Precarious work is employment in which the worker cannot count on continuity, earnings or protection. Its defining feature is the transfer of risk: fluctuations in demand, illness, accident, slack seasons and obsolescence of skill, which the standard employment relationship of the mid twentieth century absorbed through notice periods, paid leave, provident funds and insurance, are shifted onto the worker who has no reserves to meet them. Precarity is therefore not simply low pay; a reasonably paid job with no contract, no notice and no cover for a broken arm is precarious, while a modestly paid permanent post may not be.
The concept became analytically useful once it was disaggregated. Following the labour-security framework that Guy Standing developed at the International Labour Organization, precarity can be read along several dimensions: employment insecurity, the absence of protection against arbitrary dismissal; job insecurity, the absence of any defined occupational niche or ladder; income insecurity, volatile and unpredictable earnings without a floor; absence of social protection, no pension, insurance, maternity provision or compensation; absence of representation, no union or bargaining voice; and weak skill reproduction, no training and no recognised qualification, so that the worker's capacities do not accumulate over a working life. Measuring these separately allows precarity to be treated as a matter of degree rather than a label.
The forms precarity takes
Casualisation hires by the day or the task through labour markets that assemble at a street corner or a factory gate. Contractualisation places workers inside established enterprises on fixed-term or contractor-supplied terms, so that people performing identical work stand in different legal relations to the employer — the most consequential change in Indian organised industry over recent decades. Outsourcing and subcontracting disperse production down chains of small units and home-based workers, so that the principal firm captures the output without acquiring the obligations of an employer. Platform work completes the pattern by classifying the worker as an independent partner while retaining algorithmic control over allocation, pricing, ratings and deactivation — control without employment, and therefore direction without duty. Migration and circulation frequently accompany all four, since the precarious worker moves to where work briefly exists.
The precariat and Breman's objection
Standing's The Precariat (2011) argued that these workers constitute an emerging class in the making, distinguished from the industrial proletariat by the absence of an occupational identity and a stable narrative of life, prone to anger and anxiety, and politically volatile — a class he called dangerous because its resentments could be captured by the right. He proposed universal basic income and portable entitlements as its programme.
Jan Breman, drawing on a lifetime of fieldwork in Gujarat, offered the sharpest rejoinder. Precarity, he argued, is a condition of employment, not a class: it cuts across occupations, and the people in it share no common relation to the means of production, no shared consciousness and no organisational capacity that would make them a collective actor. Worse, he held, the thesis is written from a Northern vantage point in which security was the norm and precarity is the novelty. For the great majority of the world's workers the sequence runs the other way. Breman's Footloose Labour had already described a circulating, unattached, seasonally mobile workforce whose insecurity long predated globalisation and was never abolished by it. Others add that precarity's forms are highly gendered and caste-marked, so that a single class category conceals more than it reveals.
India: precarity as the norm, not the exception
India makes Breman's point unavoidable. The overwhelming majority of the workforce has always been informally employed — in agriculture, construction, petty trade, transport, domestic service and small manufacturing — without written contracts, statutory protection or organisation. Security in India was the privilege of a thin organised segment in public undertakings, banking, railways, large factories and government service, and even there it applied to permanent employees rather than to the contractors' workers alongside them. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, reporting in 2007, made the crucial conceptual distinction between the informal sector, defined by the character of the enterprise, and informal employment, defined by the character of the contract — and showed that informal employment exists in abundance inside formal enterprises.
The second Indian movement is therefore the erosion of security within the formal sector itself: the substitution of contract and fixed-term workers for permanent ones, outsourcing of ancillary functions, and the growth of apprenticeship and trainee categories. The consolidation of labour statutes into four codes — on wages, on industrial relations, on social security, and on occupational safety — carried both tendencies at once. It formally recognised gig and platform workers as a category for the first time and widened the ambit of social security registration, while also recognising fixed-term employment and raising the establishment-size threshold at which prior permission for retrenchment and closure is required. Whether these measures extend protection to the unprotected or dilute it for the protected is the live analytical question, not a settled one.
Policy responses
Three broad approaches contend. The first extends regulation — bringing platform and contract workers within the definition of employee, mandating contracts, and enforcing equal terms for equal work. The second builds portable, worker-linked social security independent of any single employer, through universal registration, contributory welfare boards on the model long used for construction and beedi workers, and state-funded insurance and pension floors; India's registration of unorganised workers and its dedicated statutes for street vendors and platform-based gig workers belong here. The third strengthens collective capacity: new unions and associations among domestic workers, home-based workers, waste pickers and app-based drivers, alongside public employment guarantees that provide a wage floor by giving workers an outside option. Standing's own proposal, a basic income, cuts across all three by decoupling subsistence from employment altogether.
For the UPSC answer
Define precarity by the shifting of risk to the worker and then disaggregate it — employment, income, protection, representation and skill security — so the answer has an analytical spine rather than a list of grievances. Name the four forms (casualisation, contractualisation, outsourcing, platform work) with Indian examples, and present the Standing–Breman exchange as the theoretical core: precariat as a class in the making against precarity as a condition that cuts across classes. The India-specific argument is decisive and should be stated plainly — precarity here is the historical norm, since informal employment predominates, and what is new is the erosion of security inside the formal sector. Finish with the policy triad of regulation, portable social security and collective organisation, noting the labour codes as an ambiguous instance of all of it.
References & further reading
- Rodgers, G. and Rodgers, J. (eds.) (1989). Precarious Jobs in Labour Market Regulation. International Institute for Labour Studies.
- Standing, G. (1999). Global Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice. Macmillan.
- Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury.
- Breman, J. (1996). Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy. Cambridge University Press.
- Breman, J. (2013). A Bogus Concept? New Left Review, 84.
- Kalleberg, A. L. (2009). Precarious Work, Insecure Workers. American Sociological Review, 74(1).