Towards a Charter for the Precariat

John Harris on Guy Standings’ Precariat Charter:

“Standing’s contention is that the precariat will soon become “we”. It is increasing in size and range, and spanning no end of occupational categories, from the fluorescent-jacketed service workers who keep our cities running to ambitious graduates who take “jobs” in the digital world on the basis of bogus self-employment. Over time, these people will find a voice – and, as Standing sees it, the “labourist” political left will then have to radically alter its views not just of political economy, but of what it is to live. “Twentieth century spheres of labour protection … were constructed around the image of the firm, fixed workplaces, and fixed working days and work-weeks that apply only to a minority in today’s tertiary online society,” he points out.

“While proletarian consciousness is linked to long-term security in a firm, mine, factory or office, the precariat’s consciousness is linked to a search for security outside the workplace.” This is fundamental: it shreds such sepia-tinted ideas as the “dignity of labour”, and the notion – shared by both the old left and its reformist successors – that to toil is to express one’s essential humanity. As Standing puts it: “The precariat can accept jobs and labour as instrumental … not as what defines or gives meaning to life. That is so hard for labourists to understand.” It certainly is.

For that reason, among others, politics has real problems with the precariat. In the UK, partly thanks to the Labour party’s panicked revival of interest in its working-class base, its condition has begun to intrude on national debate: MPs and ministers now at least talk about agency work and zero-hours contracts. But politicians of left and right still tend to think that the more forlorn elements of this new class are essentially there to be kicked around, which they believe plays well with the higher-up social groups who hold the key to electoral success. “The state treats theprecariat as necessary, but a group to be criticised, pitied, demonised, sanctioned or penalised in turn,” Standing says: the trick was pioneered by New Labour, and is used on an almost daily basis by the current government.

It is members of the precariat who pinball in and out of the benefits system thanks to short-term working arrangements, and who now form a large part of the demand for food banks. In response, the Westminster consensus insists that they should be subject to regimes that are not just cruel, but dysfunctional. In other words, it doesn’t actually matter if so-called welfare-to-work programmes actually help people, or just screw them up: the point is that they visibly punish them in pursuit of a political dividend. In that sense, the precariat is not only at the cutting edge of the economy, but at the receiving end of a postmodern politics that values the manipulation of appearances much more highly than reality.

This is obviously intolerable. Quite soon, Standing reckons, the precariat “will echo a slogan of ’68: ça suffit!” Its initial voice, he thinks, will come from “the educated and ‘wired’ part of the precariat, exploiting the potential of electronic communications”, but he claims that we have already felt its anger, in no end of civil disturbances. On this point, he gets carried away, giving far too much credit to the inchoate Occupy spasm of 2011, and projecting on to the English riots of 2011 a political motivation that simply wasn’t there.

But the best of what he goes on to advocate in a 27-article charter is inspiring: among other things, an end to the punitive aspects of the modern welfare state, and the creation of new organisations that are rooted outside any single workplace (and might follow the lead of the US’s International Workers of the World, or “Wobblies”, who were founded “to organise the workers, not the job”). By way of addressing security beyond the workplace, his most compelling suggestion is a basic citizen’s income, payable to all, which would increase the bargaining power of people at the low end, and by cutting across the orthodox benefit systems’ serial poverty traps, actually increase the incentive to work. This idea has been circulating for at least 40 years, and may take just as long to arrive in mainstream debate. But if it seems outlandish by contemporary standards, that actually only heightens its appeal: the same, after all, was once said of the most basic aspects of the welfare state; and even the weekend.”

1 Comment Towards a Charter for the Precariat

  1. AvatarEimhin

    “…projecting on to the English riots of 2011 a political motivation that simply wasn’t there.”

    I want to comment on this to say that in so far as economic ‘trickle down’ theory may be complete and utter fabricated illusion, the reality of trickle down and cumulative societal stress is very very real. This societal characteristic, a national version of ‘kick the cat’ syndrome from the cat’s perspective, gives cause to exactly this kind of evidencing outbreak at the bottom of the line. Its a damn shame that these ‘gangs’ are the only kind of socially cohesive bunch there to manifest their feeling in a connective form. For the most part, for the divided, the alienated and isolated, the manifestation is in alcohol, drug abuse, abuse, or suicide.

    They’re watching the bridges in Galway, 8 went into the corrib in the last two months…

    A political motivation…perhaps not, but a societal situation inclusive for explanation of a political reality – definitely.

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