The Precariat

The claim that work has become more precarious in recent decades has an intuitive appeal, at least among a layer of young people and activists. The concept of the “precariat,” playing on the old description of the working class as a “proletariat,” attempts to give empirical and sociological content to this intuition. The term has been widely disseminated by U.K. sociologist Guy Standing, whose book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class summarizes a long career of investigation into the changing nature of waged work. As a proposed concept, the precariat raises three questions. First, has work around the world in fact become more precarious in the past few decades, in some empirically definable way? If so, do those who perform precarious labor constitute a “class,” in the sense of being a group that has a distinct structural position in modern capitalism and that could potentially be unified under a single political banner? And, finally, what implications does increasing precarity have for the demands and strategies of workers and their organizations? To the first question, I offer a qualified yes— qualified, because Standing’s definition of the precariat encompasses a multitude of forms of “precarity,” some more empirically verifiable than others. But the precariat is problematic as a class category, because it attempts to draw together too many different heterogeneous strata of the population and because it too strongly excludes segments of what Standing defines (too narrowly) as the working class, which still enjoys relatively stable and protected employment situations. I answer the final question with a caution. Standing raises important points about the subjective basis of progressive and pro-worker politics in the twenty-first century; while the precariat may not be the answer to the issues raised, we should not pretend that anyone else has an obvious answer either. Advocates and critics alike often reduce the definition of the “precariat” to decreasing job tenure—people increasingly move from employer to employer. There has been a robust debate about the degree to which this form of instability has increased. Kevin Doogan’s New Capitalism, for example, argues that such claims are overstated. But most researchers acknowledge that the long-term attachment between workers and employers, upon which the structures of the welfare state and much of the labor movement were constructed, has diminished. Henry Farber of Princeton University reports, based on a detailed empirical study of the United States, that “the structure of jobs in the private sector has moved away from long-term relationships” and “recent cohorts of workers are less likely than their parents to have a career characterized by a ‘life-time’ job with a single employer.” Standing’s definition is more complex than this, however, encompassing seven different dimensions of “labor security,” which he claims the precariat lacks. These include not only one’s security in employment but also the security of job descriptions and career paths, the safety and regularity of working conditions, the ability to gain and employ new skills, the security of income over the life course, and “representation 482888 NLFXXX10.1177/1095796013482888New Labor ForumFrase research-article2013