the precariat
noun [singular] informal
a social group consisting of
people whose lives are difficult because they have little or no job
security and few employment rights
'John Harris meets low-paid and insecure workers in
Swansea and London caught in a race to the bottom, and hears about the
rise of the precariat.'
The Guardian 16th February 2011
The Guardian 16th February 2011
the emergence of the precariat is thought to be a direct result of employment policies in our modern, global economy
The term precariat has recently hit the spotlight in relation to the economic situation in the UK. It's been argued that government cuts in public spending and Prime Minister David Cameron's call to maintain a 'flexible and dynamic labour market' have made the term relevant across all sections of society. As budgets have been cut, so the axe has fallen on public sector jobs. The consequences are bleak, with any new jobs likely to be insecure, and rising unemployment forcing wages and/or working conditions even further downward. 'Flexibility' has often been interpreted as an increased reliance on agency staff, who rapidly come and go, and are employed on inferior terms. Such factors, exacerbated by the cost of living rising much faster than average pay, mean that a growing proportion of British workers could be deemed members of the precariat.
More BuzzWords
- WiFi
- notspot
- lifelogging
- QR Code
- jailbreak
- e-waste
- lappy
- wave and pay
- cloud computing
- sofalizing
- Web 3.0
- qwerty tummy
- text-walking
Background – the precariat
The term precariat dates back to the 1980s, when French sociologists used it to define unprotected, temporary workers as a new social class. It also exists as a term in French (précariat), Italian (precariato) and German (Prekariat), with shifts in meaning determined by the time, place and social context in which it is used. In Britain, the term was recently brought into the public eye by Guy Standing, an economics professor from the University of Bath, who uses it in the title of his forthcoming book: Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury 2011).Precariat is a blend of adjective precarious and noun proletariat, a word used to describe working-class people as a social group. Proletariat has its origins in Latin proletarius, which denoted a person who had no wealth in property and whose only way of serving the state was by producing offspring.
Stemming from a wave of opposition to economic globalization, there's also some evidence for a related neologism precarity, a noun describing 'a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare'. Precarity is most commonly associated with workers who leave their home country to compete for low-paid retail and service jobs.
No comments:
Post a Comment