Precariat

A Precariat is a worker with precarious work arrangements.

• Context:
  • They can be a member of a Precariat Class.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Proletariat.
• See: Freeter, The Financial Times, Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Elite, Social Class, Precarity.

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References

2015

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/precariat Retrieved:2015-11-21.
  • 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 as well as being a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of lack of job security, in other words intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism. The term is a portmanteau obtained by merging precarious with proletariat. The precariat class has been emerging in societies such as Japan, where it includes over 20 million so-called “freeters." The young precariat class in Europe became a serious issue in the early part of the 21st century. 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 a subsequent book Precariat: The New Dangerous Class and proposes a 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. The Precariat class was envisaged as “the most deprived British class of all with low levels of economic, cultural and social capital” and the opposite of “the Technical Middle Class” in Great Britain in that instead of having money 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.

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