Varieties of the Precariat

The Precariat is far from a homogeneous group, but they share some characteristics. Extracts from Guy Standing's 'A Precariat Charter'

Varieties of Precariat

"...the precariat is divided to such an extent that one could describe it as a class at war with itself. This may change sooner than some observers imagine."

So who are the precariat? There are three varieties.

"The first consists  of people bumped out of working-class communities and families.



They experience a sense of relative deprivation. They, their parents or grandparents belonged to working-class occupations, with status, skill and respect...They are also relatively uneducated, and so more likely to listen to populists peddling neo-fascist agendas. People in this part of the precariat typically blame the 'other' for their plight and are keen to punish others in the precariat by cutting 'their' benefits, even when they are receiving benefits themselves or face the prospect of needing them."

"The second variety consists of the traditional denizens - migrants, Roma, ethnic minorities, asylum seekers in limbo, all those with the lest secure rights anywhere. It also includes some of the disabled and a growing number of ex-convicts...this part of the precariat may be detached from the political and social mainstream. They keep their heads down. That should not be mistaken for a lack of resentment or readiness to become active if the right vision emerged to energize them."



The first variety of the precariat is easily mobilised against the second.

"...there is a third, rapidly growing variety. It consists of the educated, plunged into a precariat existence  after being promised the opposite, a bright career of personal development and satisfaction. Many are in their twenties or thirties, but they are not alone. Many drifting out of the salariat existence are joining them.



The defining feature of this part of the precariat is another form of relative deprivation, a sense of status frustration. They are not doing what they set out to do, and there is little prospect of doing so. But because of their education, and awareness of the drabness or absurdity of the labour they are expected to accept, they are well placed to appreciate the delusion of labourism and the need for a new progressive vision. We should not be surprised to find a new youthful romanticism, a flourishing artistic outbreak, analogous to what happened two centuries ago.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for this part of the precariat is to induce the other varieties to share a common vision.

There is no reason why that cannot happen, just as craftsmen and intellectuals acted as educators and leaders of 'the working class' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it is a challenge.

In sum, we can say that the first part of the precariat experiences deprivation relative to a real or imagined past, the second relative to an absent present, and absent 'home', and the third to a feeling of having no future. But enough of the three groups must find a common identity, for the precariat must form a class-for-itself, if only to have the strength to abolish itself."
~Guy Standing