precariat

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class

by Guy Standing  · 27 Feb 2011  · 209pp  · 89,619 words

from those outside. Even its most enthusiastic protagonists would admit that the demonstrations so far have been more theatre than threat, more about asserting THE PRECARIAT 3 individuality and identity within a collective experience of precariousness. In the language of sociologists, the public displays have been about pride in precarious subjectivities

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living in fear and insecurity. Most would not identify with the EuroMayDay demonstrations. But that does not make them any less part 4 THE PRECARIAT of the precariat. They are floating, rudderless and potentially angry, capable of veering to the extreme right or extreme left politically and backing populist demagoguery that plays

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the neo-liberals wished to dismantle, after briefly contesting the neo-liberals’ diagnosis, subsequently lamely accepted both the diagnosis and the prognosis. 6 THE PRECARIAT One neo-liberal claim that crystallised in the 1980s was that countries needed to pursue ‘labour market flexibility’. Unless labour markets were made more flexible

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involve very different statuses. In any case, the division into wage labour and salaried employee, and ideas of occupation, break down when considering the precariat. The precariat has class characteristics. It consists of people who have minimal trust relationships with capital or the state, making it quite unlike the salariat. And it

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in exchange for subordination and contingent loyalty, the unwritten deal underpinning welfare states. Without a bargain of trust or security in exchange for subordination, the precariat is distinctive in class terms. It also has a peculiar status position, in not mapping neatly onto highstatus professional or middle-status craft occupations.

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low incomes. Representation security – Possessing a collective voice in the labour market, through, for example, independent trade unions, with a right to strike. THE PRECARIAT 11 parties and trades unions pursued as their ‘industrial citizenship’ agenda after the Second World War, for the working class or industrial proletariat. Not all

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interns, which is inaccurate but indicative of the unease with which the phenomenon is regarded. Internships are potentially a vehicle for channelling youths into the precariat. Some governments have even launched intern programmes as a form of ‘active’ labour market policy designed to conceal unemployment. In reality, efforts to promote

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think and, more alarmingly still, on our capacity to think. It is doing so in ways that are consistent with the idea of the precariat. The precariat is defined by short-termism, which could evolve into a mass incapacity to think long term, induced by the low probability of personal progress or

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the prospect of artless, career-less jobs. Anomie comes from a listlessness associated with sustained defeat, compounded by the condemnation lobbed at many in the precariat by politicians and middle-class commentators castigating them as lazy, directionless, undeserving, socially irresponsible or worse. For welfare claimants to be told that ‘talking

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with standards, ethical codes and mutual respect among its members based on competence and respect for long-established norms of behaviour. Those in the precariat cannot be professionalised because they cannot specialise and they cannot construct a steady improvement in depth of competence or experience. They face uncertainty of returns

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if firms become more fluid, workers will be discouraged from trying to build careers inside them. This puts them close to being in the precariat. WHY THE PRECARIAT IS GROWING 31 The firm is becoming more portable than employees, in terms of its ability to switch activities. Many employees cannot relocate easily

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professional. The growth of temporary labour, multinational employment agencies and seedy labour brokers that figure in countries such as South Africa has been 34 THE PRECARIAT facilitated by legislative changes and has been legitimised by bodies such as the International Labour Organisation, which reversed its opposition to private employment agencies in

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private employment agencies in more areas; after 2004, they were allowed in manufacturing. These reforms undoubtedly contributed to the growth of the Japanese precariat. In Italy, the precariat was enlarged by the Treu law of 1997, which introduced temporary contracts, and by the 2003 Biagi law, which allowed private recruitment agencies

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technological revolution, it is understandable why companies want this and why governments want to help. However, it has brought painful changes that have expanded the precariat. Whereas numerical flexibility generates employment insecurity, functional flexibility intensifies job insecurity. A facilitating change came with the strengthening of managerial prerogative over work arrangements, the

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and 1980s, when employers wrested control from unions and professional bodies. In subjecting employees to more subordination, it marked an advance of ‘proletarianisation’ WHY THE PRECARIAT IS GROWING 37 (Standing, 2009), but paradoxically it was necessary for ‘precariatisation’. Establishing administrative control over the division of labour allowed managements to create flexible

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provide different treatments, degrees of security and status, so as to channel some workers into the salariat, some into stable jobs, some into a precariat status, increasing divisions and hierarchies. Individualised contracts allow employers to tighten conditions to minimise the firm’s uncertainty, enforced through the threat of penalties for

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and largest labour market, these developments mark a move to a multi-layered global labour force in which privileged salariats will work alongside a growing precariat. Individual contracts, casualisation and other forms of external flexibility come together in another clumsy term, ‘tertiarisation’. This is more than is conveyed by ‘the

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dismantling In addition to functional flexibility and distance work, changes in occupational structures have disrupted the capacity of people to control and develop WHY THE PRECARIAT IS GROWING 39 their occupational potential. In the globalisation era, governments quietly dismantled the institutions of ‘self-regulation’ of professions and crafts, and in

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no chance of becoming real lawyers. Finally, there is an emerging sphere of occupational restructuring that reflects the commodification of firms, which will accelerate precariat tendencies. This is the commodification of management, epitomised by the growth of interim managers hired out through agencies or by themselves for short-term assignments

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in industrialised countries have stagnated, in many countries for several decades. Wage differentials have widened enormously, including differentials between regular employees and those near the precariat. For instance, in German manufacturing, wages of permanent workers have risen, while wages of those with ‘atypical’ contracts have fallen. In Japan, temporary employees

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cent wage increase), but changing the form of remuneration and character of the labour relationship. The global model was coming to China. 44 THE PRECARIAT The precariat experiences the full force of wage flexibility. Its wages are lower, more variable and more unpredictable. The variability is unlikely to correlate positively with personal

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in the country. They had defended their members well, but the widening inequality between public and private sectors made for rising resentment. 52 THE PRECARIAT The crisis was used to cut public sector job security, through intensifying functional flexibility. Administrators began insisting that public employees should perform tasks other than

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relevant, undermining social solidarity and the principles underlying progressive direct tax and social insurance. Whatever the reasons, the shadow economy is where much of the precariat survives, facing exploitation and oppression. A study by Friedrich Schneider of the University of Linz (The Economist, 2010b) estimated that the unofficial economy accounted

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baby boomers’ fractured arrangements created by their parents’ generation. But youth has been the change agent throughout history. Rather, 1968 marked the beginning of the precariat, with its rejection of industrial society and its drab labourism. Subsequently, having railed against capitalism, the baby boomers took the pensions and other benefits, including

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teacher-less teaching and ‘teacher-less classrooms’ are proliferating (Giridharadas, 2009). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has launched an Open Courseware Consortium, WHO ENTERS THE PRECARIAT? 69 enlisting universities around the world to post courses online free of charge, including professors’ notes, videos and exams. The iTunes portal offers lectures from

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one-third of all employees, reflecting a widespread use of students and temporaries in Chinese manufacturing (Mitchell, 2010). Like everywhere else, interns are a precariat substitute for regular labour. The generational tension Youth in industrialised countries enter a labour market in which they will have to make increasing contributions from

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further education, exacerbating the spiral of ‘qualifications’ exceeding requirements for the jobs available. In Japan, the crisis accelerated the shift of youth into the precariat as companies froze initial entry to executive-track salariat positions. Traditionally, university graduates emerged in March each year to begin a salaryman job that would

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they are French citizens, Maghrebians are denizens, having equal rights in law but not in practice. For example, the Labour Code asserts 102 THE PRECARIAT the principle of equal treatment during employment but does not cover discrimination in recruitment. A study for the Equal Opportunities and AntiDiscrimination Commission reported that

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generation and activities preserving our social existence. We need to escape from the labourist trap. No group needs that to happen more than the precariat. 118 THE PRECARIAT The tertiary workplace Before going further into work, we may highlight a related historical change. The classic distinction between the workplace and the home

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to other occupations and may even become mandatory, or part of a global accreditation system, which would be a desirable development. 122 THE PRECARIAT More relevant for the precariat is the increasing need for forms of trainingfor-labour (rather than training-in-labour), such as personality refinement, employability, networking and the

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stress. The cost is not randomly borne by all segments of the population. It is a hidden form of inequality, one felt adversely by the precariat. The precariat is also disadvantaged in the increasingly significant sphere of legal knowledge. A society of strangers relies on contracts; binding regulations LABOUR, WORK AND THE

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anxieties and ailments, and to resort to therapy, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy, to handle the stresses and strains of their insecure lives. Those in the precariat face a quandary. If they are uncertain about what they should do, they will soon find themselves under pressure to receive counselling, including ‘employability

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claiming to ‘empower citizens to fight crime and save lives’. There are said to be many similar neighbourhood webcams throughout the United States. 134 THE PRECARIAT Google Street View, launched in 2007, has already attracted the attention of data protection regulators in North America and Europe for illegally (apparently inadvertently) obtaining

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panopticon apparatus into hiring, discipline, promotion and dismissal strategies of companies and organisations has been largely unchecked. It particularly jeopardises the life chances of the precariat, in subtle and diverse ways. The neo-liberal state claims to favour non-discriminatory labour practices, trumpeting equal opportunity as the essence of ‘meritocracy’.

