The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, by Guy Standing; A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens, by Guy Standing

Abstract

Guy Standing's companion volumes, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class and A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens, explore the precarious economic life of growing swaths of the population in the global north and its link to the altered forms of precariousness experienced by those already living precariously in the global south. In The Precariat, he defines as a member of the precariat anyone lacking labor-related security, explaining the causes of increasing precarity across the industrialized, now deindustrializing, world and the both disturbing and liberating potentials of this change. In A Precariat Charter, Standing briefly recapitulates the analysis of the precariat contained in the first book and expands at length on what he calls the politics of paradise, which addresses human needs for security and dignity. If the precariat can become a class-for-itself, it could abolish its own existence by inventing the conditions for greater economic security for all.

Key Words:

• Basic Income
• Economic Development
• Globalization
• Labor Market
• Precariat

Notes

1 See “The Precariat,” Buzzword, 9 May 2011, http://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/precariat.html.