Young precariat and a new work order? A case for historical sociology

ABSTRACT

This article assesses Guy Standing's (2011) account of ‘the precariat’ as a ‘new class' to the many exercises undertaken in youth studies since the 1980s to make sense of the changing patterns of youth employment. While Standing's focus on the experience of fragmented and casualized work in many economies which now implicates young people has value, there are significant problems with his account that highlights the some difficulties in thinking in somewhat abstracted ways about ‘structural’ change processes that do not sufficiently consider the question of time. The case of Australia's of labour market regulation since the 1890s is used to test the validity of Standing's focus on the novelty of neoliberalism after the early 1980 to explain the emergence of precarious employment. Standing's claim that insecurity is central to the ‘new precariat’ because they lack the different kinds of security enjoyed by the ‘working-class’ after 1945, highlights the need for an interpretative framework attentive to the longer term role of state policy and the interplay of historical and local processes. The case is then made for developing a historical sociology that engages with what is now happening in respect to young people and their employment security.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy
• employment
• labour market
• historical sociology
• structure agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 It was not until 1967 that a National Wage Case amend that principle by considering the employer's capacity to pay and the worker's productivity when setting the new ‘basic wage’.

2 Idiographic: an approach to knowledge that focusses on the meaning of contingent, cultural, subjective said to be typical for the humanities.

3 Idiographic: an approach typically associated with the natural science, that attempts to make generalisations and develop laws to in a bid to explain categories or types of ‘objective’ phenomena.