From Denizens to Citizens: Forging a Precariat Charter
Guy Standing1
1. Introduction
We are in the midst of the Global Transformation, akin to Polanyi’s Great Transformation.
What Polanyi depicted was the painful forging of national market systems, in which the
disembedded phase involved the systemic planning of laissez-faire by financial capital, in
which old systems of regulation, social protection and redistribution were dismantled, leaving
workers increasingly insecure and allowing inequalities to grow, during which new coercive
forms of regulation intensified the insecurities.
The re-embedding phase, concentrated in the middle decades of the 20th century, involved
three major variants of what I have called labourism, namely ‘welfare state capitalism’ in its
various forms and centred in western Europe, ‘welfare capitalism’ predominantly in the USA,
and a Soviet system in which labour was put on a state pedestal, involving a rigid Taylorist
management system and a withering of the money wage. Japan was close to the American
model, while Mao’s China was a variant of the Soviet model, with its rice bowl mechanisms
and the danwei system that facilitated early capital accumulation from the 1970s into the
1990s.
There are three contextual points to keep in the back of our minds. First, the embedded phase
of the Great Transformation represented the triumph of labourism, in which for the first time
in history all work that was not labour was dismissed as inactivity and during which the
performance of labour became the route to citizenship. This went with the central feature of
the labour process, that of proletarianisation.
This was historically unique. It meant a process of habituation of the modal worker to a life
of stable labour, disciplined by the clock, remunerated by the blocks of time spent on the job
in a fixed workplace. The proletariat was defined not just by Marx’s two freedoms – freedom
of the means of production and free to supply labour – but also by stable disciplined labour.
Second, it was an era of fictitious labour decommodification, in that the money wage became
a dwindling part of total compensation in all parts of the capitalist system and in parts of the
state socialist system, while the performance of wage labour – or the willingness to perform
it, or attachment to someone who was performing it – became the necessary condition for
entitlement to mainstream state benefits and the ever widening array of enterprise non-wage
benefits that were built up in that era.
The fictitious nature of the labour decommodification was extended to the silliness of
presenting one outcome of the era as “Full Employment”. The three decades after the Second
1
This is a ‘zero order draft’, and should not be quoted without permission. Comments would be welcome. It
draws in part from two books – G.Standing, The Precariat – The New Dangerous Class (London and New York,
Bloomsbury, 2011) and G.Standing, Work after Globalisation: Building Occupational Citizenship (Cheltenham,
Edward Elgar, 2009).
1
World War has been presented as the ‘golden age’ of welfare state capitalism by ageing male
social democrats, or les trente glorieuses. But the Full Employment was a sham, in that
women’s was largely disregarded, women were treated as a labour reserve, and migrants, the
disabled and youth acted as safety valves, entering the labour market sporadically in times of
boom and disappearing into the shadows in recessions.2
A fourth contextual point is that international migration actually declined in the embedded
phase of the Great Transformation. Too often commentators today focus on contemporary
restrictions on migration, somehow implying that it was open and unlimited in some better
past. All the available data indicate that international migration peaked just before the First
World War, and only started to rise again in the 1980s.
Anyhow, as we all know, Polanyi’s Great Transformation broke down in the 1970s, partly
under the weight of its own contradictions, because it depended crucially on a system of
closed economies and a static international division of production, with developing countries
producing primary goods while the rich industrialised countries producing manufactured
goods and a modest array of modern services.
The neo-liberalism that emerged triumphant in the 1980s, notably in the guise of the so-called
Washington Consensus, was very different from Adam Smith’s market liberalism. In brief,
for our purposes, it envisaged an open global market system based on individualism,
liberalisation of markets and intense ‘competitiveness’. There are three contextual points I
would like to make about this agenda. First, this represented the disembedded phase of the
Global Transformation in which a truly global market system was being forged.
Second, it involved a systematic dismantling of old systems of regulation, social protection
and redistribution, and the erection of new systems of regulation, protection and
redistribution. Contrary to popular comment, it was decidedly not a period of “deregulation”.
It was a period of re-regulation, and in particular as far as labour and work are concerned it
involved the tightest and most interventionist regulation in history.
