[...] precarity gives German companies a means with which to reconfigure their cost structure. Many now operate a dualized employment structure consisting of a core of permanent employees reinforced by a periphery of precarious workers. This structure gives companies two significant advantages.19 Firstly, they can react more flexibly to the demands of a volatile world economy, since the “dismissal costs” of precarious workers are fairly marginal compared to permanent staff. Secondly, they produce conflicting interests within the workforce and therefore in the trade union movement. Precarious workers’ top priority is to enter the permanent workforce. In order to do so, they are often willing to accept relative wage restraint. Permanent workers, however, are interested in improving their working conditions and wages, and sometimes even accept bosses’ arguments justifying precarious employment to protect their more secure jobs. Finally, precarious work is deliberately used as a means of internal social discipline. Precarity constitutes a new form of the “reserve army” described by Marx in the first volume of Capital.20 In the past the unemployed filled the ranks of the capitalist reserve army, exerting an external structural pressure on wages and labor relations. Today, precarious employment internalizes this function within the firm. Though they may work inside the company, temporary workers always have one foot in unemployment. Their mere presence serves as a continual reminder to permanent staff that their futures may very well also become less secure should the company fail to meet its earnings targets.