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children who take grim pleasure in denigrating them, without any sense of accountability? It risks turning professionals into walking wounded and tipping them in a precariat direction. Why risk being humiliated online by being rigorous? Give them what they want! This is an illusion of empowerment that degrades responsibility and

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at civic friendship and trust, making people more fearful and more anxious. The group with most reason for that fear and anxiety is the precariat. 154 THE PRECARIAT The utilitarianism that underpins the neo-liberal state boils down to a creed about making the majority happy while making the minority conform to

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that to attract more skilled migrants Germany would introduce a law recognising foreign qualifications. This is an ad hoc response to a global 158 THE PRECARIAT challenge. What is needed is an international accreditation system, whereby governments and occupational bodies establish standards of qualification and mutual recognition, so that those

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-based entitlements. Work rights should include rules on acceptable practice between workers and within occupational communities as well as between ‘labour’ and ‘capital’. The precariat is at a disadvantage in these respects; a regime of ‘collaborative bargaining’ to give it Voice is required to complement regimes of collective bargaining between

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representatives of employers and employees, an issue to which we will return. The precariat should also demand construction of an international workrights regime, beginning with an overhaul of the International Labour Organisation, a bastion of labourism. How this

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After all, making appeals is risky, costly and time consuming. Not everywhere is like Islington, with its local community of lawyers and activist journalists. The precariat must demand that democratic transparent principles should be applied at every stage of policy development and implementation. Conditionality and commercialised social policing must be rolled

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A Polanyian message is that associations emerging to help ‘re-embed’ the economy in society following the globalisation crisis should allow nonconformity, to accommodate the precariat while enhancing egalitarianism. The principles of cooperativism have something to offer in this respect. Intriguingly, before his election as UK Prime Minister, David Cameron announced

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cooperative principle is laudable but it must not become another means of stifling occupational mobility. Besides cooperatives, another form of agency that would serve the precariat is an association of temporary workers. There are several variants. The Freelancers’ Union, set up for ‘permalancers’ (permanent freelancers or temporaries) in New York,

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of care and responsibility prevails. An emphasis on security may become reactionary, resisting change and justifying regressive controls. However, basic economic security would 174 THE PRECARIAT still leave existential insecurity (we worry about those we love, our safety and health, etc.) and development insecurity (we want to develop our capacities

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing  · 13 Jul 2016  · 443pp  · 98,113 words

have advocated more education. Education is desirable for many reasons, but more of it will not alter the character of the income distribution system. THE PRECARIAT SMOULDERS Globalisation, neo-liberal policies, institutional changes and the technological revolution have combined to generate a new global class structure superimposed on preceding class structures

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0.001 per cent) atop a bigger elite, a ‘salariat’ (in relatively secure salaried jobs), ‘proficians’ (freelance professionals), a core working class, a precariat and a ‘lumpen-precariat’ at the bottom. The plutocracy, elite, salariat and proficians enjoy not just higher incomes but gain most (or an increasing part) of their income

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jobs require. They gained from twentieth-century social democracy, which provided non-wage benefits linked to workplaces and state benefits mostly linked to labour. The precariat, which ranks below the proletariat in income, consists of millions of people obliged to accept a life of unstable labour and living, without an occupational

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to rights-based state benefits and are losing civil, cultural, social, economic and political rights, making them supplicants if they need help to survive. The precariat is growing all over the world, accelerated by the likes of Uber, TaskRabbit and Amazon Mechanical Turk discussed in Chapter 6. It is in turmoil

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been internally divided and scarcely conscious of its commonality. But this is rapidly changing as more of those in or close to being in the precariat realise that their situation is structural rather than a reflection of personal inadequacy, and that together they have the ability and energy to force transformative

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economy began to take shape. The neo-liberalism that followed has generated rising inequality of wealth and income, and chronic insecurity for a rapidly growing precariat. Worst of all, it has created a plutocracy and plutocratic corporations linked to concentrated financial capital that are able to gain increasing amounts of rental

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(London: Morgan Stanley, 2015). 9 J. Kynge and J. Wheatley, ‘Emerging markets: Redrawing the world map’, Financial Times, 3 August 2015. 10 G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 11 J. Anderlini, ‘China to become one of world’s biggest overseas investors by 2020’, Financial Times, 25

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opportunity? Recent trends in intergenerational mobility’, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 2014, 104 (5): 141–7. 37 Standing, 2011, op. cit.; G. Standing, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 38 M. Bitler and H. Hoynes, ‘Heterogeneity in the impact of economic cycles and the Great Recession

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debt relative to income and face the highest interest rates, another reason why inequality measured by money incomes understates social income inequality. In particular, the precariat is living on the edge of unsustainable debt, knowing that one accident, illness or financial mistake could unleash a spiral leading to homelessness, dependence on

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increased the fragility of the economy and the probability of another financial crash. Payday loans, credit card and catalogue debt are the bane of the precariat. Finance imposes extra costs on the economically disadvantaged. Those in and out of casual jobs, with fluctuating low incomes, dependent on state benefits, or

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a private necessity and then forcing students to rely on loans that produce debts greater than their additional prospective earnings. Those likely to join the precariat are losing an acquired social right because the cost of education is becoming prohibitive. And they are losing a political right, since tertiary education is

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anywhere in the company, which has contracts guarding ports and airports, shops and offices. They have lost their occupational security and have probably joined the precariat. Meanwhile, on its website, Securitas claimed that outsourcing lowered costs precisely because private companies could pay lower wages: ‘The view held by some that outsourcing

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firm annual £468,000 rent for free school’, The Guardian, 11 August 2015, p. 35. 39 Standing, 2009, op. cit. Chapter 6 LABOUR BROKERS: THE PRECARIAT BEARS THE STRAIN Economic liberalisation, the pursuit of labour market flexibility and a technological revolution have brought profound changes in the nature of labour and

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the app-based taxi service and the most emblematic of the new platform corporations. A combination of the smartphone, cashless payment systems and the growing precariat have propelled the growth of digital service platforms. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated that what it called ‘online talent platforms’ could add 2 per cent

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encouraging illegal lets and landlordism.24 Amateurism is a route for cheapening labour and increasing the rental income of the platforms. Taskers fit in the precariat. They lack income security, labour security and an occupational trajectory. They must do a lot of work-for-labour, unremunerated, off formal workplaces. Uber

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the prospect of standardised services sold in supermarkets. It has accelerated the fragmentation of the legal profession into an elite, a salariat and an expanding precariat, including paralegals, with little prospect of upward mobility. This has created space for the penetration of legal services by digital platforms, which will gain rental

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Facebook users had risen to 1.6 billion. Unsolicited training is another form of unpaid work encouraged by the new technologies and growth of the precariat. Often in desperation, people take online courses in several subjects, induced to do so by adverts, sweeteners, encouragement or insistence by employment offices. This

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the on-demand economy reverses a capitalist mantra. Instead of being owned by capitalists, the main means of production are ‘owned’ by the taskers – the precariat. The platforms maximise profits through ownership and control of the technological apparatus, protected by patents and other forms of intellectual property rights, and by the

