Towards a Precarity Agenda

It is widely acknowledged that the closing decades of the twentieth century, and the early decades of the twenty-first century, have been marked by growing economic insecurity across the globe.But how we understand this process is highly contested.What are the sources of economic insecurity?To what extent do contemporary forms of economic and political organisation mark a break from the past?What analytical tools do we need to make sense of the current moment?Are new concepts needed, or will well-established concepts suffice?What are the implications of growing economic insecurity for questions of agency, solidarity, class struggle and social change?How does economic insecurity relate to various forms of collective organisation such as trade unions, political parties and community-based organisations?Guy Standing has been one of the most prolific and visible contributors to these debates.Standing was an economist and director of various projects at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) from 1975 to 2006.Since then he has held various academic positions at Monash University (Australia), University of Bath (UK) and University of London.He is perhaps best-known for his analysis of the "precariat", which he develops over the course of three books: Work After Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (2009), The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), and A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014).The third instalment is distinct from the previous two in that it develops twenty-nine proposals -a Precariat Charter -for how to improve the conditions of the precariat.The proposals are wide-ranging.They call for: redefining work (Article 1) and reforming labour statistics (Article 2), changing recruitment practices (Article 3) and regulating flexible labour (Article 4), regulating payday and student loans (Article 21), and eliminating poverty and precarity traps (Article 17); getting rid of assessment tests (Article 18), abolishing "workfare" programmes (Article 20), stopping class-based migration policies (Articles 11-15) and attacks on the disabled (Article 19), eliminating subsidies and tax breaks for corporations and special interests (Article 24), and re-marginalising charities (Article 29); ensuring due process (Article 16) and the right to financial knowledge (Article 22), decommodifying education (Article 23), sharing capital (Article 26) and providing a basic income (Article 25), promoting associational freedom (Article 5) and occupational communities (Articles 6-10), and reviving the commons (Article 27) and deliberative democracy (Article 28).Standing's Precariat Charter envisions a comprehensive overhaul of global capitalism, if not necessarily its overthrow.The programme it outlines entails the redistribution of resources, the reorganisation of decision-making processes, and the construction of new policies and institutional Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 112 frameworks.This Special Issue of the Global Labour Journal derives from a panel held at the eighteenth International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology in Yokohama, Japan, in July 2014.Entitled "The Politics of the Precariat: A Dialogue with Guy Standing", the panel was devoted to a critical analysis of Standing's A Precariat Charter, and also featured a response from Standing.Following the conference, the three critical commentators -Jennifer Chun, Ruy Braga and Marcel Paret -further developed their comments into full papers.Erik Olin Wright and Ben Scully, who were at the ISA conference but did not participate in the panel, were later invited to contribute essays on the same theme.The resulting Special Issue includes five peer-reviewed articles that engage with Guy Standing's analysis of the precariat.The contributions offer critical reflections on Standing's work, and also draw from the authors' research to develop original theoretical and empirical analysis.The discussion centres on Standing's third book in the precariat series, A Precariat Charter, but the contributors also make reference to the previous two books.Standing was invited to compose a rejoinder to the critiques, and this rejoinder is included in the Special Issue as well.My aim in this introduction is to take stock of the debate, outlining the most central points of critique or disagreement, and to assess their implications.The critiques of Standing developed across the five critical articles may be organised into two sets.One set of critiques pertains to identifications of precarity, including sticky issues around how to define the class structure and patterns of global variation -particularly the North/South divide.A second set of critiques revolves around questions of agency and class struggle, including the controversial topic of unions, as well as more general strategies for social change.I take each set of critiques in turn, highlighting both the key points raised by Chun, Braga, Scully, Wright and Paret, and the responses to them by Standing.Building on this synthesis, the second part of the essay proposes a research agenda for future studies of precarity.This proposed agenda focuses on four key areas: classification, space and time, commodification, and struggle.

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