“Neo-liberal policies and institutional changes have produced a huge and growing number of people with sufficiently common experiences to be called an emerging class. In this book Guy Standing introduces what he calls the Precariat – a growing number of people across the world living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities or careers, stable social protection or protective regulations relevant to them. They include migrants, but also locals.

Standing argues that this class of people could produce new instabilities in society. They are increasingly frustrated and dangerous because they have no voice, and hence they are vulnerable to the siren calls of extreme political parties. He outlines a new kind of good society, with more people actively involved in civil society and the precariat re-engaged. He goes on to consider one way to a new better society — an unconditional basic income for everyone, contributed by the state, which could be topped up through earned incomes.

This is a topical, and a radical book, which will appeal to a broad market concerned by the increasing problems of labour insecurity and civic disengagement.”

Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2011

ISBN 1849663513, 9781849663519

Creative Commons BY-NC Licence

ix+198 pages

Essay by the author (The Guardian, June 2011)

Excerpts from a seminar with the author (video, United Nations, September 2011)

Interview with the author (James Foley, International Socialist, November 2011)

Essay by the author (OpenDemocracy.net, January 2012)

Reviews: Keith Randle (Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2011), Gaverne Bennett (Socialist Review, 2011), Arne L Kalleberg & Hazel Conley & David A Spencer (Work, Employment and Society, 2012; Response), Xavier St-Denis (Canadian Rev of Sociology, 2012), Geoff Bailey (International Socialist Review, 2012), Jan Breman (New Left Review, 2013; Response), Catherine Lawlor (Global Discourse, 2013), Chris Deeming (J Social Policy, 2013), Andreas Bieler (Capital & Class, 2013), Kieran Allen (Irish Marxist Review, 2014), Monica Threlfall (E-International Relations, 2015), Dylan Taylor (POA Review, n.d.), Bengt Furåker (Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsli, 2014, SW), Edgar Augusto Valero Julio (Rev Colombiana de Sociologia, 2015, ES), Lech Mikulski (Państwo i Społeczeństwo, 2015, PL), Jean-Pierre Durand (Nouvelle Revue du Travail, 2017, FR), Anne Rodier (Le Monde, 2017, FR).

Publisher (EN)

WorldCat (EN)

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (English, 2011, updated on 2018-12-29; EPUB)

O Precariado: A nova classe perigosa (BR-Portuguese, trans. Cristina Antunes, rev. Rogério Bettoni, 2013)

Prekariat: nowa niebezpieczna klasa (Polish, trans. Paweł Kaczmarski and Mateusz Karolak, c2014, Introduction & Chapters 1-3, HTML, PDFs)

See also Standing’s A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014, EPUB, added on 2018-12-29).