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new burst of populist right-wing parties. This has reflected both the loss of appeal of traditional labourism among the emerging social groups, notably the precariat, and the impact of the financial crisis. As the crisis was caused by finance, political parties representing its interests might have been expected to lose

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’Neill predicted before the financial crash that millions were about to enter the world’s affluent middle class. Months later, millions more had joined the precariat instead, many with unsustainable debt. Goldman Sachs represents an interest – finance capital. Those trained and working in it espouse and serve that interest. And

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44)’, MailOnline, 22 April 2016. 41 A. Perkins, The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Chapter 8 RENT ASUNDER: THE PRECARIAT’S REVOLT ‘Capitalism based on rent-seeking is not just unfair, but also bad for long-term growth.’ The Economist, 15 March 2014 The Economist

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elections was just what the representatives of rentier capitalism would want. Leading social democrats, as well as their opponents, were prone to dismiss the growing precariat as ‘post-political’. This was to confuse the dismissal of politicians as ‘all the same’ with a rejection of politics per se. Other critics,

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mostly of a Marxist persuasion, dismissed the idea that a precariat could become a coherent group able to achieve political change. Reaching back to nineteenth-century ways of thinking, they envisage a socialist revolution led by

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raised in sufficient numbers to induce concessions. In the remainder of this chapter, it will be assumed that new progressive politics will emanate from the precariat. The politics of resistance to rentier capitalism are clear. The revolt will not come from the plutocracy, the elite or the salariat. They all

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it is folly to imagine a ‘united working class’ or that a party platform oriented to ‘the middle class’ will serve the aspirations of the precariat. The ‘proficians’ – consultants or freelancers with technical skills, working on ‘projects’ under contract – also gain from subsidies, tax breaks and the like. They are

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have similar material interests, and welcome rent-seeking opportunities. But with their life of insecurity, they should be sympathetic to the realities faced by the precariat. They are potential allies. The proletariat is too enfeebled and atavistic, pining for a real or imagined past and hanging on to the labourist traditions

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should recognise that the Great Convergence traced in Chapter 1 will continue, that average real wages will continue to stagnate and that wages for the precariat in the industrialised world will continue to fall. Of course, efforts should be made to raise productivity and skills. But no individual country can

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to strike. These forms of protest traditionally acted as safety valves for society and for the economy. Today they are enfeebled. A challenge for the precariat is to find appropriate forms of organisation. What collective bodies can be vehicles for a renewal of progressive politics? Historically, the great associational – or

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an amicable debate held in 2015 with Polish intellectual, activist and publisher Slawomir Sierakowski of the Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) network. FROM NO POLITICS TO PRECARIAT POLITICS ‘Precari invisibili – Rompiamo il silenzio’* Placard worn in Bologna’s social strike, November 2014 The social strike (sciopero sociale) is an Italian phenomenon in

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-liberal model succeeded. Solidarność (Solidarity), the trade union that became a political movement that brought down the communist regime, was unable to reach the emerging precariat. Subsequently, there was little to choose between the main parties, both profoundly neo-liberal and conservative, although the Law and Justice Party, which won the

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enlightenment values of progressives through the ages, encapsulated in the great trinity of liberté, egalité and fraternité. Here we can incorporate the perspective of the precariat. The emergence in 2013 of Beppe Grillo and his MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Italy was a forerunner. It briefly struck a chord with the

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symbolic days of protest. These dissipate frustration but do little to advance new progressive politics. It is what happens after that phase that matters. The precariat’s mood has been one of derision towards politicians in general and mounting anger towards the plutocracy, financiers and the elite. This is not apathy

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by financial interests, leading to an overvalued exchange rate that decimates industrial production and employment. Similarly, in Spain, Catalonian independence movements epitomise the motivation of precariat-style mobilisation, which is hostility to the most relevant centre of global finance, in their case Madrid, and a desire to recreate sustainable communities of

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democracy was dying; state socialism was discredited; the IMF and World Bank were in charge; and neo-liberals were setting the agenda almost everywhere. The precariat was just taking shape. Its members had not reached the crucial stage in the development of a class-for-itself, that of ‘recognition’, associated with

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Society that transcends endless consumerism and pervasive insecurity. Disaffection with old parties is shown by the steady decline in voting, especially by youth and the precariat in general. Over a third of the US electorate does not vote in presidential elections, and in most democracies winning parties have been gaining little

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that produce rental income. But there is something more. The failing distribution system and emerging class structure have produced inequalities of particular relevance to the precariat. A century ago, progressives linked to the proletariat hoped to gain control of the ‘means of production’. Today that would excite humour and puzzlement. The

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means of production are not the assets over which the redistributive struggle should take place. For the precariat, the assets of most value are those essential to a decent life in modern society – income security, time, quality space, uncommodified education, financial knowledge

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are the bane of the modern state. They are regressive, distortionary, costly and inconsistent with the free markets the neo-liberals claim to support. The precariat should take the lead in mobilising opposition, with support from across the political spectrum. Every political party should pledge to promote a National Commission for

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faith in a statutory minimum wage, and in a higher variant known as the ‘living wage’. While useful for setting standards, these scarcely affect the precariat. Since their introduction in Britain, average real wages have stagnated and social income has fallen; fewer workers have access to non-wage enterprise benefits or

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used to represent reality. This matters, because statistics orient public debate and policy thinking. Crowd labour, new forms of labour triangulation and growth of the precariat make current official statistics even more unfit for purpose. Most taskers are neither ‘employees’ nor ‘self-employed’, while the popular term of ‘freelancer’ is inappropriate

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sides to make agreements transparent and standardised as far as possible. To achieve these reforms will require a struggle. It will not happen otherwise. The precariat’s vulnerability today is a threat to all tomorrow. When sweating spreads to taskers, the threat to wages and working conditions of those outside the

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and preference in awarding government contracts.13 But such schemes would actually be regressive and distortionary. By definition, they favour employees, insiders, rather than the precariat, and in practice they benefit the elite and salariat more than the lower-paid. Sovereign wealth funds have much more redistributive potential. CONSTRUCT A BASIC

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will face declining living standards. It may be a cliché, but we cannot expect poachers to become gamekeepers, the elite to turn protectors of the precariat. The rent seeking unleashed by neo-liberalism has created a profoundly corrupt economic system. A progressive response is overdue. Today we are in dangerous times

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and G. Standing, Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2015). 23 Atkinson, 2015, op. cit., p. 219. * ‘The invisible precariat – We are breaking the silence’. INDEX A Mechanical Age 1 Abbott, Arnold 1 AET (Academy Enterprise Trust) 1 agnotology 1 Airbnb 1, 2, 3, 4

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intellectual commons 1, 2 intellectual property branding 1 and commons 1 copyright 1 and lies of rentier capitalism 1 and lobbying 1 and revolt of precariat 1, 2, 3 trade and investment treaties 1 see also patents International Association of Political Consultants 1 International Energy Agency 1 ‘inversion deals’ 1 Investment

Social Class in the 21st Century

by Mike Savage  · 5 Nov 2015  · 297pp  · 89,206 words

FOUR: THE CLASS DIVIDE IN 21ST CENTURY BRITAIN CHAPTER 9 The View at the Top BRITAIN’S NEW ‘ORDINARY’ ELITE CHAPTER 10 The Precarious Precariat THE VISIBLE INVISIBLE PEOPLE CHAPTER 11 Class Consciousness and the New Snobbery CONCLUSION The Old New Politics of Class in the 21st Century APPENDIX The

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a class order which is more hierarchical in differentiating the top (which we call ‘the wealth elite’) from the bottom (which we call ‘the precariat’ which consists of people who struggle to get by on a daily basis), but which is more fuzzy and complex in its middle layers. We

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shows how social class impacts on social mobility, education and geography. Part Four zooms in on our two extreme classes – the wealth elite and the precariat – to demonstrate the profound class divide that now exists. We draw out the political implications of our arguments in the conclusion. In January 2011

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at class in this way, we can detect a very different structure, one in which a small, wealthy elite class is pitted against a precariat with few resources, and between these two extremes there exist a patchwork of several other classes, all of which have their own distinctive mixes of

