Precariat

The precariat is a term for people whose working lives are marked by insecurity: short-term or casual jobs, unpredictable hours, low or volatile income, and little access to the pensions, sick pay and job protections attached to standard employment. The word combines "precarious" and "proletariat". It was popularized by the British economist Guy Standing in his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, which argued that this group was forming a new social class.

The idea sits within wider debates on labor market flexibility, the gig economy and economic inequality. It overlaps with, but is broader than, statistical categories such as temporary work, involuntary part-time work, the zero-hours contract and informal employment. It is a sociological and political concept rather than an official measure, and it is contested.

Think of two people doing similar work in a warehouse. One has a permanent contract, a fixed weekly schedule, paid holiday and a pension. The other is called in through an agency when the warehouse is busy, never knows next week's hours, and has no paid leave. On a good week they might earn the same; over a year their lives look very different.

The second worker is the kind of person the term "precariat" describes. The point is not only low pay but unpredictability. Planning a budget, signing a lease, taking out a loan or starting a family is harder when income can change sharply from one week to the next and when losing work means losing everything at once.

French sociologists used "précariat" and "précarité" in the 1980s to describe unstable employment, and the word appeared in Italian and Spanish activist movements in the early 2000s. Standing gave it a systematic economic framing. He argued that globalization, deregulation and the push for flexible labor markets since the 1980s had created a growing group lacking seven forms of security that the post-war industrial working class had gained:

• Labor market security. Adequate opportunities to earn, backed by policies for full employment.
• Employment security. Protection against arbitrary dismissal.
• Job security. The ability to keep a niche or occupation and build a career.
• Work security. Protection against accidents and illness at work.
• Skill reproduction security. Opportunities to gain and use skills, building human capital.
• Income security. A stable, adequate income, including social benefits.
• Representation security. A collective voice, such as through a trade union.

In Standing's account the precariat includes people who drift between short jobs, migrants, young graduates unable to find career jobs, and older workers pushed into casual work. He argued that these groups share insecurity and a lack of occupational identity, and that their frustration could feed political instability.

No official statistic counts the precariat directly. Researchers use proxies such as the share of workers on temporary contracts, involuntary part-time work, zero-hours or on-call contracts, platform work, and own-account work with low earnings. In 2013 the BBC's Great British Class Survey, analysed by sociologists led by Mike Savage, proposed seven classes for the UK and identified a "precariat" as the poorest, with low income and few savings, social contacts or cultural resources. In the developing world, where most workers are in the informal economy, the ILO's statistics on informal employment are the main gauge of insecure work.

The concept has drawn criticism from several directions:

• Is it a class? Many sociologists, including Marxist writers in the tradition of Marxism, argue that insecure workers are part of the working class, not a separate class, because they still sell their labor for wages.
• Is it new? Scholars of the Global South, such as Jan Breman and Ronaldo Munck, point out that insecure work has always been the norm for most of the world's workers; stable employment with benefits was a mid-twentieth-century exception in rich countries.
• How big is it? Some economists note that the share of temporary jobs in several countries has not risen much in recent decades, and that much flexible work is chosen by students, carers and others who value it.
• Free-market critics argue that flexible work lowers barriers to entry, reduces unemployment and gives people a foothold in the labor market, and that the term overstates hardship.

Standing himself is a leading advocate of a universal basic income, which he argues would restore income security regardless of work status. Other proposals include extending social insurance and welfare benefits to independent contractors and platform workers, rights to predictable hours, portable benefits, a higher minimum wage, and new forms of worker representation. The United Kingdom's Employment Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent in December 2025, includes a right for qualifying zero-hours and low-hours workers to be offered guaranteed hours, with the detailed rules still being consulted on in 2026. Debates about technology and skill-biased technological change also feed into the discussion, since automation may shift more workers into insecure roles.

• International Labour Organization: Non-standard forms of employment