Tra formale e informale. Lavoro formale e strategie di sussistenza nel Mezzogiorno

This qualitative research involved a group of temporary low-skilled workers of the Polyclinic of Messina. Fifty in-depth interviews and life histories were collected, besides the analysis of other materials. The study has investigated the material life organization of the precarious workers auxiliaries and their families. The precariousness in the public sector generated a peculiar circularity between formal and informal works, public (guaranteed) and private jobs (unguaranteed). In order to contain this life’s uncertainty, the precarious workers activate different “stabilizing anchorages” or survival strategies (linked to the housing or to the public job). The study analyses how the workers deploy subsistence strategies and generate forms of resistance, which are placed at the crossing of informality and illegality, with a tendency towards individualistic appropriation and often present “unscrupulous” attitudes with regard to eventual benefits that the formal-institutional system makes available. Within such framework, the protagonists act in original and unexpected ways, and show a great suitable capacity.