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economic division, not between manual and non-manual workers – as with the classic middle/working class divide – but between a smaller group of the ‘precariat’ at the bottom of the scale, whose paucity of economic capital and their frequent reliance on rented housing is a defining feature of their insecurity

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traditional working class’ and ‘emerging service workers’ have low economic capital (though they differ in the balance between their income and house values), whereas the ‘precariat’ are clearly at the bottom. Table 5.1 Classes and their Income Source: GBCS data. 1. The social contact score is the median value of

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popular music concerts and showing preferences for rap and rock music) In this analysis, the two most clearly differentiated classes are the elite and the precariat, which score highest and lowest on most of our measures of the three capitals. The elite turn out to have incomes twice as high

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amounts of economic, social and cultural capital, but considerably less than the elite (in the case of the established middle class) and more than the precariat (in the case of the traditional working class). These patterns suggest a fracture which makes it difficult to distinguish a clear, cohesive ‘professional and managerial

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the class hierarchy which we distinguished separates out three main groups: a small elite at the top, massively better off than others, a somewhat larger ‘precariat’ at the bottom, who score lower than others in relation to all three kinds of capital, and then five other classes in the middle, who

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these extremes. And this, we argue, demonstrates why we might focus on the power of class divisions at these extremes. An elite and a precariat class can be differentiated from a more fragmented set of groups in the middle. In particular, we now live in a more polarized world and

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mountain, have had to do little or no climbing at all. At the other extreme, the picture is reversed: 65 per cent of the precariat remain where they grew up, on the valley floor (their parents having been in semi-skilled and routine employment). And we can see that only

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4 per cent of the precariat come from senior managerial or traditional professional backgrounds: there is not much mobility going from top to bottom of British society either. Few of those

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19 per cent). All the other classes have approximately the same range (between 38 per cent and 47 per cent) until we get to the precariat, where the proportion rises dramatically to two-thirds. So, the headline is that there are real limits to how much social mobility there is into

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middle class has the greatest number of graduates: just under half of graduates are assigned to it. In contrast, graduates are largely absent from the precariat, where the majority have no educational qualifications. Only one in ten of the elite reports the same. What overall picture of the role of

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small number who did do the GBCS were rather atypical, being more likely to be downwardly mobile into this class than born into it. The precariat are the GBCS’s ‘missing people’. Whereas the elite and well educated found the Class Calculator on the BBC website fun to engage with,

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is hardly surprising, because the GBCS was used by those with cultural capital as a way of expressing their cultural knowledge and their confidence. The precariat are placed at the bottom, and no one wants to come last, so it was expected that this group would not be as visible

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deliberately different from the others. We have had to find resources outside the GBCS to unravel the lives and experiences of some people of the precariat class, and this therefore might grate with the book’s style elsewhere. But this discrepancy, of course, precisely underscores our fundamental point regarding the

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is rarely considered by the general public when observing working class people and neighbourhoods, that working class people, and especially the poor working class, the precariat, can know or understand themselves and their situation, and that they can articulate their understandings, perceptions and feelings extremely well.3 Unfair, patronizing and mean

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as ‘tasteless’, but are also pathologized, encoded as immoral, wrong and criminal. This leads to a situation where the working class in general, and the precariat in particular, are defined as ‘lacking’ culture, as not measuring up to ‘respectable’ standards. Beverley Skeggs has argued that the consequences of stigmatization, and

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chapter how today’s elite class revels in its own significance and that this is shown through that class’s attraction to the GBCS. The precariat, however, being on the receiving end of extensive stigmatizing, seeks to hide from view. This cultural gulf is one of the most telling features

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of today’s class divide. Precariat worlds Let us begin then with a revealing exchange which took place when a group of Nottingham workers were asked about which class they imagined

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this takes the form of reclaiming Emin’s unmade bed for an aesthetic taste which is outside of that of the legitimate art world. The precariat world is therefore one in which people are ‘knowing’, but it is nonetheless also one which recognizes how people are placed on the receiving

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being positioned and had limited power to contest. This self-interpretation and analysis of the classification methods used by the GBCS among those in the precariat category was therefore very revealing; they gave thoughtful and interesting answers to the questions and enjoyed thinking about the things they liked, and the things

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pub or watching television, these are not neutral pursuits; they count against you and show you up as lacking and deficient. The responses among the precariat to these investigations in the GBCS had many echoes elsewhere. Lisa had been asked many times, over the years, by people in her community,

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‘common’ [vulgar]? And so it is that class hierarchy is vividly delineated within the supposedly mundane arenas of lifestyle and appearance. Who are the precariat? The term ‘precariat’ was introduced by Guy Standing, who argues that neo-liberal policies and institutional changes across the globe are producing growing numbers of people with

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common enough experiences to be called an emerging class.10 The precariat, according to Standing, are people living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities or

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the same time, they are becoming loathed and laughed at because of their methods of managing their fear, and the precariousness of their lives. The precariat may arrive at their management of fear through close identification with that which is local, tightening their notions of identity, ‘Who we are’, via

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and known as old-fashioned, rigid and unable to bend to the wishes of a changing globalized market. The ways in which those in the precariat class dress, speak and walk, and how they raise their families, come under scrutiny and are devalued. When Britain needs a low-paid working

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from Italy, Poland, Nigeria or Brazil who can be enlisted instead. Clearly, as Standing argues, this causes globalized precariousness and a global precariat. This concept of the precariat is preferable to that of the ‘underclass’, which has been widely used in the past to designate a group of people ‘underneath’ the

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their inequality and add to the rhetoric about them as a ‘dangerous class’. Given this difficult politics of naming and classification, we think the precariat concept is preferable to that of an underclass because Standing’s term draws direct attention to the way that the vulnerability of these groups is

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of this group, it captures the structural instability of a global market, and a group of people at the mercy of that structure. The precariat concept also recognizes that there is mobility into and out of its ranks, because it situates this group within the wider processes of contemporary labour

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have been shown through many modalities, and the definitions of these people and their places constantly shift. And although the picture seems grim for the precariat, who experience low pay or no pay, insecure housing and being known as ‘dangerous’, the truth is, it can always get bleaker. This is

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who have over at least the last thirty years become identified and named as those who have little value, and are of little value. The precariat know they are looked down on and ridiculed, which is why they say they would rather stay among ‘their own’. It was always more

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this group of people to be liked and respected within their own community than outside it. This makes the instability and the precariousness of the precariat more cruel. Their resilience and resistance in difficult circumstances are misrecognized as crassness; their protection of their preferences is known as ‘bad taste’, and

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that, coupled with their sense of community, is viewed as part of their bad judgement and rigidity. Although the precariat are highly visible, and their ‘bad taste’ the rationale behind the practice of vilifying them, the value they have remains invisible. Today’s class

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cultural capital, were brimful of confidence and were attracted to engaging with a ‘scientific’ experiment such as the GBCS. At the other extreme, the precariat hardly did the GBCS at all. This was not because they were ignorant or unaware: it was because they were highly sensitive to the loaded

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a class rises as the class hierarchy descends. Nearly half of the elite think they belong to a class, but only a quarter of the precariat. This is a fascinating inversion of what Marx might have thought, that class consciousness intensifies among the proletarianized, who ‘have nothing to lose but

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to it for aspirational reasons (as a means of confirming their view that they were middle or upper class). The exception here is among the precariat, where those who undertook the GBCS were more likely to identify themselves as lower working class. (Those who did the GBCS have their response

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evidence of how members of the elite class are more likely to have a distinctive sense of their own privileged class identity. Secondly, the precariat are much more prone to see themselves as lower working class and very few see themselves as middle class. They recognize their position at the

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which can be hard to deal with and recognize. We have seen extensive elements of this already in this book, notably our discussion of the precariat in Chapter 10. Claiming an ordinary, unclassed existence is a response to the high stakes and sharp realities of class division, and notably the

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the skin’ through piercings or tattoos. When conversation focused upon these class anxieties, it was often the lowest class, the group we have called the precariat, which became the brunt of negative identification. Having tattoos is a good example; these were still frequently associated with a particular type of classed person

