482888
research-article2013
NLFXXX10.1177/1095796013482888New Labor ForumFrase
On the Contrary
The Precariat:
A Class or a Condition?
Peter Frase1
Keywords
capitalism, contingent workers, immigrant workers, neoliberalism, working class
The claim that work has become more precari-
ous in recent decades has an intuitive appeal, at
least among a layer of young people and activ-
ists. The concept of the “precariat,” playing on
the old description of the working class as a
“proletariat,” attempts to give empirical and
sociological content to this intuition. The term
has been widely disseminated by U.K. sociolo-
gist Guy Standing, whose book The Precariat:
The New Dangerous Class summarizes a long
career of investigation into the changing nature
of waged work.
As a proposed concept, the precariat raises
three questions. First, has work around the
world in fact become more precarious in the
past few decades, in some empirically definable
way? If so, do those who perform precarious
labor constitute a “class,” in the sense of being
a group that has a distinct structural position in
modern capitalism and that could potentially be
unified under a single political banner? And,
finally, what implications does increasing pre-
carity have for the demands and strategies of
workers and their organizations?
To the first question, I offer a qualified yes—
qualified, because Standing’s definition of the
precariat encompasses a multitude of forms of
“precarity,” some more empirically verifiable
than others. But the precariat is problematic as
a class category, because it attempts to draw
together too many different heterogeneous strata
of the population and because it too strongly
excludes segments of what Standing defines
(too narrowly) as the working class, which still
enjoys relatively stable and protected employ-
ment situations. I answer the final question with
a caution. Standing raises important points
about the subjective basis of progressive and
New Labor Forum
22(2) 11­–14
Copyright © 2013, The Murphy Institute,
City University of New York
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DOI: 10.1177/1095796013482888
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pro-worker politics in the twenty-first century;
while the precariat may not be the answer to the
issues raised, we should not pretend that any-
one else has an obvious answer either.
Advocates and critics alike often reduce the
definition of the “precariat” to decreasing job
tenure—people increasingly move from employer
to employer. There has been a robust debate
about the degree to which this form of instabil-
ity has increased. Kevin Doogan’s New
Capitalism, for example, argues that such claims
are overstated. But most researchers acknowl-
edge that the long-term attachment between
workers and employers, upon which the struc-
tures of the welfare state and much of the labor
movement were constructed, has diminished.
Henry Farber of Princeton University reports,
based on a detailed empirical study of the
United States, that “the structure of jobs in the
private sector has moved away from long-term
relationships” and “recent cohorts of workers
are less likely than their parents to have a career
characterized by a ‘life-time’ job with a single
employer.”
Standing’s definition is more complex than
this, however, encompassing seven different
dimensions of “labor security,” which he claims
the precariat lacks. These include not only one’s
security in employment but also the security of
job descriptions and career paths, the safety and
regularity of working conditions, the ability to
gain and employ new skills, the security of
income over the life course, and “representation
1
The City University of New York Graduate Center,
New York, USA
Corresponding Author:
Peter Frase, pefrase@gmail.com
12 New Labor Forum 22(2)
security”—that is, the right to a collective voice in
the labor market, especially through labor unions.
This complexity makes it difficult to empiri-
cally verify a trend toward increasing precarity,
and it also calls into question the coherence of
the precariat as a concept. The relationships
between precarity of income, employment, and
job content are easy enough to draw. But the
diminution of what Standing calls “skill repro-
duction security,” the “opportunity to gain
skills, through apprenticeships, employment
training . . . [and] opportunity to make use of
competencies” sounds more like what has been
called “deskilling” than a form of precarity. And
the decline in “representation security” could
just as easily be called one of the drivers of pre-
carity rather than an example of it.
It seems, at times, that what Standing calls
“labor security” might be better identified as the
characteristics of the industrial working class in
the era of what we can call the Fordist compro-
mise: the period between World War II and the
1970s, in which strong labor unions conceded
control over the workplace to employers, in
return for employment protections and a share
of increased productivity in the form of rising
wages. It is only by drawing a contrast with this
era that Standing is able to dub the precariat the
“new dangerous class” that may either usher in
a new relationship to labor or be drawn to popu-
list or neo-fascist positions.
Standing proposes the precariat as a histori-
cal successor to the proletariat, or the working
class. It is a successor both in the sense of being
the faster growing part of the labor force and in
terms of being the leading edge of political
struggle in the future. To be a class, according to
the main approaches to that concept—that of
Karl Marx, but also of Max Weber—means that
a group occupies a distinctive position in the
economic system of production and distribution
of goods and services, and reproduction of
human beings and society as a whole. Richard
Seymour has sharply criticized the notion of the
precariat as a class on these grounds, arguing
that Standing’s definition is entirely negative,
based on what people in precarious labor lack.
To be coherent and meaningful, however, the
notion of class must have a positive content and
an economic role.
This negative definition is almost unavoid-
able, given that Standing defines the precariat
relative to the conditions of manual employees
under the postwar welfare states. But to equate
the conditions of those workers with those of
the “working class” is a grave mistake. Stable
employment and rising wages have been the
exception rather than the rule in capitalist soci-
eties, and the condition of American or European
workers in the nineteenth or early-twentieth
centuries appears at least as precarious as that
facing contemporary labor.
Classes, however, are not purely objective
phenomena. To be a class can also mean simply
that people view each other, subjectively, as
members of the same collective, with the same
economic interests. So even if precarious labor
is an insufficient basis for identifying a coherent
economic class, might it still be the basis for a
political identity?
It seems, at times, that
just about anyone who is
relatively disadvantaged in the
labor market gets swept into the
ranks of the precariat.
