Guy Standing and the Precariat: The New Dangerous Class

Guy Standing is a British labour economist who spent three decades inside the International Labour Organization, and he is best known for giving a name to a group of people who had, until then, mostly been described as an accident. The name is the precariat, and the book that carried it into general use is The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, published in 2011. Standing did not invent the underlying word — variants of it had been circulating in Italian and French labour activism for years — but he was the one who built an argument around it, and the argument is more interesting, and more uncomfortable, than the shorthand suggests.

The shorthand is that the precariat means people with insecure jobs. That is not wrong, but it is thin enough to be useless. Standing’s claim is structural: that a distinct social class has formed in the last forty years, defined not by how much money its members make but by the shape of their relationship to work, and that this class does not behave like the industrial working class we built our politics and our labour law around. If he is right, a great deal of what we still say about jobs is being said about a world that has quietly moved on.

Who Standing is, and why the ILO matters

Standing was born in 1948 and worked at the ILO from 1975 until 2006, including as director of its Socio-Economic Security Programme and, earlier, of its Labour Market Policies Branch. He is now a professorial research associate at SOAS University of London. In 1986 he co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network, which campaigns for unconditional basic income as a right, and he remains one of its most visible figures.

The ILO background is not a footnote. The ILO exists to define and defend the standard employment relationship — the contract, the hours, the notice period, the pension, the protections that a job was supposed to carry. Standing spent his career measuring how well that model was holding, in country after country, and watched the answer deteriorate. His conclusion is essentially an insider’s: the twentieth-century labour settlement is not merely fraying at the edges, it has stopped being the norm, and the institutions built to serve it — trade unions, labour ministries, social insurance keyed to a permanent employer — are increasingly aiming at a target that has moved.

What the precariat actually is

Standing defines the precariat by the absence of the securities that a proper job used to bundle together. He counts seven forms of labour-related security — including the security of a stable job, of income you can predict, of a skill you can keep developing, of representation by someone who bargains on your behalf — and the precariat is the group living without most of them, permanently rather than as a phase. Pulled apart, the definition has three components worth separating.

• Distinctive relations of production. Work that is short-term, on-call, project-based, subcontracted, or freelance; often several income streams at once; frequently a lot of unpaid work-for-labour — the searching, the applying, the retraining, the waiting for a shift, the maintenance of a rating or a profile — that nobody pays for and no one counts.
• Distinctive relations of distribution. Reliance almost entirely on the money wage, with none of the non-wage benefits — paid leave, pension, medical cover, redundancy pay, a state benefit tied to your employment record — that used to make a modest wage into a survivable life.
• Distinctive relations to the state. A steady loss of rights: civil, cultural, social, economic and political entitlements shrinking until people become, in Standing’s term, denizens rather than full citizens — present in a society, contributing to it, but holding a lesser bundle of claims on it.

The piece people most often miss is the one about identity. Standing argues the precariat has no occupational narrative — no craft, no ladder, no story that connects what you did at twenty-two to what you will be doing at forty. A steelworker or a schoolteacher had a trade that structured a life. A person who does delivery for eight months, warehouse picking for five, a content gig for three and a stint of unpaid upskilling in between has income, sometimes decent income, but no arc. That absence is not a soft, psychological complaint. It changes how you plan, whether you can borrow, whether you can marry or have children on schedule, whether you can organise with the people beside you — who will not be beside you next quarter.

The precariat is not the working class on a bad month. It is a different relationship to work altogether: no ladder, no trade, no story that connects what you do at twenty-two to what you will be doing at forty.

Why he insists it is a class, not a poorer version of the old one

This is where Standing draws the sharpest line, and where he takes the most fire. His argument is that the proletariat and the precariat want different things, so treating the second as a shabbier instance of the first produces politics that misfires.

The industrial working class fought for more of the standard job: longer tenure, better wages within it, stronger protection around it. Its institutions were built for that fight, and they largely won it. The precariat, on Standing’s account, cannot want the same thing, because the standard job is not on offer and, for many, is not even desirable. What it needs instead is security that is detached from the employer — income that does not evaporate between contracts, entitlements that travel with the person rather than the payroll, control over time rather than a guaranteed number of hours. That is a different demand, and it explains why a labour movement organised around workplaces struggles to represent people who have no fixed workplace.

