When the Bilderberg Group listed precariat as one of their ten items for discussion at their 2016 meeting, many outsiders (and nearly everybody on the planet is an outsider) would have reached for their electronic or physical dictionaries to look up the meaning of this word. I know I did.
Well it turns out that precariat is a portmanteau formed by merging precarious with proletariat. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article:
In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the Precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive "unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings". Specifically, it is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.
A recent article (June 8th 2016) in QUARTZ included this description:The "precariat" is a term popularised by British economist Guy Standing, describing a growing class of people who feel insecure in their jobs, communities, and life in general. They are…
… the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash … the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash labourers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired.
The word isn't recognised by Blogger's spell checker but it is certain to become better known now that the global elite are discussing it and, by whatever name this category of people may be called, it is growing rapidly in size. Here is Amazon's review of Guy Standing's book:This marginalised group—“alienated, anomic, anxious, and angry,” according to Standing—is fuelling the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump in the US and similar rabble rousers in Europe and beyond. (Discussing this group alongside the middle class, which isn’t doing great either, is telling.) The resulting turmoil in politics, markets, and economics is a factor in nearly all of the Bilderberg meeting’s other agenda items.
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?
