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Guy Standing

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class Paperback – June 5, 2014

by Guy Standing (Author)

102 ratings

Part of: Bloomsbury Revelations (49 Books)

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Described by Noam Chomsky as 'a very important book', Guy Standing's The Precariat has achieved cult status as the first account of this emerging class of people, facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives.

Guy Standing warns that the rapid growth of the precariat is producing instabilities in society. It is a dangerous class because it is internally divided, leading to the villainisation of migrants and other vulnerable groups. And, lacking agency, its members may be susceptible to the siren calls of political extremism. He argues for a new politics, in which redistribution and income security are reconfigured and in which the fears and aspirations of the precariat are made central to a progressive strategy.

Since first publication of this book in 2011, the precariat has become an ever more significant global phenomenon, highly visible in the Occupy movement and in protest movements around the world.
In a new preface Guy Standing discusses such developments - are they indicative of the emergence of a new collective spirit, or do they simply reveal the growing size and growing anger of this new class?

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date

June 5, 2014
Dimensions

5.42 x 0.77 x 8.55 inches
ISBN-10

1472536169
ISBN-13

978-1472536167
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Guy Standing is Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. He has previously been Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath, UK, Professor of Labour Economics at Monash University, Australia and Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organization. He is co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network. His recent books include Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (2009) and Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality (2002).

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic; Reprint edition (June 5, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1472536169
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1472536167
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.42 x 0.77 x 8.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,109,564 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,058 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)
- #2,060 in Labor & Industrial Relations (Books)
- #2,719 in Sociology of Class

Customer Reviews:
102 ratings

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James A. Brannan

Will our kids be happy selling us cheap plastic junk at BiggieMart - Guy Standing Doesn't Think So

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2014

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This book is really good. It points out the gut-wrenching, society dismantling, insidious results of neo-liberal policy. As I am in the I.T. field, I am useful to the oligarchy, for now, so I have a job. But I still have no benefits to speak of, no pension, and I have to run like heck just to stay in place in this field, albeit I enjoy the constant learning. But there is little stability, as the USA government long ago outsourced I.T. to private companies, who in turn outsourced to staffing firms. So, much like I was in college, when I'd work as a temp in factories and law offices doing manual labor or clerical work, I'm still really just a temp when you think about it.

When I see my friends and family who have sons and daughters coming of age, going to college, and then working at Starbucks. I have to wonder. When all my professors are Adjuncts making a pittance, while the college's administration is making more money then ever, I have to wonder. The older Americans aren't retiring, information technology is taking on more of their work resulting in less need for new labor, and so there just aren't jobs. It's hard to convince folks that the "slackard" generation of today is not the same thing as "slackards" of the 1960s or 1970s. Even though we are again making money hand-over-fist in the USA, it certainly isn't trickling down to the middle-class. Moreover, the "slackards" of today are going to college...it's just when they get out, and there are no good jobs, they opt to live in their parent's basement and play XBox instead of working.

While certainly one could argue ambition should force them to go out and make a job, realize that there has always been a segment of society that just "settles" on the decent job, somewhat comprable to his or her education and skill, and then settles into a respectable, but secure, life of kids, community, and prime-time television. But that option, as Guy Standing so eloquently discusses, was taken from us in the west by neo-liberal policies. That stability and security was transferred from the nation state to an oligarchy that now controls much of the world's wealth. No, Dr. Standing doesn't present it as a conspiracy, it just is...something that happened. The book doesn't lament how things got the way they did, or who's to blame, as much as asking what we are going to do to correct our current course of action?

The book doesn't just appeal to liberal morality, it stressed the danger this generation poses if we allow them to continue to drift with no community, no security, and no sense of purpose. I hate to say it, but, the Keynesian welfare state is starting to look pretty good right about now. Dr. Standing has me convinced, we need a guaranteed minimum salary for every working age person and we need to redefine what we define as work. What I think is interesting, to me, is how this redefinition sort of relates to what Jaron Lanier writes about in "Who Owns the Future." The secret is, "smart computers" aren't really all that smart...they are just formalizing *your* domain knowledge - for free - and subsequently rendering your job obsolete. Isn't that knowledge worth something? Why are you not getting paid for it? Anyways, how it relates is that it too is suggesting we rethink how we define work and being productive. And, what we consider human labor worth compensating. If it is your knowledge I'm formalizing into an AI system, shouldn't you get paid and not solely some rich Silicon Valley entrepreneur? Something has to change, lest we find ourselves all working at Starbucks or Walmart selling each other caffeine or cheap plastic junk.

