the ward: The hospital doctors’ dispute

Chapter 2. The Construction of Stable Work Between Parliament and Labor Law
2.1 The parliamentary inquiry into workers’ conditions in Italy
2.1.1 A political alliance for the improvement of the working classes’ conditions
2.1.2 “Precarity” in the parliamentary inquiry documents
2.1.3 The parliamentary inquiry and the new labor law

2.2 Legislation on “particular labor relationships” during the boom years
2.2.1 Home-based industrial work
2.2.2 Sub-contracted work
2.2.3 The fixed-term contract

2.3 New regulations on dismissals in the nineteen-sixties
2.3.1 Dismissal for marriage
2.3.2 Individual dismissals

Chapter 3. Stability or Precarity: The Two Faces of the Long Seventies
3.1 The achievement of stability
3.1.1 The Statute of Workers’ Rights and Article 18
3.1.2 The new home-based industrial work law

3.2 In the shadow of the crisis: Industrial restructuring and precarity
3.2.1 Precarious work in the studies of the seventies
3.2.2 The decentralization of production and precarity: The metalworking and textile- industries

3.3 Intellectual precarity and intellectual elaboration on precarity
3.3.1 Precarity and the woman question
3.3.2 Precarity and the 1977 movement
3.3.3 Intellectual precarity between schools and universities

Chapter 4. The Myth of Flexibility during the Roaring Eighties
4.1 The flexibility paradigm in economic-sociological thinking
4.1.1 Flexibility and precarity in the international debate
4.1.2 The myth of flexibility and the eclipse of precarity in the Italian debate

4.2 Labor policies and legislative changes in the shade of flexibility
4.2.1 Flexibility in the Parliament: The Craxi government’s ....