"Precarity (also precariousness) is a precarious existence, lacking in predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare. The social class defined by this condition has been termed the precariat..."

"Léonce Crenier, a Catholic monk who had previously been active as an anarcho-communist, may have established the English usage. In 1952 the term was documented by Dorothy Day, writing for the Catholic Worker Movement... The condition of precarity is said to affect all of service sector labor in a narrow sense, and the whole of society in a wider sense, but particularly youth, women, and immigrants.... Around 2000, the word started being used in its English usage by some global justice movement (sometimes identified with antiglobalization) activists... and also in EU official reports on social welfare. But it was in the strikes of young part-timers at McDonald's and Pizza Hut in winter 2000, that the first political union network emerged in Europe explicitly devoted to fighting precarity: Stop Précarité, with links to AC!, CGT, SUD, CNT, Trotskyists and other elements of the French radical left... The precariat class has been emerging in advanced societies such as Japan, where it includes over 20 million so-called 'freeters.' The young precariat class in Europe became a serious issue in the early part of the 21st century."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Precarity," because I encountered the word — which I'd never noticed before — in a NYT article, "The End of Babies/Something is stopping us from creating the families we claim to desire. But what?"

There are as many answers to this question as there are people choosing whether to reproduce. At the national level, what demographers call “underachieving fertility” finds explanations ranging from the glaring absence of family-friendly policies in the United States to gender inequality in South Korea to high youth unemployment across Southern Europe. It has prompted concerns about public finances and work force stability and, in some cases, contributed to rising xenophobia.

But these all miss the bigger picture.

Our current version of global capitalism — one from which few countries and individuals are able to opt out — has generated shocking wealth for some, and precarity for many more. These economic conditions generate social conditions inimical to starting families: Our workweeks are longer and our wages lower, leaving us less time and money to meet, court and fall in love. Our increasingly winner-take-all economies require that children get intensive parenting and costly educations, creating rising anxiety around what sort of life a would-be parent might provide. A lifetime of messaging directs us toward other pursuits instead: education, work, travel....

The OED has the first published use of the word "precarity" in 1910, in "The Crowds and the Veiled Women," by Marian Cox: "In proportion as Monsieur was certain, Gaspard was rendered more miserable through the delay that augmented its precarity."