The global capitalist restructuring processes that have taken place since the early 1970s have entailed a series of transformations that are fundamental to understanding the transition to the current labor market configuration: a reorganization of capital in surplus-generating strategies, in line with the consolidation of neoliberal policies focused on the financialization of the economy and the free market. As a result, collective responsibilities for sustaining urban economies have become more pronounced (Quiroga Diaz & Gago, 2017).

Currently, we are witnessing forms of work under multiple situations of heterogeneity, with non-classical forms becoming predominant: underemployment, outsourcing, unregistered wage labor, temporary jobs, along with various forms of non-wage labor, self-employment, and family and community work (^{Antunes, 2009}). The “typical” or “classic” labor relationship—characterized by stable, regulated, full-time wage-earning occupations that achieve social recognition through labor and social protection law—is changing to new types of labor relationships (duration and quality of employment contracts) and deteriorating working conditions (^{de la Garza Toledo, 2009}); and also to new forms of technical and scientific dominance: technological advances that lead to new modes of management and work organization. The configuration of the labor market in the 21st century implies an expansion of work modalities and heterogeneity of subjects (based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, age range, qualifications, etc.) and, as a counterpart, implies a new homogeneity: precariousness.

Robert Castel questions this transformation that is reflected in the concepts, problematizing the opposition employment-unemployment, and proposes as a hypothesis “a shift from classical employment towards forms of activity below employment that could ultimately lead to a society of full activity, very different from a society of full employment” (2012, p. 127).

New working conditions and profiles are expanding and deepening with the aim of capturing surplus value through mechanisms that do not involve the direct exploitation of living labor. The valorization of capital is expanding beyond the factory space, altering times, forms, and conditions that bring about significant changes for workers. This process has been termed by ^{Mezzadra and Neilson (2016}) as “labor multiplication”; for Ricardo ^{Antunes (2006}, p. n.d.) a “new morphology or polysemy of labor.” It is presented from a heterogeneous nature as legal and social regimes that institutionalize different forms of organization and modalities in the commercial relationship, no longer only the well-known formal employee-employer relationship; its diversified condition deepens the limits of the classic social and technical division of labor, expanding increasingly differentiated and diverse labor and productive experiences and conditions (combining heterogeneous forms of work in each division); and its form of intensification pushes towards a “tendency to colonize the totality of the lives of subjects” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2016, p. 142). These modalities combine in the breaking down of the classic boundaries of the factory, developing greater flexibility and colonization of time and space in the social and personal ARTÍCULO CIENTÍFICO 5 spheres, as well as (or with the purpose of) fertile ground subordinated to the logic of financial valorization. Labor consolidates a “complex and highly heterogeneous social cooperation” (^{Gago & Mezzadra, 2015}, p. 43) with a certain exteriority of capital to labor that blurs the command of one over the other.

The multiplication of labor allows us to recognize the ways in which the organization of work is reconfigured, with the imperative to earn a living, or the “fear of hunger” that ^{Polanyi (2012}, p. 296) recognizes as the driving force behind the functioning of the market-based system, as its counterpart. The diverse and heterogeneous forms it takes redefine labor by multiplying it, extending it to forms of “life without wages” (^{Denning, 2011}), revealing an expansion of the universe of workers beyond the wage-earning form. The lack of a regular, stable, and sustained wage through social security for broad sectors of those who make a living from their work implies the disposition and movement of diverse activities, tasks, timeframes, and income-generating resources and popular infrastructure that give rise to processes that allow for the production and reproduction of the material conditions of existence. This is where we identify economies with adjectival and self-managed terms: popular, social, solidarity, feminist; developed by broad sectors of the population with the aim of guaranteeing (to the extent possible), through the use of their own labor power and available resources, the satisfaction of needs in microeconomic terms. Therefore, activities that require uninterrupted execution, a continuous movement of their living labor, are multiplying.