The neo-liberal regulation model, shaped by Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, involved
restrictive controls over collective action and a plan for dismantling all collective entities
representing workers. Crucially, and most relevant for our debate, they set out to destroy the
so-called self-regulation exercised by the occupational guilds and to transfer regulation of
occupations to the state, with a mandate to maximise competitiveness. One cannot sensibly
analyse the emerging global labour process without appreciating the nature and extent of the
labour market regulation constructed during the globalisation era.
2
One indicator of the sham was exposed by the incredible number of studies in the 1960s and 1970s of
fluctuations in labour force participation rates and analysis of “discouraged workers” and “additional workers”.
The Rehn-Meidner Swedish model was more sophisticated, in that while operating a deflationary macroeconomic policy designed to have the economy operating at less than full capacity, so-called active labour
market policy, operated by the AMS, was expected to put surplus workers in phoney schemes, neither
employed nor unemployed. Rudolph Meidner, with whom I had the great pleasure of working in the 1980s,
knew the Swedish model had reached its limit at that time.
2
Third, the globalisation era (essentially the disembedded phase of the Global Transformation)
involved the commodification of every possible sphere of existence, including ‘the firm’
itself. And in that regard it was a period of labour re-commodification, epitomised by a shift
back towards remunerating labour through the money wage, and the whittling away of
enterprise non-wage benefits for workers and a shrinking of state benefits as so-called social
rights. But this process was fundamentally one of differentiation, intensifying inequalities and
insecurities. Let us consider what this has involved.
2. Conceptualising the Precariat
Recall the onset of globalisation and the mantra of ‘liberalisation’. Any economist could see
immediately that opening up the global economy would usher in a process of convergence, if
it were practised in the way that neo-classical economists advocated and in the way
demanded by the international financial agencies, and financial capital in general.
Too much is made of the restrictions placed on labour migration in recent times. The reality
is that, in a historical blink of the eye, the labour supply to the global market system trebled,
and the extra two billion workers that were suddenly made available were habituated to earn
and labour for about one-fiftieth of the income taken as the norm for workers in Sweden or
elsewhere in the rich OECD countries. Obviously, this altered the bargaining power of capital
and labour dramatically, and it opened up the prospect of a rapid outflow of productive jobs
to the countries entering the global market economy or/and a dramatic drop in wages and
benefits of workers in the rich countries.
Politically and socially, governments and financial capital could not allow that. So, they made
in effect a Faustian bargain, by launching an agenda of cheap credit, labour subsidies and tax
credits to top up declining real wages, allowing an orgy of consumption and dissaving. We do
not have space or time to go into the details here. However, the Faustian bargain allowed the
restructuring of the labour process and the structure of social income, while postponing the
painful adjustment process that global economic liberalisation had to produce. Of course, the
Faustian bargain ended with a bang in 2008, since when the austerity agenda has been sold to
a deceived public.
Yet it is the underlying aspect of that Faustian bargain that we should emphasise most in this
conference. It is that the disembedded phase of the Global Transformation, dominated by
financial capital that took almost all the gains of the era, involved the growth of new
structures of inequality and new forms of socio-economic insecurity.
The main feature is that a new global class structure has been superimposed on old class
structures. This is described in more detail elsewhere, and is still taking shape. Suffice it to
state that six distinctive groups have been taking shape. At the top, in terms of income, power
and influence, is a plutocracy, consisting of a tiny elite of absurdly rich global citizens,
without pressing obligations to any nation state, lauded and feted by Presidents and Prime
Ministers, most verging on the edge of criminality. We know most of their names, and wish
we did not.
3
Below them, amidst the ranks of lesser capitalist barons and conventional entrepreneurs, is a
salariat. This consists of all those with employment security, with salaries and old-style
career jobs. Ironically, in the 1960s and 1970s, this group was predicted to become the
overwhelming majority.3 But it has been shrinking in numbers, accelerated by the onslaught
on public sectors since 2008.
A relevant feature of the salariat is that a growing proportion of them are becoming more
migratory, in a phenomenon that has received insufficient attention from social scientists
surveying migration. Many are transferred within multinational corporations or within
government agencies from one part of a country to another and increasingly from one country
to another, without breaking their employment.
