In sociology and economics, the precariat (/prɪˈkɛəriət/) is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.[1]
Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labor to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labor and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for "gig" work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being "on call").
The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.[2] The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.[3][4]
Overview
Some theorists suggest that the young precariat class in Europe has become a serious issue in the early part of the 21st century.[5] This has been linked with major mass political developments including the Brexit referendum[6][7] in the United Kingdom, and the first presidency of Donald Trump[6][7] in the United States.[8][9] The global COVID-19 pandemic has particularly exacerbated food insecurity in the United States.[10] A survey conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations discovered that only one third of Germans and one quarter of Italians and French had enough money remaining at the end of the month for discretionary spending.[11]
The British economist Guy Standing has analysed the precariat as a new emerging social class in work done for the think tank Policy Network and the World Economic Forum.[8] In his 2014 book entitled A Precariat Charter he argued that all citizens have a right to socially inherited wealth.[12][13] The latest in the series is titled The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class[2][14] where he proposed basic income as a solution for addressing the problem.
The analysis of the results of the Great British Class Survey of 2013, a collaboration between the BBC and researchers from several UK universities, contended there is a new model of class structure consisting of seven classes, ranging from the Elite at the top to the Precariat at the bottom.[15] The Precariat class was envisaged as "the most deprived British class of all with low levels of economic, cultural and social capital." This was contrasted with "the Technical Middle Class" in Great Britain in that instead of having disposable income but no interests, people of the new Precariat Class have all sorts of potential activities they like to engage in but cannot do any of them because they have no money, insecure lives, and are usually trapped in old industrial parts of the country.
The precariat class has been emerging in societies such as Japan, where it numbers over two million.[16] Both in the West and in Japan, a similar group of people are called NEETs.
See also
- Asset poverty – Economic and social condition
- Bagholder – Slang for shareholder left holding worthless stocks
- Cost of living – Cost to live based on price of necessities
- Criticism of capitalism – Arguments against the economic system of capitalism
- Dead-end job – Job with little chance of advancement
- Discrimination against autistic people
- Dispossession, oppression, and depression – State of low mood and aversion to activity
- Division of labor – Separation of tasks in any system so that participants may specialise
- Economic inequality – Distribution of income or wealth between different groups
- Economic security – Socioeconomic and personal finance concept
- Endo contractualization – Form of exploitative temporary employment
- Gig worker – Independent on-demand temporary workers
- Precarious work – Type of non-standard or temporary employment
- Involuntary unemployment – Condition in which a person is unemployed despite being willing to work
- Kitchen sink realism – British social realist artistic movement
- Living wage – Minimum income to meet a worker's basic needs
- Lumpenproletariat – Marxist term to describe a subsection of the underclass
- McJob – Pejorative work-related slang
- Minimum wage – Lowest remuneration which can be paid legally in a state for working
- Policy Network – International think tank
- Precarious work – Type of non-standard or temporary employment
- Pre-distribution – Fiscal policy idea; holds that government should prevent rather than remedy inequalities
- Reserve army of labour – Marxian economic concept
- Social policy
- Social vulnerability – Dimension of vulnerability to multiple stressors
- Survival of the fittest – Phrase to describe the mechanism of natural selection
- Tang ping – Chinese neologism, "lying flat" ("lying flat")
- UK cost of living crisis – Ongoing cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom
- Universal basic income – Welfare system of unconditional income
- Victimology – Study of victimization
- Workforce casualisation – Shift from stable to often contractual labor relations
References
- ^ F. Lunning (2010).Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies. University of Minnesota Press. p. 252. ISBN 081667387X.
- ^ a b Guy Standing (May 24, 2011). "The Precariat – The new dangerous class" Archived 2019-12-08 at the Wayback Machine. Policy Network.
- ^ Lorna Fox O'Mahony, David O'Mahony and Robin Hickey (eds), Moral Rhetoric and the Criminalisation of Squatting: Vulnerable Demons? (London: Routledge, 2014), ISBN 0415740614 p. 25.
- ^ Wacquant, Loïc (2014). "Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neo-liberal city: an analytic cartography" (PDF). Ethnic and Racial Studies. 37 (10): 1687–1711. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.694.6299. doi:10.1080/01419870.2014.931991. S2CID 144879355. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-10-10.
- ^ Smoczyński, Wawrzyniec (15 September 2011). "Youthful members of the full-time precariat - VoxEurop (English)". voxeurop.eu.
- ^ a b Seren Selvin Korkmaz & Alphan Telek (2018-04-02). "The rising precariat and left-transformation: an examination of the Five Star Movement and Corbyn's Labour Party". Open Democracy.
- ^ a b Guy Standing (2016-12-12). "The 5 biggest lies of global capitalism". World Economic Forum.
- ^ a b Guy Standing (2016-11-09). "Meet the precariat, the new global class fuelling the rise of populism". World Economic Forum.
- ^ Thomas Guénolé (2017-05-07). "After Macron's win, France is divided in four". Globe and Mail.
- ^ LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole (September 2, 2020). "How Hunger Persists in a Rich Country Like America". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
- ^ Butler, Patrick; Rice-Oxley, Mark (2019-05-15). "Cash, credits and crisis: life in the new European 'precariat'". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-10-20.
- ^ Guy Standing. A Precariat Charter. Bloomsbury Academic. 2014.
- ^ Crocker, Geoff. "The Economic Necessity of Basic Income". Archived from the original on 24 July 2017. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
- ^ "Who will be a voice for the emerging precariat?", The Guardian, June 1, 2011.
- ^ "Huge survey reveals seven social classes in UK". BBC. April 3, 2013. Retrieved 2021-05-03.
- ^ Machiko Osawa and Jeff Kingston (July 1, 2010). "Japan has to address the ‘precariat’". The Financial Times.
Further reading
- Standing, Guy (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781849663526.
- Kalleberg, Arne (2018). Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781509506538.
External links
- "Plutonomy and the Precariat" Noam Chomsky in the Huffington Post
- We’re All Precarious Now. Jacobin, April 20, 2015.
- Cash, credits and crisis: life in the new European 'precariat' The Guardian, May 15, 2019
