From rich to poor, contesting totalizing precarity in the domestic and care sector and the banking sector

This dissertation explores precarity as a central concept for understanding contemporary labor and social conditions in late capitalism, focusing on Spain's domestic and care sector and banking sector. It examines how the contemporary political economy has generated expanding and more intense, yet differing experiences of precarity across these sectors and explores how each social group, subjected to different productive requirements navigates and contests precarity. This research has aimed to empirically gather the experiences of precaritized workers and highlights how workers are forced to bear overwhelming personal responsibilities (desperate responsibility) in the face of politically generated socio-economic vulnerability. The thesis contrasts the conditions of domestic and care workers, marked by low wages, job instability, and fragmented employment, with the more regulated and stable employment yet precarious experiences in banking, where workers face corporate strategies aimed at maximizing profit through labor cost reduction, automation, and restructuring. Through a combination of critical theory and empirical research through life histories, this study draws on Marxist analysis to shed light on the material and subjective experiences of precarity. This research contributes to broader discussions on capitalism's contradictions, labor, and social reproduction, exploring whether these precarious conditions offer space for emancipatory action. The research highlights that while precarity affects all workers, it is most acute in marginalized sectors like domestic and care work, where workers are undervalued despite being essential. In addressing political agency, this research finds that while care workers often rely on informal networks and collective coping strategies - sometimes oriented toward challenging systemic capitalist imperatives - bank workers tend to respond through individual withdrawal, resignation, or psychological self-management. This contrast highlights the uneven capacities for resistance and subversion embedded within different modalities of precarity in different areas of social stratification. In addressing the relation between these two groups, this research further reveals how precarious conditions in low-wage sectors underpin exploitation in more concentrated labor markets, producing a hierarchical structure of precarity that is both politically and economically sustained for the ongoing reproduction of capitalist social relations