This seems implausible on its face, if only
because of the vast social and material distance
between the components that would make up
this collective. Women, young people, the
aged, ethnic minorities, people with disabili-
ties as well as their home health care aides, the
incarcerated, freelance graphic designers, and
transnational migrants—all these are claimed
for the precariat. If it seems, at times, that just
about anyone who is relatively disadvantaged
in the labor market gets swept into the ranks of
the precariat, this should not be a surprise. As
we have seen, the precariat ultimately appears
to be a blanket term for those who are now—
and in many cases, always were—excluded
from the historically ephemeral stability
and regulation of labor under the Fordist
compromise.
Standing claims that the precariat shares a
desire for “control over life, a revival of social
solidarity and a sustainable autonomy, while
rejecting old laborist forms of security and
Frase 13
state paternalism.” This is less a convincing
structural analysis of a class than a description
of a certain set of attitudes and desires about
work. And here is where the Left, and the labor
movement, can perhaps learn the most, both
from analysts like Standing and from young
activists like the European alternative May Day
protesters with whom Standing begins his book,
who reject both their current precarious exis-
tence and the traditional labor vision that
Standing summarizes as “stable jobs with long-
term employment security and the benefit trap-
pings that went with that.”
Critics of the precariat and related concepts
have concentrated on the decline in job stability
as an empirical issue. The critique of laborism,
however, has at least as much to do with the
desirability of these kinds of jobs as it does
with their feasibility. Critiques of precarious
labor often proceed on the premise (implicit or
explicit) that our goal should be a return to the
Platonic ideal of high Fordism, a lifetime of
high wage employment with a single employer.
But the turn to precarity was driven not just by
the coercive power of employers and states, but
by an appeal to the frustrated desires of workers
themselves.
The turn to precarity
was driven [in part] by an
appeal to the frustrated desires
of workers themselves.
It is too often forgotten that at the high point
of industrial labor after World War II, discus-
sions of factory work were as often about the
unpleasant and deadening quality of the work
as they were about its potential as a source of
middle-class prosperity. The historian Jefferson
Cowie, in Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last
Days of the Working Class, notes that the old
compromise between capital and labor was bro-
ken down not just by neoliberal assaults from
the boss’s side, but by the resistance of workers
to the quality of their jobs. “[W]orkers were
harnessed to union pay but longed to run free of
the deadening nature of the work itself,” he
writes. The failure of the Left to offer anything
to these workers, beyond more of the same,
made them more susceptible to the illusory lib-
eration of a deregulated free market, which ulti-
mately took away the security of union jobs and
left nothing but precarious labor in their place.
What, then, is the alternative? The analysis
of precarious labor suggests that pro-worker
politics must move beyond the workplace, in
two senses. The private welfare state, in which
benefits are tied to employment, is increasingly
inadequate to a world of diminishing long-term
employment. And the privileging of the work-
place as the key site of labor struggle neglects
all the ways in which the struggles of workers
extend out into the community and the home.
The connection between social benefits and
employment is a problematic one in all rich
countries, but especially in the United States.
Not only are such things as pensions and unem-
ployment protection tied to prior employment,
but we also tie access to health care to specific
employers, in contrast with virtually every
other rich country. If fewer and fewer workers
can count on staying with the same employer
for a long period of time, and if many others are
forced into the roles of self-employed freelanc-
ers and independent contractors, then this sys-
tem is clearly untenable. Thus, establishing
universal benefits, administered by the national
government rather than the employer, should be
a labor priority. Beyond this, there is the more
radical demand to begin loosening the link
between employment and income. Standing,
along with many others associated with the
concept of the precariat, has endorsed the idea
of the Universal Basic Income: a modest
monthly payment, guaranteed to every legal
resident, without any condition or any work
requirement. This would ensure that no one is
permitted to fall into utter poverty.
As for those concerned with the politics of
labor, the rise of precarious labor underlines the
importance of moving beyond the workplace.
The idea of the shop floor as the optimal point
of organizing rests, in part, on the notion that
this is where workers forge bonds of solidarity
over time, a dynamic that is undermined as
work becomes more ephemeral. And many
workers today are never official employees at
all, but rather freelancers or independent con-
tractors who go from workplace to workplace.
14 New Labor Forum 22(2)
Moreover, workers today perform large quan-
tities of what Standing calls “work for labor”:
activities such as networking, searching for
jobs, or learning new skills, that are not paid
for by anyone but are nevertheless essential
parts of getting and keeping jobs. Finally, the
issues facing workers go beyond what hap-
pens at the point where work is exchanged for
money. Access to affordable housing, educa-
tion, and child care are just as much “labor
issues” as what happens during working
hours.
The whole idea that labor
struggles begin from the point of
production must be questioned.
Such struggles cannot simply be tacked onto
traditional workplace organizing in the way they
often have been historically. The whole idea that
labor struggles begin from the point of production
must be questioned—in many cases, struggles
with governments or landlords may be more sig-
nificant and longstanding than struggles with
employers with whom workers may have only
short-term and transient relationships. And with
workers still most often organized according to
employer or sector, this poses difficult questions
about labor’s organizational form as well as its
political strategy.
The precariat may not be “the new class”—
that is, it may not be the force that will unite
workers around a renewed progressive politics
in the twenty-first century. But neither will the
old, laborist industrial proletariat be that class.
By identifying new empirical trends and new
sensibilities about work and labor, theorists of
the precariat are at least helping us feel our way
toward some new answers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received the following financial sup-
port for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article: This work was supported by the
National Research Fund of Luxembourg (Grant No.
1044743).
Author Biography
Peter Frase is an editor at Jacobin magazine and a
Ph.D. student in sociology at The City University of
New York Graduate Center.