Incomplete proletarization? Rural reserve army of wage labour in Hungary after the 2008 crisis

Abstract

In the 1990s, structural unemployment became one of the most crucial social problems of rural areas in Hungary. Even though after the 1990s the role of FDI and new industrial investment projects was significant, the geography of reindustrialization was extremely uneven. Typically, peripheral rural areas were left untouched by these investments, and thus unskilled workers of these areas could not entirely integrate into the formal labour market due to their specific socio-spatial position. During the economic crisis of 2008, many of these unskilled workers were once again pushed out of the formal labour market, and even during the economic boom period after 2010 their social reproduction strategies remained diverse, including non-formal labour practices.

In our paper we investigate the structural position of this unskilled rural population, and we analyse how they combine different livelihood strategies during economic boom and crisis periods. We show that the livelihood strategies of unskilled workers in Hungarian rural areas are still based on multiple practices, such as day labour, informal labour and workfare programs. Since the connection of these unskilled workers to the formal wage labour market is not only vulnerable, but highly dependent on the cyclical waves of the economy, we define this population as the ‘reserve army of wage labour market’.

While this ‘reserve army of wage labour market’ is only cyclically and partially integrated into the formal labour market, it still has a crucial and constitutive role to the capitalist system of production by providing cheap labour force at times when it is needed. As a result of this speci????c temporality of integration into the formal labour market, the members of the ‘reserve army’ are pressured to diversify their livelihood strategies. In the article we not only show how household strategies are adjusted to the cyclically changing economic context, but how juggling with different labour forms influence class, ethnic and labour relations in a complex way as well. Our findings are based on a three year long qualitative research conducted in rural regions of Hungary.