He also insists the precariat is not simply the poor. It contains graduates with degrees and debts and no corresponding future, migrants doing essential work with almost no standing, and older workers pushed out of jobs that once defined them. Some of them earn reasonably in good months. Insecurity, not income, is the axis.

The “dangerous class” — read this carefully

The subtitle is the most misread thing Standing has written. He is not saying that precarious people are dangerous, a menace to be managed. He is saying something closer to the opposite: that a large group living with chronic insecurity, holding no stake in the existing arrangement and finding no institution that speaks for it, is a politically volatile condition, and that the danger belongs to the situation rather than to the people in it.

His analysis of the volatility is specific. He splits the precariat into three factions who are angry about different things. The atavists look backwards to a real or imagined past their families had and they lost, and are the most receptive to populist and nativist appeals. The nostalgics — migrants and minorities — are denied a viable present, mostly keep their heads down, and rebel when even survival is threatened. The progressives, typically the educated young, were promised a future in exchange for study and emerged with debt and a bits-and-pieces life instead; they are the ones most likely to want something genuinely new. These groups are not natural allies. The first faction can be turned against the second with very little effort, and repeatedly has been. That internal division, plus the absence of any body that credibly represents the whole, is what makes the moment combustible — and mobilisable in almost any direction.

The gig economy and the India question

Standing’s framework was written before platform work became the default entry-level job in much of the world, and it fits that world almost too neatly. App-mediated labour delivers every element of the definition at once: piece rates, no benefits, algorithmic supervision in place of a manager, an account that can be deactivated without a hearing, and a legal classification as an independent contractor that removes even the vocabulary of employment. It is, in effect, the precariat with a software layer — which is why the mechanics of gig economy exploitation read like a field test of a thesis written a decade earlier. And the direction of travel is not accidental. It is one of the clearest examples of how technology gets captured: a coordination technology that could have made flexible work fairer was instead built to move risk from the company to the person, and the flexibility ended up flowing almost entirely one way.

The danger is not in the people. It is in leaving tens of millions with no security, no representation and no stake, and then being surprised at what they are willing to vote for.

India complicates the story in a way worth stating plainly, because it is also the strongest criticism of the concept. Standing’s account describes a fall from a norm — the secure post-war job — that most Indian workers never had. Around nine in ten Indians already work informally: no contract, no provident fund, no notice period. Jan Breman, a sociologist who spent decades studying labour in Gujarat, made exactly this objection, calling the precariat a bogus concept partly because it universalises a European experience and reads as news something that has been the ordinary condition of the global South for a century. Erik Olin Wright, from a different direction, questioned whether the group meets the standard criteria for a class at all — shared position in production, shared material interests, capacity for collective action. Standing has replied to both, but the disagreement is real and unsettled, and anyone using the word should know that sociologists do not agree it names a class.

My own reading is that the objection sharpens the idea rather than sinking it. What is new in India is not informality but its spread upward — into engineering graduates, into content and design work, into the salaried urban middle class that assumed the ladder existed for them. When a Bengaluru graduate with a good degree strings together contracts and platform shifts, the old distinction between the protected formal worker and the informal mass has stopped doing its job. And the quiet withdrawal of effort that gets labelled quiet quitting looks rather different once you notice it is often a rational response to an employment relationship that stopped offering anything in return for loyalty.

Where basic income comes in

Standing’s policy answer follows from his diagnosis. If insecurity is the defining feature, and if it cannot be fixed by attaching benefits to an employer that no longer exists in any stable form, then security has to be attached to the person. Hence unconditional basic income — paid individually, without means tests or work requirements, as a right rather than a favour. He grounds it less in charity than in a claim about the commons: that natural and social wealth is shared inheritance, and that a share of the returns is owed rather than granted. He also argues the practical case, that a floor under income buys people the ability to refuse the worst work and to negotiate, which is precisely what the precariat lacks.

It is a contested proposal, and the machine-driven version of the debate — whether automation makes universal basic income a necessity rather than a choice — is a distinct argument from Standing’s, which rests on rights and insecurity rather than on robots. Whether or not you find the remedy convincing, the diagnosis has earned its place. Standing looked at a mass of separate complaints — unstable hours, vanishing benefits, unpayable degrees, disposable contracts, angry politics — and argued they were one phenomenon with one shape. That is what the good concepts do. They let you see a pattern you were previously experiencing one grievance at a time.