Resistance to Managerial Control Amid Consent to the New Precarity

Chapter 5 investigates workers’ personal biographies of moving in and out precarious work, where the social welfare regime has been largely undependable. The life-long experience of working and living under precarity nurtures workers’ entrepreneurial aspirations and contributes to the normalisation of the new form of precarious work, as practiced in the online transport service. The entrepreneurial aspirations are also linked to many workers’ individualised strategies to cope and their hostility towards collective organisations, in a context where collective bargaining associated with unionism has been relatively absent from the lives of most working people. But the chapter also deals with workers’ tendency to individually resist managerial control by ‘gaming’, ‘switching’ and ‘resisting’ the system. This sort of resistance often occurs without fundamentally challenging the normalisation of precarious work.