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have disputed such a benevolent view. We have argued that by focusing on the fundamental differentiation between the wealth-elite at the top and the precariat at the bottom – alongside the larger numbers of people located in the middle reaches of the class structure – we have opened the door to

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This has generated a widening class division between a small ‘ordinary’ wealth-elite at the top, who are the great beneficiaries, and a rather larger precariat at the bottom, who lack significant economic resources of any kind. Between these two extremes lie a number of groups in the middle ranges of

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is an effective and powerful wealth-elite, who, broadly speaking, are highly engaged politically and know how to lobby, at one extreme, and a precariat, who are largely alienated from mainstream party politics, at the other. There is also a much larger group between these two extremes, who are more

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to the limits and absences that are generated by the definition and construction of groupings. The most striking finding here is the way that the precariat become invisible, if you rely on the GBCS web survey, whilst the elite become highly visible. We have therefore challenged the characterization of those

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at the bottom – the precariat – and at the top – the ‘ordinary’ wealth-elite. We have insisted in this book on the way that modes of classification are inherently hierarchical

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of Southampton), in collaboration with Andrew Miles, Mike Savage and Helene Snee. 15. See Wakeling and Savage, ‘Entry to Elite Positions’. CHAPTER 10: THE PRECARIOUS PRECARIAT: THE VISIBLE INVISIBLE PEOPLE 1. See, more broadly, Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (Oxford: 2010). 2

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Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright, Culture, Class, Distinction (Abingdon: 2009), Chapter 4. 10. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: 2011). 11. William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy (Chicago: 1987). 12. See

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especially of social capital (Chapter 4) and of social mobility (Chapter 6). Lisa Mckenzie (Fellow at London School of Economics) conducted the research on the precariat reported in Chapter 10. Andrew Miles assisted with data organization and analysis throughout. Helene Snee assisted with the organization of qualitative interviews in the north

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income

by Guy Standing  · 3 May 2017  · 307pp  · 82,680 words

‘neo-liberal’ economics has done its work, and as the technological revolution has facilitated transformative changes in labour markets. One outcome has been a growing ‘precariat’, consisting of millions of people facing unstable, insecure labour, a lack of occupational identity, declining and increasingly volatile real wages, loss of benefits and chronic

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instituted a sort of basic income grant that rewarded them for their time and was intended to enable the plebs – the contemporary equivalent of the precariat – to take part. The payment was not conditional on actual participation, which was nevertheless seen as a moral duty. Sadly, this enlightened system of deliberative

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of all governments. Globalization and policies of market flexibility, combined with the technological revolution unleashed by or associated with globalization, have also produced a growing precariat, consisting of millions of people everywhere living in chronic insecurity and losing all forms of rights.3 Even if economic growth were to pick up

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, which seems unlikely, the precariat would not gain economically. It certainly has not done so in the first two decades of this century. In a relative sense, the

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precariat almost certainly loses from growth, because the gains from the sort of growth that is occurring go disproportionately if not entirely to the plutocracy, elite

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, average wages in developed countries have stagnated for more than three decades and can be expected to continue to do so. For those in the precariat, wages have been falling in real terms and have become more volatile; one mishap, mistake or accident would throw them into real poverty. However hard

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distributed than income or wealth as conventionally defined and measured. The rich can buy physical security, and have almost total economic security. Someone in the precariat or with low and uncertain income has no security at all. A basic income would rectify that chronic inequality. Similarly, the inequality of control over

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income and wealth spectrum can have complete control of their time, paying others to do tasks they do not wish to do. By contrast, the precariat has little or no control over time. Even if it did not do so fully or adequately, a basic income would allow people more control

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social insurance schemes associated with William Beveridge and Otto von Bismarck; they fail to reach the growing number of people, in and close to the precariat, who cannot build up adequate contribution records, and face uncertain and volatile earnings. And a basic income would improve security more effectively than current means

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noted in Chapter 4, the Beveridge and Bismarck models of social insurance simply do not work in open, flexible economies with a large and growing precariat. The point being made here, however, is that support for or opposition to a policy should not be based on whether someone one does not

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redefined to be about 5 per cent unemployment with much ‘underemployment’, concealed by labour statistics that are unfit for purpose; and, above all, the growing precariat has been neglected by mainstream politics. Second, why should ‘full employment’ be regarded as a progressive policy? What is so desirable about putting as many

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) insurance contributions that would flow into national coffers. The current means-tested system also creates a huge immoral hazard, tempting people in and around the precariat to enter the black economy, thereby avoiding tax and national insurance contributions altogether. Since a basic income would not be lost when people took jobs

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checkouts) and in what I have called ‘work-for-labour’, unpaid work around jobs or job seeking, which has expanded with ‘always on’ connectivity. The precariat in particular must do a lot of work (in their eyes) that is not counted or remunerated – hunting for jobs, enduring complex time-consuming recruitment

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they are now in. If you can say that about yourself, would you not expect that to apply to others? Work and Labour in the Precariat An important theme in the debate on basic income is the breakdown of the twentieth-century income distribution system linking incomes and state benefits to

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, technological change and ‘flexible’ labour markets mean that real wages in industrialized countries, on average, will stagnate for the foreseeable future, leaving many in the precariat permanently trapped in the low pay/benefit nexus. Some critics of basic income contend that labour’s share of national income has fallen only in

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even where unions and collective bargaining systems have remained relatively strong, as in Austria. A basic income would underpin the total income gained by the precariat. It would also enable those on low incomes to do odd jobs for other low-income people for a modest amount. At present, potential suppliers

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needed, not just labour and recreation. That is why the demand to reconceptualize work is Article 1 of the twenty-nine articles of my suggested precariat charter.37 Existing social security systems impose a treble penalty on the valuable work we all do that is not labour: first, we do not

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benefits and contribution rates. Above all, as described in Chapter 4, there has been a change in the nature of economic insecurity. Those in the precariat in particular have increasingly volatile earnings, and their insecurity is one of uncertainty, for which social insurance is ill-equipped. Social insurance worked adequately in

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-up and stigmatization. Universal Credit may push more people into low-level jobs, but in doing so it will surely lower wage rates for the precariat in general. As Frank Field MP and his colleague Andrew Forsey concluded, ‘The political historians may be interested in how a programme, so full of

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is demanded by some factions of Podemos in Spain, and by Alternativet in Denmark and Razem in Poland, new political parties formed to represent the precariat. All this reflects a new sense of legitimacy. Basic income can no longer be dismissed as unworldly utopianism. Meanwhile, opinion polls reflect a spreading awareness

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new political parties, by national networks that are welcoming new members, and by new initiatives such as the annual Basic Income Week events. Unions and precariat groups are also starting to call for basic income. In September 2016, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the UK’s umbrella union body, voted in

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better future. It is all too easy to see transitional drawbacks as impenetrable barriers. But before long the rising political anger in and around the precariat could make basic income a political imperative for any government keen to be re-elected. One may wish for a nobler motive, but expediency may

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. 6. G. Standing (2016), The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay. London: Biteback. 7. Outlined in G. Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London and New York: Bloomsbury. 8. T. Shildrick, R. MacDonald, C. Webster and K. Garthwaite (2012), Poverty and Insecurity: Life

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’ of the Holy Father Francis on care for our common home’, Vatican, 24 May. CHAPTER 3: BASIC INCOME AND FREEDOM 1. G. Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London and New York: Bloomsbury. 2. R. Nozick (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. C. Murray (2006

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of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 112(49), pp. 15078–83. 3. G. Standing (2011), The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. 4. G. Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury. G. Standing (2016), The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does

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. Remarks by Christopher Pissarides at the 2016 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, January 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnNs2MYVQoE. 14. Standing, A Precariat Charter. 15. M. L. King (1967), Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press. 16. N. Gabler (2016), ‘The secret shame

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, Australian Government. 8. Standing, ‘Responding to the crisis’. A. Kaletsky (2012), ‘How about quantitative easing for the people?’, Reuters, 1 August. G. Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury. M. Blyth and E. Lonergan (2014), ‘Print less but transfer more: Why central banks should give money directly

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), Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream. New York: PublicAffairs. 16. G. Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury. CHAPTER 7: THE AFFORDABILITY ISSUE 1. T. Harford (2016), ‘Could an income for all provide the ultimate safety

