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Precariat……….. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the Precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive “unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings”. Specifically, it is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.[1] The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.[2][3]
The term is a portmanteau obtained by merging precarious with proletariat.[4]
The precariat class has been emerging in societies such as Japan, where it includes over 20 million so-called “freeters.”[5] The young precariat class in Europe became a serious issue in the early part of the 21st century.[6]
The British economist Guy Standing has analysed the precariat as a new emerging social class in work done for the think tank Policy Network. In 2014, he wrote another book titled “A Precariat Charter” where he argued that all citizens have a right to socially inherited wealth.[7][8] The latest in the series is the titled Precariat: The New Dangerous Class[1][9] where he proposed basic income as a solution for addressing the problem.
The analysis of the results of the Great British Class Survey of 2013, a collaboration between the BBC and researchers from several UK universities, contended there is a new model of class structure consisting of seven classes, ranging from the Elite at the top to the Precariat at the bottom.[10] The Precariat class was envisaged as “the most deprived British class of all with low levels of economic, cultural and social capital” and the opposite of “the Technical Middle Class” in Great Britain in that instead of having money but no interests, people of the new Precariat Class have all sorts of potential activities they like to engage in but cannot do any of them because they have no money, insecure lives, and are usually trapped in old industrial parts of the country.
…the perpetual part-timers, the
minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics
paid in cash… the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no
office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the
indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without
support, the cash labourers who have no savings, the generation for whom
a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired.
But what the Bilderbergers really think
will remain a mystery. According to the group’s code, “There is no
desired outcome, no minutes are taken and no report is written.
Furthermore, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no
policy statements are issued.”