“It is a general principle of human nature that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it” writes Alexander Hamilton in March 1788 (Federalist N° 71). The Latin root of the term “precariousness” refers to the social condition of being dependent upon the favor of others from which one obtains something through entreaty rather than contract. It also refers to a condition of instability, as when an equilibrium is said to be precarious. Somewhat surprisingly, the term has never been adopted into the conceptual vocabulary of the social sciences. That has only changed in the 1990s when a group of French sociologists and labor lawyers (P. Bourdieu, L. Wacquant, R. Castel) introduced the term into academic discourses. From there it entered into the terminology of sociological and economic labor market studies (and, to a lesser extent, political sociology) in many countries and languages from Japan to Latin America. The term has been widely used in political and academic texts in continental Europe (Brinkmann et al., 2006; Dörre and Castel eds. 2009; Castel 1995) and was more recently picked up in English language discourses. Two substantives have been coined from the original adjective: precarité as the condition of being precarious and the precariat as the category of people who find themselves in that condition. Standing’s new book-long essay seems to be the first one in whose title the latter noun appears. The allusion to proletariat is fully intended, as the subtitle “the new dangerous class” suggests.
There is no shortage of concepts in sociology which seem to target the same or very similar phenomena of social life as the “precariat”, or the P-class as I shall call it here. The mob, the underclass, the déclassé, the lower class, the sub-proletariat, the Lumpenproletariat, the lower third of the “two thirds society” (a term coined by German social democrats in the 1980s) the marginalized and excluded, the (working) poor, the sans papiers or clandestino migrants are obvious conceptual competitors (or otherwise constituent components) of the P-class, as are The Truly Disadvantaged (Wilson 1987); also, precarité comes very close to (coerced) flexibility in time (under the regime of a “24/7 time culture”) and mobility in space (“the erosion of the fixed workplace”). Another facet is the quality of the precariat of being a class of people who are considered (by others and themselves) virtually superfluous and largely worthless; if they did not exist, nobody would miss them, at least in economic terms.
In labor market studies and economic sociology, the precariat is an antonym to the conditions of work and life that prevailed and flourished in the trente glorieuses of Western (in particular “Rhenish”) capitalism, i.e. roughly during the third quarter of the twentieth century with its fairly continuous post-war boom, its “Fordist” pattern of industrial organization, its status-protecting collectivist welfare states and a society in which the vast majority of employees were covered by a standard employment relation (ser). Precarité prevails when all these (comparatively) good things have definitely become a matter of the past for significant numbers of people due to the combined impact of economic globalization, European integration, IT-enhanced productivity and patterns of communication, post-industrialization, the demographic imbalances of aging societies, high and persisting levels of unemployment, the rise to hegemonic force of “neo-liberalism” and the associated rise of inequalities of wealth, income, and security, the disappearance of state socialism as a competing model of ruling an industrial society, and the qualitative and quantitative decline of social democracy as it manifested itself in the shrinking of both its ambitions and constituencies.
The sociological usefulness of the new concept of the “dangerous” P-class hinges on the answer to three questions. First, what are its distinctive features? Second, what are the context conditions and types of strategic action that give rise to this class and make it grow? Third, how do members of this alleged class typically cope with and respond to their condition in terms of economic and political action - and are there any hopes or favorable prospects for social change to be associated with those responses? For in line with the Marxian use of the concept of class, the author claims that the new class is more than an artifact of descriptive statistics; it is at the same time a source of transformative collective action. These are the questions which Standing’s volume explores on the basis of a rich selection of journalistic reporting and academic sources and to which it tries to provide fresh answers.
Defining features
Standing insists that the P-class is a “class in the making” although he also claims that it already shows “class characteristics”. One of these characteristics is “status discord” (for a long time known in sociology as “status inconsistency”, i.e. a negative deviation or discrepancy between what you actually do in earning your means of subsistence and what you can do due to your talents and the skills you have acquired); this discrepancy is said to lead to “status frustration”. But that seems to suggest that precarians have actually attained medium-to-high levels of education, which seems hard to defend. Another key feature is the multi-faceted condition of “labour insecurity” that pertains to all aspects of the working situation: your employer, the wage or income from self-employment, time and conditions of work, place of work, content of work – all of which tend to be subject to change according to contingencies that are beyond the control of members of the P-class. They thus have no status and recognized place in society. They are not necessarily income-poor at every stage of their lives, but they are vulnerable and thus “security-poor”. One of the attractions of the concept of precarité is that it does not focus, as does pauvreté for example, on a characteristic that is present and measurable at any given moment; instead, the focus is on dynamic patterns and longitudinal profiles.
