Precarity

When stability is refused -- and possibilities collapse.

What It Is

Precarity is a disabling force. It occurs when the stability that people need to function -- steady work, predictable support, consistent access, survivable workloads, reliable infrastructure, or safe institutional footing -- is absent, fragile, or constantly under threat.

Precarity removes guarantees. It creates environments where nothing can be counted on: not funding, not mentors, not benefits, not accommodations, not continuity of tools, not the systems required to survive. In precarious environments, lives and careers are built atop shifting ground. What should be reliable becomes vulnerable to collapse.

Precarity reduces pathways. It collapses the number of viable routes a person can take -- toward education, stable work, mentorship, healthcare, relationships, or long-term goals. Under precarity, the same individual has fewer possible futures. When stable routes are removed, the life a person could have lived becomes inaccessible.

Precarity constrains participation. Unstable infrastructure -- shifting platforms, inconsistent maintenance, abandoned functionality, or fragile assistive pathways -- makes access unreliable and participation conditional. When the platforms that underly daily life become shaky, the ability to engage with information, services, work, education, and community is weakened.

Precarity causes harm. It erodes agency, interrupts continuity, and forces people to divert energy away from growth and toward survival. When the environment is chronically unstable, long-term plans become fragile, progress stalls, and the conditions required for health, safety, and participation deteriorate.

Precarity can operate in plain sight. It's visible when institutions exploit contingent labor, replace stable roles with disposable labor, rotate people through short-term positions that cannot sustain access, or leave accessibility teams understaffed, roles unfilled, mandates unfunded, and support unpredictable. Its harm is often not hidden; organizations may normalize it as the cost of participation.

A biosocial perspective

Precarity harms bodies, reshapes behavior, and emerges from institutional, economic, and cultural systems that normalize instability. This page uses a biosocial lens to show how instability disables people.

This page is a contribution to social medicine: mapping how precarity itself constitutes structural harm, and how its drivers and effects ripple across health, work, identity, and community.

Why It Happens

Precarity is created when institutions treat stability as optional rather than foundational. When leadership frames continuity as a luxury instead of a requirement, the systems disabled people depend on remain fragile, unpredictable, and unable to support sustained access.

Precarity can gradually emerge as support systems thin out. Budgets contract, roles become temporary, workloads intensify, and once-reliable resources are spread across too few people. Over time, these material pressures accumulate into chronic instability.

Precarity is engineered, maintained, assigned, inherited, and historically given. It is propped up by gig economy logic, funding volatility, workforce churn, flexibility rhetoric, austerity, systemic bias, and political indifference.

Precarity is engineered. Institutions create instability when they refuse to build the durable structures that disabled people need to survive and participate, replacing stability with risk and leaving disabled people to absorb the consequences alone.

Precarity is maintained. Institutions keep fragile arrangements in place -- temporary roles, unstable funding, understaffed teams, and short-term contracts -- long after the consequences are known. Instability becomes routine.

Precarity is assigned. The people who authorize unstable systems are rarely the ones required to live inside them -- and would not accept such conditions for themselves. They offload instability to those whose options are constrained -- disabled people, contingent workers, junior staff, or anyone with the least power to refuse it. Risk is externalized, not shared.

Precarity is inherited. When people are placed in systems already shaped by earlier instability, they begin from risky conditions they did not choose. They absorb fragility inside systems that limited their possibilities from the start. When the escape velocity required to exit these conditions is higher than available capacity, precarity perpetuates precarity.

Precarity is historically given. Institutions justify fragile systems by treating them as “how things have always been.” They may hand disabled people systems shaped by earlier decisions -- scarcity-based budgets, churn-driven staffing models, fragile funding structures, and policies that externalize risk. These unstable arrangements endure when organizations continue to build on them rather than dismantle them.

Precarity does not happen on its own. It arises when institutions create unstable environments without the buffers, continuity, and guarantees that make uncertainty survivable. When those supports are withheld, the message is clear: disabled people must bear the risk others are protected from. Precarity becomes a form of structured disposability.

Gig economy logic normalizes precarity. As work becomes outsourced, on-demand, and classification-resistant, institutions adopt the same “flexible” models -- temporary roles, contractor-heavy teams, "soft money" positions, churn-based staffing -- transferring instability to disabled people who depend on reliable structures for access.

Funding volatility intensifies precarity. Disability-centered work is often the least funded and the first to be cut when priorities shift. When funding cycles shorten, stability collapses. Sudden layoffs, funding shocks, leadership changes, or shifting priorities can amplify already unstable conditions, making fragile systems even less reliable.

Workforce churn accelerates precarity. When teams rely on individual champions instead of institutional commitments, the departure of one person can destabilize entire accessibility pathways.

Flexibility rhetoric justifies precarity. Organizations frame temporary staffing, unstable roles, and constant restructuring as "agile," "lean," or "responsive," even when this instability removes the dependable supports disabled people require. What is framed as agility is often a transfer of risk from institutions to individuals. What is sold as efficiency is often the erosion of safeguards that protect disabled people’s capacity to participate.

Austerity drives precarity. When budgets shrink or are reallocated, the first roles cut are often the ones that safeguard access -- accessibility teams, disability services, support positions, and stabilizing infrastructure.

