Guy Standing supplied contemporary sociology with a word for a condition millions recognised before it had a name. The precariat is his term for a growing global grouping whose defining experience is not poverty as such but insecurity: work without contracts or with contracts that end, income that cannot be relied on, no occupational identity to grow into, and entitlements granted as discretion rather than claimed as rights. He calls it a class in the making — real enough to be described, not yet organised enough to act as one.

The argument turns on the collapse of a specific settlement. In the mid twentieth century, industrial societies built a bargain in which stable employment, collective bargaining and social insurance made labour reasonably secure. Standing's case is that the globalised, flexible, financialised capitalism of the past four decades dismantled that bargain, transferring risk from capital and the state onto the individual worker.

Life and intellectual formation

Standing trained as a labour economist in Britain and spent much of his career at the International Labour Organization, where he directed work on socio-economic security and conducted comparative labour market research across Europe, Africa, Asia and the post-communist economies. His categories were built from labour statistics and field surveys rather than from social theory, and Global Labour Flexibility (1999) analysed flexibilisation as a policy programme long before precarity became fashionable. He later became a professorial research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He is also a campaigner, having co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986. The Precariat (2011) describes the condition; A Precariat Charter (2014) proposes what should be done about it.

The seven forms of labour security and their erosion

Standing's most useful analytical device predates the precariat concept. What the post-war industrial citizen possessed was not one security but seven, and each has been separately dismantled.

  • Labour market security — adequate opportunities to earn, underwritten by a political commitment to full employment.
  • Employment security — protection against arbitrary dismissal, through regulation of hiring and firing.
  • Job security — the ability to hold and advance in a defined niche, with barriers to arbitrary reassignment and dilution of skill.
  • Work security — protection against accident and illness at work, through safety rules, limits on hours and compensation for injury.
  • Skill reproduction security — access to training, and the opportunity to use the skills acquired.
  • Income security — an assured, stable income, protected by minimum wages, indexation and social security.
  • Representation security — a collective voice through independent unions and the right to strike.

The precariat has little or none of these, and the losses are cumulative: without representation security the rest cannot be defended. Standing adds a burden he calls work-for-labour — unpaid time spent searching for jobs, retraining, commuting and queuing, which grows as employment fragments and which no statistic counts as work.

The precariat as a class in the making

Standing defines the precariat along three dimensions and insists all three are required.

Its relations of production are distinctive: unstable, casual, temporary, outsourced, agency-mediated or piece-rate labour, movement between jobs without a ladder, and above all the absence of an occupational narrative — no craft, profession or trade in which a person can locate a past and a future, and hence no basis for a work-based identity.

Its relations of distribution are distinctive: reliance on money wages alone. Where the salaried worker of the last century drew on several components of social income — wages, enterprise benefits, family support, state benefits, returns from assets — the precariat depends on the wage, which is why a short interruption becomes a crisis and indebtedness is chronic rather than exceptional.

Its relations to the state are distinctive: the loss of rights. Entitlements once held as unconditional claims of citizenship have become conditional, means-tested, behaviour-policed benefits, so the recipient is supplicant rather than claimant. Standing calls members of the precariat denizens rather than citizens — people with a restricted bundle of civil, cultural, social, economic and political rights.

Anger, anomie, anxiety, alienation

The subjective consequences form what Standing calls the four A's: anger at blocked lives and visible injustice; anomie as passive resignation among those who have stopped expecting improvement; anxiety as chronic uncertainty about whether next month's income will arrive; alienation from work that carries no meaning and is done under compulsion. The result is a life without control over time, in which the precariatised mind cannot plan.

This is why he calls the precariat dangerous: lacking organisation and a shared narrative, its anger is available to whoever will name an enemy. Its atavist faction, fallen from old working-class communities, is readily mobilised by populist and far-right movements against migrants and minorities; its progressive faction, the educated young promised a future by their qualifications and denied it, is the one Standing hopes will lead a politics of paradise rather than of blame.

Not the proletariat, not the salariat

Standing places the precariat within a global class structure of an elite, a salariat in stable salaried employment with pensions and benefits, technically skilled proficians who trade security for high earnings, a shrinking core manual proletariat, the precariat, the unemployed and a detached lumpen stratum. The industrial proletariat had stable employment, an occupational identity, a union, a labour contract and social insurance built for it, and its politics concerned wages, hours and control within a recognised relationship. The precariat has none of these and cannot use the same instruments: labour law protecting employees does not reach those defined as self-employed partners of a platform, and workplace unions cannot easily organise those who pass through many. From the salariat it is separated by security, benefits and the possession of a career. Hence his insistence that it needs its own agenda — occupational citizenship, restoration of rights and basic security.