Given all that uncertainty, insecurity, and variability, it is unsurprising that the members of that class do “not feel part of a solidaristic labour community”. The skills they need are what Standing calls “tertiary skills” (or “extrafunctional” ones according to an older terminology): “personality refinement, employability, networking, information gathering”, restless “connectivity”, “non-stop interactivity”, a virtuosity in multi-tasking and other routines of what the German literature on the subject calls Selbstunternehmertum (“self-entrepreneurship”) – people constantly busy with the desperate reflexive activity of streamlining, advertising and marketing their own labor power. For the precarians, there is no “shadow of the future” – a felicitous term that refers to everything that can be taken for granted, is durable and reliable, which in the case of precarians is very little, as their relation to the world of work is highly opportunistic and “infinitely adaptable”: they have to take what comes and must remain in standby mode. They have no careers; their jobs tend to be temporary, which makes for a nomadic pattern of drifting in space. We might speak of the de-institutionalization of their life course. What is lacking is a sense of “fate control” – the sense of being able to guide one’s own destiny within a framework of conditions that can be relied upon, at least for the time being.
All of which engenders emotions of passivity, despair, anxiety, hopelessness, fatalism, resignation, lack of self-esteem, occupational identity and pride; other emotional ingredients can include aggressiveness and unfocused hatred. They refer to themselves by terms such as indignados in Madrid or “generation 700” in Athens (meaning people who feel that there is next to no chance they will ever make more than 700 euros per month). Their trust relationship with employers, the state, and fellow workers is minimal. The author claims that such are the conditions under which “at least a quarter of the adult population” lives and works. Due to its inhomogeneous composition and the fluidity of any given situation, this “class” is definitely not a “class-for-itself”, one that is capable of recognizing itself as a class, understanding its shared attributes and interests, and cooperating in collective action.
This lack of homogeneity is also reflected in the demographic composition of the P-class on which Standing provides some telling statistics. The majority of its members are women, youth, and migrants (on whom the book offers extensive information), with the near- or post-retirement elderly becoming a growing fourth component under the impact of pension cuts and increasing rates of old age poverty. Other components which Standing briefly discusses are ethnic, criminal, and disabled minorities. The author notes two impacts this social profile of precariousness has upon the family. First, “precariousness discourages marriages and leads to later childbearing” or childlessness, thus adding further demographic distortions. Second, parental families of the young share the burden of subsistence costs for their grown-up though not yet reliably self-supporting off-spring, leading to the pattern of what has been called the “accordion family” (Katherine Newman 2012) and extended periods of adolescence. To be sure, there is also a minority of people within the P-class, the “grinners”, who are sufficiently resourceful (in terms of skills, networks, funds) to sustain and even enjoy the bohemian existence of creative individuals who, being their own masters, have little to complain about in terms of insecurity as they free-lance from project to project.
Yet given the growing temporal compression of tertiary education, its commodification also on the European Continent, and the deficiencies that are due to insufficient public investment at all levels of the educational system, graduates are typically ill-prepared to make the transition from school to “standard” jobs without passing through an often extended period (if not permanent condition) of unpaid, low paid, short-term types of jobs.Footnote 1 While there are concerns about the looming shortage of highly skilled human capital (supposedly a combined result of declining fertility and the inadequate performance of educational institutions), there are at the same time strong indications of a labor supply that is considerably inflated relative to what the demand side of high-tech and low-growth economies is capable of absorbing. This discrepancy seems to result in precarious working conditions and career patterns that underutilize existing skills, frustrate talents and ambitions, and often positively amount to skill destruction.Footnote 2
The Coming into being of the P-class
There are two theories as to what drives the growth of the P-class, an economic and managerial one and one that focuses on lthe abor market and other policies of the state. The author is not quite clear as to how they differ and interact, although my impression is that he favors the former theory. In a nutshell, the rise of precarious forms of employment can be caused by employers’ and managerial strategies. Employers, especially those who have adopted a form of production that is called “flexible specialization”, have to face the problem that their need for labor is unstable, both in terms of quantity and quality. Also, there are typically ups and downs in time (across the day, the week, the seasons of the year) due to the shifting demands of customers. This form of production is incompatible with labor contracts of a "Fordist" type, based upon “rigidities” such as occupational skills and credentials, permanent and full time employment of workers with seniority and job protection rights, a continuous flow of production, multi-employer collective bargaining, and coverage by collectively negotiated wages and conditions.
