Social Work Research Paper

INTRODUCTION

During the last decades cities in the Global North and Global South has shared common experience of acute confluence of austerity, declining public welfare, and fragmentation of standard means of employment. This has upset and reshaped work opportunities available to many in the potentially working (economically active) population, particularly young people. As a result, youth across cities today experience prolonged period of uncertainties; such that finding a job and attaining other cultural markers of adulthood are becoming increasingly asymptotic. There are some who have focused on political economic forces and associated structural problems, and others on social issues and movements which challenge classical notions of production, reproduction and citizenship, for those living in such precarity.

Work has a central meaning for all of us and it has fundamentally changed the course of history. This transformation in the concept of work needs to be addressed as the nature of work itself is changing. With the opening of markets and due to technical, political and social development in the last decades, work is increasingly becoming a scarce and limited asset which correlates with social value systems and current beliefs, and is deemed to be no longer available for all. Increases in productivity are no longer achieved through

One of the theme which crystallized was to increase labour market flexibility in countries which could transfer risk and insecurity onto workers and their families. This led to conception of global ‘precariat’, comprising of many millions around the world without an anchor of