Systemic bias sustains precarity. Disabled people are often assumed to be less productive, less essential, or less central to the "core mission." These assumptions rationalize underinvestment, unstable roles, and fragile supports.

Political indifference reinforces precarity. When rights, funding streams, or enforcement mechanisms are optional rather than guaranteed, disabled people must navigate environments where stability is never assured.

Precarity persists when institutions expect individuals to absorb instability rather than designing environments that prevent it.

Where It Happens (ENABLE Stages)

ENABLE Stage	How Precarity Shows Up
Set Requirements that Include Accessibility	Accessibility staffing, timelines, and budgets are unstable or unfunded, leaving requirements unsupported or unenforced.
Create Accessible Content	Content teams lack continuity; accessible formats are inconsistently maintained because staffing changes or contracted roles lapse.
Design Accessible Experiences	Inclusive design patterns disappear as teams churn, priorities shift, or contract designers rotate off projects.
Develop Accessible Implementations	Accessibility fixes are implemented on unstable foundations -- codebases, teams, or contracts likely to change before maintenance occurs.
Test for Accessibility	Testing is inconsistent because QA roles are temporary, underfunded, or eliminated during restructuring.
Triage Accessibility Issues	Issue triage fluctuates with staffing changes or shifting priorities; critical concerns are deprioritized when capacity drops.
Iterate to Address Shortcomings	Iterations stall because teams lack stable staffing or budgets to revisit accessibility work.
Create Stopgaps	Stopgaps become permanent because no stable resources exist to address underlying issues.
Use Assistive Technologies	AT support breaks when platforms change and there is no stable team to maintain compatibility.
Augment with Third-Party Tools	Third-party solutions disappear due to unsupported updates or abandoned maintenance, leaving users without fallback options.
Change System Settings	System-level accessibility settings are destabilized by updates with no commitment to restore or maintain compatibility.
Create Workarounds	Workarounds require ongoing upkeep when users cannot rely on stability in the systems they patch.
Use Humans for Assistance	Human assistance channels are understaffed, unstable, or dependent on volunteers, making support unpredictable.
Submit Feedback to Creators	Feedback goes unanswered or cycles through unstable support teams, leading to inconsistent responses.
Assert One’s Rights	Legal protections become unstable due to shifting enforcement priorities, political pressure, or policy reversals.
Stage a Protest	Advocacy is weakened when disability organizations face their own precarity -- underfunding, staffing turnover, or burnout.
Switch to an Alternative	When alternatives may not exist or may be equally unstable, switching only trades one form of precarity for another.

How It Disables

Precarity disables by destabilizing the conditions needed to maintain ability. It removes continuity, predictability, and reliability -- replacing them with uncertainty and risk.

Precarity disables by:

• Undermining continuity: people cannot rely on the same tools, supports, or policies from one month to the next.
• Forcing compensations: individuals must repeatedly rebuild stability that institutions failed to provide.
• Collapsing pathways: precarity narrows the range of viable educational, professional, relational, and health-related trajectories, reducing the futures a person can imagine¹ or realistically reach.
• Interrupting autonomy: planning becomes impossible when everything is contingent.
• Increasing cognitive load: constant vigilance is required to anticipate collapse.
• Draining capacity: survival labor replaces participation, creation, or progression.
• Increasing risk: instability leads to lapses in care, coverage, access, and safety.
• Eroding trust: people learn that nothing is dependable and reduce engagement as self-protection.
• Displacing labor: individuals must construct the stability the institution never provided -- tracking updates, inventing routines, and building personal safety nets because no reliable system exists upstream.

Precarity disables by removing stability -- the foundation of ability itself.

Why It Matters

Precarity gets into the body, reshapes behavior, and destabilizes systems meant to provide care and continuity.

Precarity is not just instability -- it is a social and biosocial harm. It induces stress, burnout, hypervigilance, and fear of collapse; increases hospitalization risk; disrupts care routines; destabilizes health management; forces compensation; forecloses futures; marginalizes care; erodes trust; stunts progress; reinforces social devaluation; inflicts harm; and rewires behavior.

Precarity forces people with disabilities to compensate. They must fill gaps, anticipate failures, and rebuild stability themselves. These compensations are not optional. They are survival strategies. They come at physical and emotional cost.

Precarity induces stress. Chronic instability forces people to monitor threats, juggle unmet needs, and brace for disruption -- taxing cognitive, emotional, and physiological systems.

Precarity produces burnout. Constant vigilance and endless compensations drain energy faster than it can be replenished. What should be sustainable becomes exhausting; what should be manageable becomes overwhelming.

Precarity breeds hypervigilance. When support structures are unreliable, people learn to anticipate breakdowns before they occur. This sustained state of alertness is harmful on its own -- disrupting sleep, impairing concentration, and reducing capacity for daily living.

Precarity creates a fear of collapse. When the environment is fragile, any setback -- an update, a policy shift, a staffing change -- threatens to upend essential routines. This fear shapes decisions, limits participation, and restricts autonomy.