On a par with the salariat in terms of level of income, although theirs comes in very different
forms, is a smaller but rapidly growing group, which I have called proficians. These are
people with technical or professional qualifications but are project-oriented, moving from job
to job. They do not seek employment security, and tend to dispense with enterprise benefits,
relying on private investments and insurance for their social protection.
Proficians are inherently mobile, and tend to network as part of their working life, with
electronic gadgets primed at all times. They have become conduits for new technologies and
projects. They act as transmission belts in the global market system. They are at the top of the
labour circulation train. The latest development to affect their growth and influence is the
emergence of a new occupation, that of interim manager, in which many firms and public
agencies are contracting out a growing range of management functions.
Below the proficians and salariat in the spectrum of average incomes comes the old core of
the proletariat, or what is rather euphemistically still called the working class. This consists of
those in stable manual labour, mostly labouring full-time, with access to all seven forms of
labour security that were extended in the re-embedded phase of the Great Transformation.4
Contrary to Andre Gorz’ premature announcement of its death, the industrial proletariat has
persisted into the 21st century. But its size has shrunk dramatically; nobody seriously predicts
a reversal of its decline. Even in Chindia, there is no evidence that its numbers are growing
much if at all.
The importance of this is that the welfare state and the system of labour regulations nurtured
by the ILO and social democrats in the middle decades of the 20th century were both built for
and by this group of workers. The misnamed labour rights were forged by the trades unions
and their political parties for this category. It was a system of industrial citizenship, largely
for male “breadwinners”.
3
See, for instance, H.Wilensky, “The professionalization of everyone”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol.70,
No.2, pp.137-58.
4
These were labour market security, employment security, job security, work security, representation security,
skill security and income security. I have documented these elsewhere, and coordinated and largely wrote a
large-scale ILO report on the erosion of all seven around the world, based on a data set from over 150
countries. ILO, Economic Security for a Better World (Geneva, ILO, 2004).
4
For our debates, there are several features of the industrial core to bear in mind. The labour
regulations and the central system of social protection (namely Bismarckian or Beveridge
forms of social insurance, combined with contributions-based enterprise benefits and
duration-based earnings) were geared to stable labour and to stabilise labour.
It was linked to the predominance of internal labour markets. So, workers who were
migrating into the labour market had to join a queue. This corresponded to the standard
economic theory of migration at the time, the Harris-Todaro model, and underlying that the
Ricardian model of Arthur Lewis, whereby surplus labour waited in the amorphous informal
sector to be asborded into formal employment as the modern capitalist economy expanded.
A second feature of the shrinking core is that a dwindling proportion of the working-age
population is attached to the old systems of regulation, social protection and redistribution
and thus prepared to fight to defend them as they are dismantled. The implications for a
progressive politics will be considered later.
Below the core in the income spectrum comes the precariat. This consists of the growing
number of people living and working in insecure conditions. The precariat has been the
predictable outcome of the policies of labour market flexibility that began in the 1980s. It is
not defined by its employment insecurity, but primarily by a lack of occupational identity, or
an occupational narrative or career.
It lacks all forms of labour security – or ‘labour rights’ – advanced during the middle decades
of the 20th century. Those in the precariat have no sense of control over their time, and have
only weak entitlement to state benefits of the type covered by the term ‘social rights’. This
deprivation takes both de jure and de facto forms, in that their situation has been made more
insecure by state action to take away access to rights, and their circumstances have contrived
to deny them access to certain benefits to which legally they should have entitlement.
Before going further on the nature of the precariat, one should complete the spectrum of
globalisation’s classes. For, at the bottom of the pile is the lumpen-precariat, those sad
individuals who make up today’s large and seemingly expanding ‘under-class’.5 Migrants
come to make up their share of this group, although too many just die, due to lack of any
social support. But the point to be emphasised is that the precariat is not an under-class. The
precariat is wanted by corporations and employers generally, and by the state that is shaping
the labour process in their interests.
There are several other features of the precariat itself that should be borne in mind. They are
anchor-less, both socially and economically, in that they do not belong to any wellestablished community by which to measure their status, progress in life or network of
reliable protection.