Basic income

His remedy is a universal basic income: a modest, regular, unconditional payment to every individual, without means test or work requirement, financed in his preferred version from levies on the returns to common resources and rentier wealth. The arguments are three — social justice, since rentier wealth derives from commons belonging to everyone; republican freedom, since only an unconditional floor gives a person power to refuse degrading work; and basic security as a public good. He attacks targeted, conditional schemes for creating poverty and precarity traps and for excluding the people they are meant to reach.

India is central to the case. With colleagues from the Self Employed Women's Association, Standing helped design and evaluate basic income pilots in villages of Madhya Pradesh in the early 2010s, reported in Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India. The studies found improvements in nutrition, schooling and health, increases in own-account work rather than the predicted idleness, and reduced debt to moneylenders. The debate entered Indian policy when the Economic Survey of 2016–17 examined a quasi-universal basic income.

The Indian informal and gig workforce

Applied to India the concept both illuminates and strains. It illuminates because the overwhelming majority of Indian workers — commonly estimated at around nine in ten — work informally, without written contracts, social security or representation, precisely Standing's list of missing securities. Contract and casual labour has grown inside the organised sector; construction, garments, brick kilns and domestic work run on intermediated and seasonal labour; and the platform economy has produced a new stratum of drivers and delivery riders, projected by NITI Aayog to exceed twenty million by the end of the decade, classified as partners rather than employees and paid by algorithmically managed piece rates. The Code on Social Security of 2020 recognises gig and platform workers, an implicit admission that existing labour law does not reach them. It strains because India never had the settlement whose loss defines the precariat: the secure, unionised, benefit-covered worker was always a small minority.

Criticisms

That is the core of Jan Breman's attack, the most serious the concept has received. Breman argues that the precariat is a bogus concept: informality and insecurity have always been the condition of the great majority of the world's workers, so a thesis built on the erosion of a mid-century Western bargain is Eurocentric in its baseline. He objects further to separating the precariat from the working class, since the division fragments labour politics where solidarity is needed, and warns that the language of a new dangerous class revives a nineteenth-century bourgeois idiom of fear about the poor. Ronaldo Munck presses the same objection from the global South.

Marxist critics raise a definitional problem: a class must be identified by its relation to the means of production, whereas the precariat is a heterogeneous category of insecure sellers of labour power, and therefore a stratum within the working class rather than a class beside it — ground, some argue, that Marx's reserve army of labour already covered. Empirically, sceptics note that its boundaries are porous, that its size varies enormously with the definition chosen, and that the contrast with a golden age of secure employment overstates how secure that age was, especially for women and migrants. Politically, critics doubt whether so fragmented a grouping can develop collective agency, and whether basic income would substitute for labour rights and public services rather than supplement them.

Legacy

The vocabulary has travelled far beyond academia into labour law, journalism, union strategy and policy debate. Precarity is now a standard category in the sociology of work, and the seven securities give a usable checklist for assessing any labour arrangement.

For the UPSC answer

Standing is the most current authority available for questions on labour, informality and new inequality, and pairing him with Breman produces a genuinely evaluative answer. Define the precariat by insecurity rather than poverty, and give all three dimensions — insecure relations of production without an occupational narrative, dependence on money wages alone, and the loss of rights that reduces citizens to denizens — because most candidates offer only the first. Use two or three of the seven securities to show precision, and distinguish the precariat from proletariat and salariat. Anchor it in India with contract labour, garment and construction work, platform riders and the Code on Social Security. Close with the decisive criticism: in India informality is the historical norm rather than a recent loss, so Breman is right that the concept needs adapting, while Standing is right that algorithmic, contractless work has produced something new inside an old informality.

References & further reading

  1. Standing, G. (1999). Global Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
  2. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  3. Standing, G. (2014). A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  4. Davala, S., Jhabvala, R., Kapoor Mehta, S. and Standing, G. (2015). Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  5. Breman, J. (2013). A Bogus Concept? New Left Review, 84.
  6. Munck, R. (2013). The Precariat: A View from the South. Third World Quarterly, 34(5).