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, 27 September. 35. J. Burke Murphy (2016), ‘Basic income, sustainable consumption and the “DeGrowth” movement’, Basic Income News, 13 August. 36. G. Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury, Article 19. 37. Ibid, Article 1. CHAPTER 9: THE ALTERNATIVES 1. G. Standing (2016), The Corruption of Capitalism

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-dont-get-it. 7. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2016), ‘Chart book: TANF at 20’, cbbb.org, 5 August. 8. G. Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury. 9. M. Tanner and C. Hughes (2013), ‘The work versus welfare trade-off: 2013’, Cato Institute White Paper

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), ‘The road to workfare: Alternative to welfare or threat to occupation?’, International Labour Review, 129(6), pp. 677–91. This is elaborated in Standing, A Precariat Charter, Article 20. 28. The Economist (2016), ‘Welfare reform: A patchy record at 20’, The Economist, 20 August, pp. 11–12. 29. J. L. Collins

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart  · 25 Jun 2018  · 320pp  · 90,526 words

of the employment growth is these days—they may receive the “traditional” female lower pay. I call this just-making-it group “the Middle Precariat,” after the precariat, a term first popularized six years ago by the economist Guy Standing to describe an expanding working class burdened with temporary, low-paid, and

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part-time jobs. My term, the Middle Precariat, describes those at the upper end of that group in terms of income. Its membership is expanding higher and higher into what was traditionally known

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the clock, in contrast to their tenured colleagues. And it’s worse for the Middle Precariat of color, which typically has much less retirement security and ability to pay college tuition. Like the classic precariat, the Middle Precariat has lost the narrative of their lives and futures. Who are they and what will

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44 percent, according to a Pew study. Meanwhile, the wealthy—with “wealth” here defined as assets minus debt—stand in stark relief to the Middle Precariat. A 2014 Russell Sage Foundation report puts the net worth of the top 5 percent at $1.3 million. The incomes of the top 1

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bad it would get. Like Nanau, I was middle-class, and at the time of my pregnancy I was self-employed, part of the Middle Precariat. I was thirty-eight and living, as I do now, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, New York, with my husband

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schools, and companies with fifty or more employees. The population not covered by it will only grow, however, along with the rise of the Middle Precariat. After all, the middle class is increasingly made up of freelancers and contract workers. It was fitting when the unofficial paper of the American middle

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a temporarily embarrassed millionaire: I am no exception.” These professors and other extensively trained and educated workers have all the typical problems of the Middle Precariat: debt, overwork, isolation, and shame about their lack of money. They also may have very little time for leisure, not even for a few dates

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their parents were more economically comfortable than they were, even though their parents often had far fewer educational attainments. Whenever I talked to these Middle Precariat parents, I also heard the ring of self-blame and ridicule. Was it a sin to have pursued a high-minded profession and to want

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prop for getting through life?” asks Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism. She could well be asking this question of the adjuncts and the other Middle Precariat brain-workers you have met and will meet in Squeezed: Who are we? And what are we looking forward to without linear or even curvilinear

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and educators see Uber as a flexible way to make money with their car.” But these teachers, like nurses and other members of the Middle Precariat, are being stressed to the breaking point, and the practice of working a second job—like the teachers in Texas who told me they deliver

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real estate to the expansion of temporary and gig labor, are responsible in large part for these individual hardships. Yet the members of the Middle Precariat can’t help but blame themselves. Indeed, I started to see self-blame as a symptom of financial uncertainty, along with depression and, in some

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. Instead, we tend to produce a sort of 1 percent social media about ourselves after consuming 1 percent TV about others. Many of the Middle Precariat parents I spoke to mentioned getting a daily sense of vertigo when logging on to social media. Though this can be a positive experience—one

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reality that TUGs are being deployed to help hospitals limit the number of humans they employ. In fact, over time they may make the Middle Precariat even more precarious. “The robots help us save on the cost of additional bodies, or FTEs,” Al L’Altrelli, the administrative director for Presby’s

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line of thought, which highlights what robots may bring. Some of the concerns voiced by this strand are minor and some are immense. The Middle Precariat people I met who would soon be affected by the rise of the robots were similar to the trucker Finn Murphy, the author of the

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be paying off these loans when the robots come for their jobs—the robot vehicles Uber has promised within the decade. The robot-fearing Middle Precariat also includes parts of the legal profession: robots are threatening higher-end jobs, including those usually carried out by humans handling information. I first discovered

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classic route for many—women and immigrants in particular—into the bourgeoisie. And of course, I didn’t have to look far to find Middle Precariat journalists at risk of being replaced. They were usually the recipients of grants at my nonprofit, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. They were up against

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Peace. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Sandage, Scott A. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Suárez-Orozco, Carola, and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco. Children of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001

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,” National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, D.C., 2016, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76. after the precariat: Guy Standing used the term in his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). the largest wealth inequality gap: Global Wealth Report 2015, Credit Suisse Research

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class. See also Upper-middle class cost of life, 5, 275n household income, 4, 9 use of term, 4–5, 8–9, 26–27 Middle Precariat, 6–7, 9, 36, 156, 162 Midlife do-over myth, 165–88 career navigators, 165–68, 186–87 concept of failure, 179–81 for-profit

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Pharmacy robots, 225–27 Phillips, Anne, 263 Platform cooperativism, 157–60, 259–60 Plouffe, David, 155 Poo, Ai-jen, 260, 285n “Poor door,” 95–96 Precariat, 6 PrecariCorps, 56–58, 59 “Precarious manhood” theory, 150–51, 262 Pregnancy, 11–31 author’s story, 2–3, 21–23 Brianne Bolin’s story

Basic Income And The Left

by henningmeyer  · 16 May 2018

Hopkins University and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth at University Pompeu Fabra’s Public Policy Center Network (BIEN). His books include The Precariat: in Barcelona, Spain. He is the author of Bienestar The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury, 2011), A Insuficiente, Democracia Incompleta (Editorial Anagrama, 2015

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). Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (Blooms‐ bury, 2014) and Basic Income: And How We Can Make it Happen (Pelican, 2017). Bo Rothstein holds the August

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liber‐ ties against the state. Today, we need a Charter to advance the rights of the precariat and substantially reduce the inequalities and insecurities in society. This is the theme of my new book, A Precariat Char‐ ter: From Denizens to Citizens. volume is to provide some easily digestible food for The

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set out in Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. Inequalities multiplied, economic insecurity became pervasive. 4 5 Above all, a new globalised class structure took The precariat consists of supplicants, being forced to shape. All economic and social analysis of the beg for entitlements, being sanctioned without due growth of inequality that

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. sion is like trying to play Hamlet without the Prince. More and more people, not just migrants, are being The emerging mass class is the precariat, looking up converted into denizens, with a more limited range in income terms to a tiny plutocracy-cum-oligarchy and depth of civil, cultural, social

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old working class in numerical decline, is rapidly losing its labour securities and non-wage forms of economic security. This is key to understanding the precariat. Its essen‐ tial character is being a supplicant, a beggar, pushed to rely on discretionary and conditional hand-outs from the state and by privatised

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distinctive relations of production ties operating on its behalf. For understanding the (unstable labour, lack of occupational identity, a high precariat, and the nature of the class struggle to ratio of work-for-labour to labour, and so on), come, this supplicant status is more important

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as the norm, living on the edge of unsustainable debt), and distinctive relations to the state. This last The Precariat And Global Capitalism aspect has received too little attention. The precariat The precariat’s position must be understood in is the first mass class in history that has been terms of the changing

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changed the context The rental economy extends all the way down to completely. Historically speaking, from the 1980s pay-day loans, whereby members of the precariat onwards the labour supply to the global open labour are exploited by disgustingly high interest rates, market quadrupled, with all the newcomers being often exceeding

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new technological revolution, which among other things allowed the corporation to unbundle, shifting production and tasks to wher‐ ever costs were lowest. 8 What the precariat must demand now is nothing less than a new distribution system, not just a tinkering with marginal or average tax rates. Indeed, the weakest aspect