This incompatibility applies all the more if what is to be produced and sold is not physical goods, but immaterial services, which by their nature (think of the services of selling an electronic gadget, letting a customer open a bank account, administering a haircut etc.) cannot be produced “on stock” or shipped to distant destinations. The problem that employers and bosses must deal with under this type of economic activity is that of minimizing the risk of labor underutilization. In other words, they need to avoid having to pay for labor in periods when there is “nothing to do” and employees are idle – unemployment on the job, as it were. The interest of the employer lies in workers who need not be loyal and trusting to the company and career-oriented, but people who can be hired and fired, can be used for this and that task, are willing to work short and long shifts – “labor from the tap”, as it has been called and as can be illustrated by the spread of part-time employment. In order to recruit a sufficient supply of workers on whom the risk of underutilization of their labor power can be dumped, work processes must be simplified so as to minimize training times and the asset specificity of skills. The dream of employers is flexible all-hours and all-purpose workers on jobs with low skill requirements and low bargaining power (due to their high replaceability).
The other theory tries to answer the question: how has this dream become so widely true? Again very briefly, here is what happened in the EU and much of the oecd world: the twin challenges advanced capitalist political economies must come to terms with were seen by policy makers across the political spectrum as consisting in the demographic change (low birth rates, increasing life expectancies) that jeopardizes the fiscal balance of pension systems and, particularly in Continental Europe, results in high unemployment and low labor market participation rates. The cure for both of these ills was generally seen in the introduction of labor market reforms which established a “low wage sector”, thus making the employment of more people more easily “affordable” for employers. For instance, the EU’s Lisbon Agenda (2000) proclaimed the strategic (yet in reality clearly missed) objective of increasing the share of the gainfully active in the adult population (aged 20-64) to 70 percent through the creation of seven million new jobs by 2010. Similarly, the Red-Green coalition government in Germany launched a programme in 2003 (“Agenda 2010”) to cut the fiscal costs of social assistance, unemployment insurance, and the public pension system by workfare programs designed to push more people (the young, the old, the unemployed, the unskilled, and in particular women) into the labor market and extend the duration of their working lives. Subsidized (“topped-up”) low wages and drastic cuts in unemployment benefits were introduced to incentivize both workers (largely through negative sanctions) and employers (largely through positive ones, namely lowered wages as well as non-wage costs of labor) to enter into labor contracts with each other.
The cognitive and moral framework of these reforms focuses exclusively on the supply side of the labor market: if you are jobless, something must be wrong with you, your skills or your work attitudes; “we”, the paternalistic authorities, are prepared to help you to improve, but that help is not for nothing but must be paid for in the currency of your own demonstrable efforts, hopeless though they are likely to remain in many cases. The key phrase in these reform discourses is that of individual “responsibility”: if you fail, you are responsible, and if you fail to recognize that fact and act accordingly, you will be “responsibilized” by administrative means! “Worklessness” increasingly being framed as a bad habit, and government must persuade the unemployed to blame themselves. While the creation of the low wage sector was first advertised and justified as a stepping stone that would allow long-term unemployed workers to gain access to the first labor market, thereby fostering “social cohesion”, it soon turned out in practice rather to be a stepping stone for employers to economize on wage costs, as it offered them the opportunity to terminate contracts with “regular” employees and replace them with subsidized labor under deregulated contracts. Instead of serving as a means to upgrade the status of the unemployed, the low wage sector functions largely as an institutional device to downgrade that of (some of) the employed.
In (too) briefly reviewing these policy shifts and major path departures of European welfare states, Standing joins those who observe the trend of a major “re-commodification” of labor that is jointly driven by the interests of employers and of fiscally strained states, both of which are trying to cope with the “globalized” economy in which investors, as well as consumers, make increasing use of their ample options of outsourcing, thus further undercutting the prospects of domestic growth and employment.
What does the P-class do?