We are at a point of unprecedented abundance, where we can produce much with little human capital. The book really gets you thinking. It points out that there really is something different happening, and unrest is seething just below the surface...and the book challenges you to consider what we can do about it to prevent the unrest in the first place, rather than suppress it when it happens.

A very eye-opening book.

36 people found this helpful

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wsmrer

A Devastating Critique of Neo-Liberalism

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2017

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There are many reviews here that touch on the contents of The Precariat I wish to take the liberty to discuss the ‘Why’ of Guy Standing formulating this presentation of the subject under the thin pretense that I too was trained as a Labour (Labor for me) Economist just a few critical years before Standing. He started at the University of Sussex, earned his Masters Degree in Labor Economics and Industrial Organization at the University of Illinois and earned his Doctorate in Economics at the University of Cambridge in 1977. He had in 1975 begun working at the International Labour Organization (I.L.O.). What those dates and subjects communicate is that he was focusing his interest at the very cusp of the transformation of the subject matter from Keynesian style analysis to what become Chicago School monetary analysis under the thrust of Milton Friedman who was laying down the ideology of Neo-Liberalism in the mid seventies; and that was to go on into policy formation under President Reagan, prime minister Thatcher and those who came after, up to the present time.

In a few words the divide between those two periods changed the world decisively and Guy Standing spells out in detail the transformation that occurred. As he was trained The Economy was one of reoccurring cycles of prosperity and bust, the greatest being the Depression of the thirties and the Macro role of government was that of a stabilizer, flattening out the cycle and alleviating to some degree the resulting suffering of the general population.

What Industrial Organization taught was the Micro side of that world; that Markets were beneficial devices but flawed in many ways due to seller concentration and externalities where social cost of production were passed on to others or not dealt with in a rational manner and required anti-trust and other regulatory input. The human side of that economic system was resolved by labor-management struggle and agreement, but also through civic responsibility for those impaired. Pensions, vacation time, sick leave, maternity leave, health care were common items in agreements; and employment periods reasonably stable with advancement expected for loyal service. A worker could view his/her future with some certainty.

In the world of Neo-Liberalism all of those concepts were treated as subversive to the beneficial effects of ‘The Free Market’ and ‘The Individual’ was then to succeed or fail depending on its unique properties. Governments’ sole role was to benefit business interest one way or the other, Globalization as it occurred was a natural outcome.

To Standing this is the world that fosters The Precariat, an angry and disillusioned and very dangerous group that can be manipulated by extremist forces, as he correctly predicted in 2011, and intensified by the intervening years. He offers what he believes to be offsetting policies and holds out optimistic hopes that the precariat may form up into an effective remedying force.

His time at the I.L.O. put him where international statistical data flowed to be collated and analyzed and this is why his book is so thoroughly substantiated with finding from around the industrial world. He clearly was at home in that setting watching the enormous effects of the changes he saw.
A very rich and important work. He has since put out two additional books on the subject but The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class can stand alone as a warning.

12 people found this helpful

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J. Lambrecht

The Precariat is a Lot of Us

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2015

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This wide-ranging book examines the life situations of people from many places in the world who would like the stability of employment and the financial security work can bring. Such security is presented as a basic human right, much like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Persons looking for rationale arguments for a basic income for all will be interested in the ideas in this book.

I would have liked to have seen more attention to the plight of the academic Precariat, the growing teaching cadre made up of the most highly educated in our society. Persons with doctorates and enthusiasm to teach end up, by necessity, in unpredictable, low-paid jobs in tertiary education when they had hoped for more. While these limited-contract teachers are implicitly included within the broad definition of the contingent, casual workforce described in this book, this topic would have fit well into the discussion of increasingly privatized, even teacherless schooling.

But, even with this omission, the ideas are compelling. They challenge readers to recognize and accept fundamental universal rights and to consider how public policies act to acknowledge, or not, basic human dignity.

8 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Christabelle

Incredible - a really important book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2016

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I think this is an incredible book. It seems to bring together a lot of things that I’ve been thinking in an inchoate way for some time. This book covers a lot of ground, far too much to do justice to here.

Guy Standing sets out his argument that there is a global class, ‘the precariat’, which consists of many millions of people. Moreover, almost all of us could potentially find ourselves in the precariat at some point, even if we are not in it currently. Not yet a class-for -itself, partly because it is disunited, the precariat must become a class-for-itself in order to abolish itself, by being sufficiently united to put pressure on governments to introduce policies which would make its position less precarious.