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rational is remote. Structural changes are required. and socially responsible. Let us find ways of going A Precariat Charter must start from understanding on that road. the nature and depth of insecurities faced by the precariat, and also from understanding the aspira‐ tions that exist in the more educated component of the

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precariat. It would be quite wrong to imagine that the precariat wants a return to the old norms of full-time stable wage labour. It wants to build a good society, resurrect a sense of ‘a

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are not like the old socialist project of a hundred years ago, when the proletariat was emerging as the mass class. The assets underpinning a Precariat Charter are basic security, control of time, quality space, educa‐ tion, financial knowledge and financial capital. A key demand is for moves towards the realisation

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for social policies. All this is much more than As for changing labour relationships and the the cost of current social protection, around €80bn. growing precariat, it sounds rather cynical to me to Up to what percentage of GDP are we willing to accept this state of affairs and try to

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been growing as dramatically in tion (or part of the solution) to what has been called many countries, on both sides of the northern the ‘precariat’ is to ignore the active causes of the Atlantic (North America and Europe): labour has deterioration of the labour market, causes that been increasingly weak

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of inequality has been the enormous is impossible to resolve the problems of precarious growth of the concentration of wealth (property work and of the precariat without touching on the generating income). In this context, the correction of relation of power, both in the state and in the labour inequalities based

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now

by Guy Standing  · 19 Mar 2020

living in an age of economic uncertainty, for which contributory insurance schemes are inappropriate or insufficient. Today a growing proportion of people are in the precariat, living bits-and-pieces lives, relying on low wages and incomes that are increasingly volatile and unpredictable and on inadequate and uncertain benefits in times

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circumstances hold. There is also a lot of anecdotal data to suggest that many more people must do more work that is not paid. The precariat, in particular, must use more unpaid time doing activities that are work but not counted as such. And over a million workers are doing unpaid

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the middle, and real earnings have fallen for lower-paid men.23 For those in the bottom half of the income spectrum – most in the precariat – wages have fallen by more than average and can be expected to continue to lag behind those of the minority earning good salaries and receiving

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have increased household earnings inequality.25 The young have lost relative to older citizens. This is partly because more young people have been entering the precariat, who have experienced volatile stagnant wages and intermittent earnings, exposed to zero-hours contracts and so on.26 And it is partly because of the

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of total compensation. As many of these were paid equally to all workers, they tended to moderate earnings inequality. But with the growth of the precariat fewer workers, young and old, have access to such benefits, and many firms have quietly converted them into money wages, giving a false impression of

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elevated by tax policies. What has happened to non-wage benefits is a largely unmeasured aspect of growing income inequality in Britain, particularly between the precariat and the salariat. However, it is likely that the trend is similar to that in the United States. According to the official Bureau of Economic

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occupational identity or narrative to give to their lives and must do a lot of work that is not recognized or remunerated. They are the precariat.60 Perhaps worst of all, they are, and feel like, supplicants: they must ask for favours, for permission, for help, which if not granted threaten

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their ability to function. The original Latin meaning of precariousness was ‘to obtain by prayer’. That is what being in the precariat is like; they are dependent on others’ goodwill. This is undignified, potentially traumatizing and puts people on the road to losing the ordinary rights of

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least 28 local authorities have closed their schemes altogether, through lack of funding, while others have shredded theirs. More people are drifting down from the precariat into destitution, relying on food banks and other forms of discretionary charity. There was a fortyfold increase in the use of food banks between 2008

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losing benefits. The minimum income floor for the self-employed and in-work conditionality: Built into UC is a sly reduction in entitlements for the precariat – the nominally self-employed, agency workers and zerohour contract employees who have irregular hours and income. The self-employed may receive hundreds of pounds a

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too much should be expected from the minimum wage in the flexible labour market of the twenty-first century. It has limited reach to the precariat: for instance, employers can offset minimum wage increases by cutting hours worked or reducing other benefits. However, it would complement a basic income. Enforcement has

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they could have a guaranteed job instead. Social democrats might like that, as it would mean better-paying jobs for more of the underemployed and precariat. But the fiscal cost would be daunting. For example, in the UK, over 60% of those regarded as poor are in jobs or have someone

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fails to recognize that today’s crisis is structural and requires transformative policies. Tax credits, job guarantees and statutory minimum wages would barely touch the precariat’s existential insecurity that is at the heart of the social and economic crisis, let alone address the aspirations of the progressive and growing part

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of the precariat for an ecologically grounded Good Society.9 The emphasis on jobs is non-ecological, since it is tied to the constant pursuit of economic growth

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. 24 OECD Employment Outlook 2018, Paris: OECD, 2018. 25 Bellfield et al., ‘Two Decades of Income Inequality in Britain’.   Notes 117 26 G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury, 2011. 27 Department for Work and Pensions, Households Below Average Income: An Analysis of the UK Income Distribution: 1994

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Active, Manchester: Activity Alliance, 2018. 59 D. Campbell, ‘NHS Bosses: Benefit Stress Driving Mental Health Care Demand’, The Guardian, 8 March 2019. 60 Standing, The Precariat. 61 See, for instance, OECD, Automation, Skills and Training, Paris: OECD, 2018. 62 World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2018, Geneva: WEF, 2018

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’, New York Times, 8 May 2019. Appendix B 1 This discussion draws on G. Standing, ‘Why a Job Guarantee Is a Bad Joke for the Precariat and for Freedom’, Open Democracy, 7 September 2018. 2 ‘The Guardian View on a Job Guarantee: A Policy Whose Time Has Come’, The Guardian, 3

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Times, 25 April 2018. 128 Notes 8 L. Summers, ‘A Jobs Guarantee – Progressives’ Latest Big Idea’, Financial Times, 2 July 2018. 9 G. Standing, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 10 J. Dorfman, ‘Job Guarantee: A Liberal Idea That Conservatives May Embrace’, Forbes Magazine

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has actually come out in favour. Calling the report a ‘union perspective’ is analogous to calling the services proposal ‘universal’. 19 In drawing up a Precariat Charter of desirable policies, I proposed that everybody should have the right to financial advice, vital in a complex financialized system. Standing, A

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Precariat Charter. Index Activity Alliance 27–8 administrative costs 46, 48–9, 51 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 27 agency workers 45 air pollution 33, 36–7,

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy

by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght  · 20 Mar 2017

capital. Second, �unions must come to view themselves as representatives of �whole populations of working and potentially working � people, including the growing precariat, and not just their shrinking cores of full-�time, permanent, male insiders.31 This they might do by broadening their membership but also by

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to two components of our socie�ties whose attitude �towards basic income can a priori be expected to be more favorable: the precariat and �women. The Precariat Job seekers, �people with short-�term or part-�time contracts, �those enrolled in workfare schemes, the more vulnerable among

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whatÂ�ever reason from good jobs that provide material security and positive identification—Â�these are the Â�people commonly gathered Â�under the label “precariat.”↜45 They include many of the Â�people who stand to gain most, in an immediate sense, from the introduction of a basic income

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Nonetheless, a number of associations that have developed outside the traditional �labor movement to represent the interests of �those now commonly called the precariat have actively militated for basic-�income-�type proposals. An early example was in the United States in the late 1960s, when the National

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of it, that would not have to be crawled and grovelled for at the feet of a bureaucratic overlord.”↜48 In several other countries, precariat-Â�linked organÂ�izations of varying durability, representativeness, and impact made the institution of something like a basic income one of their central claims.49

…

!” (“a job is a right, an income is an entitlement!”) at demonstrations and occupations in several French cities.51 Â�Under the impulse of the precariat-Â�based federation AC! Agir Contre le Chomage (Acting Against Unemployment), founded in 1994, basic income was propelled for the first time into the French

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enough to make ends meet, and many of �those with the skills of effective leaders �will remain in the precariat only for short periods of time. Moreover, the precariat lacks the sort of intense and regular interaction that the proletariat owes to sharing a workplace. It also lacks an asset

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, it �faces the challenge of breeding a positive identification with the stigmatized status of the unemployed or precariously employed. One may therefore doubt that precariat associations �will ever gain strength even remotely comparable to that of traditional �labor organ�izations, let alone sufficient to secure the introduction of