Precarity increases hospitalization risk. Instability disrupts medication schedules, care coordination, accessible transit, appointment systems, and follow-up routines. When care is interrupted, health declines -- sometimes rapidly.

Precarity disrupts care routines. Even well-designed systems fail when maintenance is unstable. Missed updates, lost documentation, shifting providers, and inconsistent communication leave care pathways fractured and unreliable.

Precarity destabilizes health management. Without predictable support -- for scheduling, transportation, digital access, or continuity of tools -- self-management becomes more difficult. Small lapses compound into health crises.

Precarity forecloses futures. By structurally removing pathways, it diminishes access to education, careers, relationships, stable housing, and long-term health. Over time, this alters life trajectories, limits social mobility, and contributes directly to reduced life expectancy for disabled people navigating precarious systems.

Precarity marginalizes care. When care depends on unstable funding or personnel, it becomes fragile -- easily deprioritized, dismissed, or delayed. Access that requires stability collapses without it.

Precarity erodes trust. When people experience instability, they stop expecting support, stop reporting issues, and disengage from systems that repeatedly fail them.

Precarity stunts progress. Accessibility requires stable teams, resources, and commitments. Precarity prevents these foundation layers from forming -- leaving inclusion undeveloped rather than merely temporary.

Precarity reinforces social devaluation. When disabled people are placed in unstable environments while others receive guaranteed support, the system communicates that their stability is optional and their participation expendable.

Precarity fosters self-doubt. When the ground shifts beneath a person -- unstable funding, inconsistent priorities, disappearing mandates, unpredictable decisions -- the brain loses the stable reference points it needs to interpret performance. Without reliable links between effort and outcome, the mind turns inward and asks “Am I the problem?” misinterpreting structural instability as personal failure.

Precarity inflicts harm. It creates conditions where lives, jobs, and care routines can collapse without warning. It turns every decision into a gamble and every day into a negotiation with risk.

Precarity rewires behavior. People adapt by minimizing exposure: avoiding updates, lowering expectations, withdrawing from opportunities, and treating instability as inevitable. What looks like disengagement is often self-preservation.

Real-World Examples

In the news

DOJ Disability Rights Lawyers Face Reassignments, Buyouts (2025)
-- KFF Health News

• Many of the Justice Department's most experienced disability rights lawyers have taken buyouts or been reassigned to other areas. "There's really skeleton staffing at this point," according to Jennifer Mathis, deputy director of the Bazelon Center. Meanwhile, less than half a dozen employees remain in the Office of Special Education Programs, which monitors rights of 7.5 million students with disabilities. This precarity -- when expertise leaves and isn't replaced -- weakens enforcement of legal protections that disabled people depend on.

FY24 Governmentwide Section 508 Assessment: 46% Never Verify Accessibility (2024)
-- Section508.gov

• The GSA found that 46.6% of federal entities "sometimes or never verify the accessibility of contract deliverables." This assessment reveals structural precarity: even when accessibility requirements are written into contracts, enforcement depends on institutional capacity that may not exist. Without stable verification processes, accessibility commitments remain fragile.

2023 Surge in Higher Ed Digital Accessibility Lawsuits (2023)
-- Barnes Creative Studios

• Higher education institutions experienced a surge in digital accessibility lawsuits in 2023, with the DOJ taking firm stances on education access. Many institutions that face litigation have not had their websites audited or made compliant. This pattern raises questions about whether precarity -- unstable funding, staffing turnover, or lack of sustained institutional commitment -- contributes to compliance gaps that lead to legal exposure.

• A disability services office loses two staff members during budget cuts; accommodations slow to a crawl.
• A research lab dependent on soft-money positions dissolves after a funding gap, leaving disabled researchers without continuity or support.
• A contracted accessibility team is terminated during reorganization, breaking the maintenance cycle that ensured ongoing compatibility.
• AT support is inconsistent because the vendor rotates through temporary development teams every quarter, leaving no sustained expertise to maintain compatibility.
• A disabled employee loses their job during layoffs that target "nonessential" roles.
• A health portal’s accessibility regressions accumulate because the vendor rotates teams every quarter.
• A grant-funded accessibility project ends abruptly, eliminating the only reliable support channel.

What Care Sounds Like

"We’re building accessibility work on stable, long-term foundations -- not temporary roles."

"Continuity matters. We’ve budgeted for it."

"We’re designing processes that don’t collapse when people leave."

"This accessibility work will not be cut or deprioritized during restructuring."

"We’re ensuring stable funding so users aren’t left without support."

"We treat stability as required, not optional."

"Access is not dependent on individual champions -- it’s embedded in the institution."

What Neglect Sounds Like

"We’ll get to accessibility if we have the capacity."

"We’re phasing out this role -- someone else can pick it up."

"We lost funding, so accessibility will have to wait."

"That feature isn’t stable, but it’s not a priority."

"We can’t guarantee ongoing support for that."

"We’re reorganizing -- things might change."

"We don’t have the resources right now."

"That depends on next year’s budget."

"Our capacity changes month to month."

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We got somethin', we both know it, we don't talk too much about it. -- Tom Petty

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Footnotes

1. Kafer, Alison. 2013. “Introduction.” In Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1–24. ↩