Millions cycle through short-term jobs with no security, no identity, and no voice. He named their class.
Guy Standing is a British economist who spent years at the International Labour Organization before becoming a professor at the University of London. His career focused on labor markets, social protection, and the erosion of employment security in the global economy.1
In 2011, he published The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, a book that identified what he argued was a new social class forming across the industrialized world. He combined the words "precarious" and "proletariat" to name a group that existing categories failed to describe.2
The precariat, in Standing's definition, consisted of people moving in and out of short-term jobs, lacking stable occupational identities, benefits, or the protections their parents' generation had taken for granted. They were not the traditional working class, who had unions and collective bargaining. They were not the unemployed, who at least had a recognized category. They existed in a space the labor market had created but had not named.3
Standing identified three factions within the precariat: those who had lost a previous status and looked backward with nostalgia, migrants and minorities who felt they had never belonged, and educated younger people who saw no pathway from their credentials to meaningful work. The internal divisions, he warned, made the precariat politically volatile.4
The concept gained traction after the Occupy movements of 2011 and 2012. Standing became one of the most prominent advocates for universal basic income, arguing that the precariat's condition could not be addressed through traditional employment policy.5 His word entered academic and political discourse in more than thirty languages. The original Latin root of "precarious" meant "obtained by prayer," a detail Standing noted: to be in the precariat was to be a supplicant, always asking for the next opportunity rather than standing on recognized ground.6