Capitalist democracies are premised upon a simple background intuition regarding the interaction between social integration and system integration. That is to say, if the economy is working well and growing, labor markets are close to full employment, and the distribution of wealth and income governed by some win-win-logic, this will lead to a solidly institutionalized, i.e. non-disruptive type of social and political conflict (if certainly not to “harmony”) that can be processed in an orderly way and according to universally accepted rules and principles of social and political institutions. This foundational equation of democratic capitalism is compellingly demonstrated at the present time, if only in its negative version: if system integration fails and the economic growth machinery does not run smoothly, social integration follows suit. Who reneges on the social contract – or is otherwise unable to keep it – summons the state of nature. Or, to put it less grandiosely: if you find yourself uncoupled from what is seen as the “normal” functioning of society, you also tend to uncouple yourself from some of its basic normative premises.
Standing’s lively story about what the P-class is doing as a collective agent and political force is full of suggestive details and telling examples from many countries; yet it does not aim at being a systematic sociological account, as it is written for a non-professional readership, including those who make up its subject matter. On the one hand, he claims that “those in the precariat […] are detached from political life”. In fact, there are many data that support that generalization by demonstrating a rapidly growing pattern of “participatory inequality” unfolding in capitalist democracies. As a rule of thumb, those who do not have a stable job do not have a stable political point of view either. They do not read and talk about politics, as they feel that doing so is simply not worth their time. At the same time, the subtitle of the book refers to them as a “new dangerous class”. But dangerous to what and to whom? To the extent that members of the P-class can at all be mobilized into some form of collective action, I see three alternative types of politics that they may be pursuing.
One is what the author terms the “politics of inferno”: periodic outbursts of anger and urban mass aggressiveness, often triggered by the killing, accidental or (allegedly) otherwise, of “one of us” by the police. European examples are the urban riots in France 2005, Athens 2008, and Britain 2011. They invariably involve the large scale and random destruction of property (cars, buildings), typically through setting items ablaze. Another feature of these typically short-lived anomic outbreaks of no more than two weeks’ duration is the large scale looting of consumer goods – a sign, as Zygmunt Bauman observed in a recent interview, that the rioters are in fact well-integrated members of a consumer society seeking happiness through the acquisition of items such as plasma screens and cell phones. The only difference is that the rioters acquire those items by other means than by purchasing them, something they cannot afford to do. Hence Bauman’s designation of them as “riots of disqualified consumers”. A further characteristic of those riots is the prevailing speechless expressiveness of action: there is neither a leadership that talks to the mobilized masses nor do they have a clear-cut enemy whom they could address with complaints, political accusations, or demands. As they are only tangentially integrated into “normal” forms of economic activities, careers, and life courses, they reciprocate, as it were, by offering occasional proof that their allegiance to basic norms of civilized behavior is also no more than a tangential one.
This is quite different when the collective action of precarians leads to protest and demands for reform, as was the case, in 2011, with the Spanish 15-M movement and the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities that were originally triggered by complaints about housing issues. In these cases, some of which were explicitly stylized as replicas of the rebellion in Egypt and other mena countries that took place in the spring of that year, the prevailing tactics was the symbolic occupation of public spaces and the attempt to reclaim them as the commons. They also differed from urban rioting in that they were strictly non-violent and made extensive use of verbal communication, both in discourses among participants and in addressing complaints and demands to the outside world. Standing extrapolates such demands in a chapter entitled “The Politics of Paradise” where he arrives at a modified universal basic income proposal as a remedy to income insecurity.
However, he is realistic enough to see that the condition of precarian insecurity can also lead to very different outcomes from reformist protest. “Insecure people” he notes, “make angry people, and angry people are volatile, prone to support a politics of hatred and bitterness”. As the author demonstrates by referring to the experience of a number of European countries, precarians can be mobilized to support rightist populist political movements and parties who promise them protection – protection, that is, from migrants, minorities, and criminals. Such movements, parties, and individual leaders have been able to forge electoral and political alliances between those who are in a precarious position already (e.g., petty shop owners) and middle class elements who are plagued by anxieties that they or their children may themselves fall into the condition of precariousness.
Standing concludes his wide-ranging exploration of many aspects of the precariat and its political dynamics with some engaged proposals about what an imaginary post-laborist, post-social democratic political left can and should do in response to the plight of the precariat. For the time being, it remains an open question both whether the precariat is (in the process of becoming) a “class” and, if so, whether it has the capacity of becoming dangerous, and to whom.