…

, with average earnings 20 Â�percent lower than in 2006 (see Roberts 2014 and Cohen 2014). Guy Standing (2011, 2014a) documents the rise of this “precariat” as a core element in his plea for the urgency of introducing an unconditional basic income. 6. The job loss caused by automation has been

…

think tank linked to the Dutch association of medium-Â�size and small firms. See Nooteboom 1986 and Dekkers and Nooteboom 1988. 45. The term “precariat” originates in the Italian anarchist tradition. It has been widely used in French sociology, for example, by Robert Castel (2009). It has been popÂ�uÂ

…

–30. 48. Bill Jordan’s 1973 essay offers a well-Â�documented and insightful case study of the aspirations, potential, and difficulties of this local precariat initiative. On its advocacy for basic income, see especially Jordan 1973: 27, 70, 72–3, and also Jordan 1986. 49. In the late 1970s, Australia

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Unemployment?” International Â�Labour Review 125(1): 87–106. —Â�—Â�—. 1999. Global Â�Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice. Basingstoke: Macmillan. —Â�—Â�—. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. —Â�—Â�—. 2012. “Why a Basic Income Is Necessary for a Right to Work.” Basic Income Studies 7(2

…

): 19–40. —Â�—Â�—. 2014a. A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury. —Â�—Â�—. 2014b. “Cash Transfers Can Work Better than Subsidies.” The Hindu, December 6. www╉.Â�thehindu╉.Â

…

, 290n20 Poverty line, 11, 17 Poverty trap, basic income and avoidance of, 19, 135, 159–160, 165, 235, 261n20, 274n62, 297n73. See also Unemployment trap Precariat, 180, 183–185, 186, 250n5, 304nn45,47,49. See also Low paid employment; Unemployed; Working poor Prisoners, 9, 13, 46–47, 256n50 Production within the

…

ethic, 27, 99–100, 175, 190, 256n56, 290n18 Work quality, 23, 77, 133, 255n45, 287n68, 296n60 Unemployed, organÂ�izations of the, 183–185. See also Precariat Unemployment: 6, 16, 26, 28, 47, 48, 57, 81, 99, 118, 130, 167, 175, 183, 201, 202, 233, 240, 250n7, 254n36, 282n28. See also Unemployment

…

Active welfare state; Work requirements Work Â�house, 46, 56–57, 61, 63, 76, 263n41 Working poor, 42, 298. See also Low-Â�paid employment; Precariat Working-Â�t ime reduction, 28, 44, 48–50, 97, 141, 145, 160, 166, 167, 187, 188, 202, 257n59, 263n47, 264n48, 289n17, 305n61 World Bank

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen  · 14 Jan 2021  · 297pp  · 88,890 words

, in which adjuncts, independent contractors, freelancers, gig employees, or any other sort of “contingent” laborer make up a new, ever-expanding societal classification: the precariat. The precariat is not the vision of the working class held by many Americans. As the theorist Guy Standing points out, the working class, at least how

…

fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features they were familiar with.”1 The precariat has almost none of those things. Uber drivers are part of the precariat. So are retail workers, Amazon warehouse employees, adjunct professors, freelance writers, Instacart grocery shoppers, corporate cleaners, MTV digital producers

…

, in-home nursing assistants, Wal-Mart stockers, fast food servers, and people who cobble together several of these jobs to make ends meet. A precariat worker knows few of their coworkers, and those that they do know turn over quickly. They often have a college degree, or have completed several

…

semesters toward one. Some, like the adjuncts and freelance writers, find themselves in the precariat as they continue to pursue their “passion,” no matter the cost. Others find themselves there through desperation. Their economic and class status is precarious, which

…

vigilant for even the smallest piece of bad luck that could sink them into poverty. Above all, precariat workers are exhausted—and, regardless of the specifics of their job, burnt out. “Those in the precariat have lives dominated by insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation,” Standing writes. “They are denizens rather than citizens

…

, losing cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights built up over generations. Most importantly, the precariat is the first class in history expected to labour and work at a lower level than the schooling it typically requires. In an ever more

…

American Dream, but they keep grinding to try to position themselves closer to it. Depending on whether or not you’re a part of the precariat, this might all sound dire. It is—but one of the greatest cruelties of the class system is that no one, not even those whose

…

booming! Unemployment is low! But that’s not how a growing number of Americans are experiencing it. If you think you’re insulated from the precariat—through your current job, or your education, or your parents’ standing—you’re wrong. You might currently be part of what Standing calls the “salariat

…

jobs, and report feeling that their opinion counts within the company. But every day, the salariat continues its “drift,” as Standing puts it, into the precariat: full-time workers are laid off and replaced by independent contractors; the new “innovative” tech companies refuse to even categorize the bulk of their workforce

…

people stringing together two or three all-nighters to distinguish themselves, either in school or at work; or the lived reality of those in the precariat who work an eight-hour shift as a nurse’s aide, grab a few hours of sleep, and go out to spend the night driving

…

Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change (New York: Currency, 2018). 5. How Work Got So Shitty 1. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 7. 2. Ibid., x. 3. Ibid., 23. 4. Hyman, Temp, 7. 5. David Weil, The Fissured

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Crusade,” 11 Pew Charitable Trusts, 14 Pew Research Center, xvii, xxiv Pinterest, 158–59, 163, 176, 224 Playdate, The (Mose), 236 Pod Save America, 194 precariat, viii, 96–98, 128 private equity and venture capital, 104–6, 143 productivity apps for, xxvi, 155, 173 corporate goals, 113, 125 distractions and, 175

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-hailing companies burnout and, xvii changing economy, 141 disruption of old industry, 142 effort at unionization, 146 guilt going offline, 144–45 lifestyle choice, 114 precariat workers, 96 pseudo-employees, 143 second job, 102 second jobs, 128 Uncanny Valley (Wiener), 187 undesirable jobs, 87–89 Unf*ck Yourself, 129 unions Depression

Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss  · 15 Jan 2020  · 199pp  · 61,648 words

seven distinct classes. At the top were the elite, who had the most of all three kinds of capital, and at the bottom were the precariat, who had the least of everything. In between were three varieties of middle class, along with two different working classes. “All sides played Spot the

…

’m just an exchange rate away from the elite. According to the survey, I have passed through several classes in my adult life, including the precariat. But I don’t believe that to be true. I have always remained, more or less, in the class into which I was born. In

…

Tsing writes, “the condition of our time.” It is also the defining feature of an entire class of people, the precariat. “Everybody, actually” is the economist Guy Standing’s answer to his own question, “Who enters the precariat?” By everybody, he means potentially anybody. Illness or disability can force somebody into the

…

precariat, as can divorce, war, or natural disaster. The precariat is composed of migrant workers and temp workers and contract workers and part-time

…

offer “no sense of career.” There are few opportunities to advance in these jobs, and no way to bargain for better terms. Some of the precariat are not citizens of the countries where they work. Others are citizens on paper, officially equal to other citizens, but lacking, in practice, equal protection

…

. And the word denizens, Standing notes, “was also used to refer to non-slave blacks in the United States before the abolition of slavery.” The precariat is not easily recognizable as a class, even to itself. It includes convicts and asylum seekers and single mothers and artists. It includes educated people

…

kinds of jobs their parents and grandparents worked, in factories and coal mines. What they all have in common is a lack of security. The precariat is not what we used to call the working class, Standing clarifies. Those workers held long-term jobs with fixed hours. They had unions and

…

a regular schedule. Some people choose their precarity—evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to it. The precariat includes people who have forgone stable employment and retirement savings for temp work and travel and an uncertain future. Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting

…

Devine, Niall Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johs. Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Sam Friedman, Andrew Miles. Sociology, April 2, 2013. This survey uses the term precariat to describe the lowest class, the class with the least of three kinds of capital. In his 2011 book The

…

Standing uses the term to describe a class defined by a lack of security, not a lack of capital. “The precariat is not the bottom of society,” he argues. His precariat is a class that cuts across economic classes as they are typically understood. “That somebody has more income than somebody else

…

1848. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Princeton University Press, 2017. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. WATER An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, volume 1, Adam

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