Standing discusses what he means by the precariat. While by no means a homogeneous group, temporary labouring status comprises a central aspect of it, as does lack of a secure work-based identity. Another feature of the precariat is precarious income and a pattern of income that is different from that of other groups. The precariat fares badly in the seven aspects of labour-related security which Standing identifies as pursued by social democrats, labour parties and trade unions as their ‘industrial citizenship’ agenda for the working class after the Second World War (for example: adequate opportunities to obtain jobs, protection against arbitrary dismissal, assurance of an adequate stable income and possessing a collective voice in the labour market).

Standing discusses where the precariat came from and why it is growing so rapidly; he identifies the policies and institutional changes in the globalisation era (1975 – 2008) which have created this huge group of people with no anchor of stability. Standing’s view is that, while the neo-liberal thinkers who emerged in the late 1970s were partially correct in their diagnosis (that, in a globalised world, investment, employment and income would flow to where conditions were most welcoming), their prognosis was callous. One of the key neo-liberal ideas was that labour markets must become more flexible.

Standing talks about ‘the precariatised mind’, ‘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 building a career’, and he links this to an interesting point about the long-term effect which the digitised world, with its lack of respect for contemplation or reflection, is having on the brain. Standing goes on to say, ‘the precariat suffers from information overload without a lifestyle that could give them the control and capacity to sift the useful from the useless’.

Standing also discusses the lack of control which the precariat has over time. He talks of the huge amount of ‘work’ which is not ‘labour’ (i.e. unpaid work-related activities) which many members of the precariat are required to do, such as applying for jobs, travelling to interviews, travelling to the jobcentre, queuing at the jobcentre, completing forms to obtain social security benefits, keeping skills up-to-date, acquiring new skills, and so on. There is also some discussion about changes to how time is viewed in our globalised world.

One of Standing’s key points is that the precariat is a ‘dangerous’ class in that it has every potential to lead us towards a ‘politics of inferno’, particularly as politics has become commodified, there has been a ‘thinning’ of democracy, with fewer people belonging to political parties and low turnouts in most elections, and the social democratic project has been unable to survive globalisation; most mainstream political parties across Europe accepted the neo-liberal economic framework, as did the Democrats in the USA, and did little to support the precariat that grew in its shadow. Standing strongly puts forward the point that insecure people make angry people, who are prone to veer to the extreme right or extreme left politically and back populists. He mentions that the extreme right has already made inroads in many European countries. I do feel that Standing has been proved to be very prescient here, given what is currently happening with the US presidential election, and certainly Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Leader would indicate that Labour Party members and supporters have rejected the Party’s acceptance of the neo-liberal framework under Blair and Brown.

In Standing’s final chapter, he sets out how we can move towards a ‘politics of paradise’ for the precariat, a key plank of which is a basic income for every citizen. I believe that he further develops his ideas on what policies would help the precariat in his later book, ‘A Precariat Charter’ (but I have not yet read this).

I cannot recommend ‘The Precariat’ highly enough for anyone who is interested in these types of issues. It is written in an engaging way and it’s fairly easy to understand. I think it’s a really important book.

18 people found this helpful

Lew Owen

The necessity of a new class cosnciousness and urgent class action.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 14, 2015

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Noam Chomsky says that this is a book you must read if you are concerned with the profound social changes taking place in the global social and economic order. Guy Standing has tried to classify the extraordinary social changes generated by our failure to control global capitalism and has created a sociological thesis that describes the emergence of an enormous new social class that stretches from almost the bottom tier of society to very near the top. It is very problematic sociologically, but he has used an insightful ideal type of categorisation that exposes the basic precariousness of the kinds of social roles now available to people in a post Fordist world, where continuous structural adjustment is necessary to make economies function. He describes how this could become (is becoming) a nightmare type of society and also how it could be redirected into becoming a humanitarian visionary society. He implies that the first stage of creating a positive society is to help make this new class a "class for itself", rather than remaining an unaware "class in itself".

8 people found this helpful

Alister Cryan

An eye opening book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 27, 2018

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Professor Standing's insights into the society we live in at the start of the twenty first century are in my view impossible to argue with. His solutions are perhaps a little optimistic and his paradise probably unobtainable it is particularly sad that Brazil has not gone the way he hoped.

Ms Joy Kay

An exploration of the longings we bring to politics

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 14, 2016

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A very interesting book, describing the recent changes in social conditions, and how and why these changes are happening. The chapters 'A Politics of Inferno'.and 'A Politics of Paradise' explore the deeper layers of our desires for change.

One person found this helpful

Linda M.

there seems to be great strides already surfacing all around the world

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 19, 2017

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Guy Standing seems to have absorbed exactly what a lot of people are pondering and makes a very convincing argument. It is really a radical step in what he is proposing, however, there seems to be great strides already surfacing all around the world.

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