Politics Lost

One of the more controversial arguments of The Precariat is that this new class is entirely distinct from the traditional working class. The idea of the proletariat, Guy Standing says, suggests “workers in long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionization and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features [are] familiar.” These characteristics are almost completely absent from the employment experience of the precariat, and their absence so alters the work experience that these workers constitute a class of their own.