Precarity pt.2

With hat tip to Atom who passed on this link in commenting on the last precarity post. "there are two major interpretations of the
concept. One is existential precarity. That is, that life is precarious in
times of global war. Either you are a body subject to bombs and military
conflict or you are a prisoner whose habeas corpus is violated in Abu Ghraib
or some other Western prison. Wherever there is total domination there is
existential precarity.

Precarity is also, however, the condition of being unable to predict one’s
fate or having some degree of predictability on which to build social
relations and feelings of affection. The diffusion of intermittent work and
the attacks on the welfare state have resulted in a widespread increase of
existential precarity across Europe"

It's interesting that this may be a radical left thing at the moment but I note that it seems rather similar to the concerns expressed in The Elephant and the Flea by Charles Handy where a big part of the book is precisely about the trends. Handy is more upbeat about the idea of portfolio careers, but for those with fewer marketable skills a portfolio career is even more pracarious. I am very sympathetic to all of this being in a pracarious situation myself at the moment and looking at the possibility that I may never again have quite the job security I had come to take for granted, and indeed I'm not even sure how far I might want to be in a position where I'm beholden to an institution that when the chips are down doesn't seem to care about my welfare overmuch ... but that's another story ...
I'm beginning to revisit the idea of a citizens' income that the Green Party propose, thinking that it might be quite a good way to achieve excellent social ends, though I think that we would need to think about the effects on investment, motivation etc etc as well as whether it is too rooted in assumptions about employmentand business that may not hold in a globalised economy -ie the tax burden though differently distributed might be a disincentive to jobs being kept in the UK and so lose us the tax-base to do the work on...
Theologically it has the advantage of procaliming justification by grace: in other words you have a basic value regardless of your contribution to society in monetary terms. It also means that people can be freed up to do certian things that may not have a current market monetary value, for whatever reason, but is still nevertheless valuable: staying home and looking after children for example which we are becoming more aware has a disproportionally large contribution to the welfare of society. We can monetise that value but it isn't marketable and perhaps shouldn't be if we can find ways to support it adequately.
Just thinking out loud ...
WOMBLES News: Precarity and n/european Identity: an interview with Alex Foti (Chainworkers):