This emphasis on technological shifts is shared by Standing. It’s a neat corollary to Antonio Negri and company’s fixation with immaterial labor. But technology (changes in the means of production) is just a veneer. Evolutions in the structure of work do not inherently lead to changes in the conditions of work (the relations of production). It’s an odd sort of determinism that says that new labor forms necessarily be more precarious than industrial employment
^^^^^ CB: Truly. Services are commodities , too. Marx analyzed "industrial" wage- labor as pretty precarious.
"The relative surplus population exists in every possible form. Every labourer belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Not taking into account the great periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, now an acute form during the crisis, then again a chronic form during dull times — it has always three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant"
Different Forms of the Relative surplus population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S2