The sense of not having an anchor goes with a feeling of not having what Hannah Arendt
called a social memory on which to call, a feeling that one belongs to a community of
5
The lumpen-precariat or underclass is never a ‘dangerous class’, in that it is never progressive. It is basically
anomic or reactionary, being inclined to be atavistic.
5
practices providing a code of ethics on which to draw. A result of this deprivation is that there
is a perceived licence to be opportunistic, which happens to be a central feature of the neoliberal market system for all groups in society.
Another feature of the precariat is they are exploited and oppressed outside labour as well as
in it, and as such have to perform a great deal of work-for-labour. This has gone with the
tertiarisation of production and employment. Too often, commentators analyse labour
markets as if manufacturing was still the main form of employment, defining some long
defunct ‘standard employment relation’, which is supposedly surrounded by ‘atypical’ forms
of employment. The reality is that a tertiary model has replaced that, with an incredible
amount of work being unrecorded and unremunerated, but essential.
This leads to the importance of two phenomena that are crucial to an understanding of the
precariat. First, in this new labour system, employers will give preference to those perceived
to be prepared to make a high effort bargain for any given contract, where the effort is
measured not just on the job in the fixed workplace, but by the amount of work done around
that sphere.
Second, the nature of the labour relation is such that for a worker there is considerable status
frustration, in that jobs are increasingly perceived as transient, even if many in them end up
spending much longer in them than they ever anticipated. The transience goes with a lack of
career progression, which is peculiarly combined with credentialism, requiring recruits to
have a high level of formal schooling or certificated qualifications than actually required to
do the job.
Ironically, everywhere in the global economy, huge emphasis is placed on using the
educational system to produce “human capital”. The commodification of education is one of
the most corroding aspects of the era. But, as argued in the two books cited at the outset, a
consequence of this is that more and more youths are emerging into labour markets with
formal certificates that have been sold to them as tickets to careers.
In fact, they are little more than lottery tickets, with dwindling value and rising personal cost.
But the point here is that those youths are particularly likely to experience a high sense of
status frustration, given what they find they are actually expected to do in the labour market,
if they are even fortunate enough to be able to enter it at all.
Given the nature of the flexible tertiary labour process, a high status frustration will surely go
with workers making a lower effort bargain, or to a feeling that they only make a major effort
out of fear and insecurity. There is no space or time here to go into the ramifications. But it is
surely a factor in the steady displacement by migrants in rich country labour markets. For
migrants are likely to come from countries or communities where living standards are lower,
and thus have a much reduced sense of status frustration.
This factor has been significant too in explaining how flexible labour relations and the growth
of the precariat went with the global ‘feminisation’ of labour and work, in the double sense of
6
many more women displacing men in jobs and many more jobs becoming similar in character
to those traditionally forced on women.6
A final point in this section is that the precariat is not a new proletariat, or a precarious
proletariat. Those commentators who have dismissed the precariat as merely the same as
those doing precarious (insecure) labour in the early decades of industrial capitalism, in the
docks and on farms, miss the defining features of the precariat. It is the central feature of
global capitalism; it is wanted as the mainstream. But whereas the norm for industrial
capitalism was the proletarian, who had to be disciplined and habituated to perform stable
labour, the precariat is being disciplined to adapt to a life of unstable labour.
The modal precariat is supposed to be flexible, adaptable and multi-skilled, and the state is
being reshaped to make more people “employable”, by using interventionist “active labour
market policies” to reshape attitudes, inculcate behavioural norms and engineer a sentiment
that we must constantly update technical skills to offset a tendency for rapid obsolescence.
The precariat is also distinctive in that life for those in it is not defined by attachment to
labour, or the values or interests associated with labour. This is one factor contributing to the
hostility one often finds in the precariat towards trades unions and ‘labour parties’. But it is
essential to appreciate that there are varieties within the precariat.
3. Denizens in Focus: An Aside
A feature of the globalisation era was that while the rhetoric of rights gained popularity, the
reality was that more and more people were being converted from citizens to denizens. A
denizen was an ancient Roman concept, and one that had currency in England in the middle
ages, to denote someone who was granted a limited range of rights.
The modern trend has not only affected migrants, although they have been the major group so
far. But for our purposes, if Hannah Arendt’s idea of citizenship is “the right to have rights”,
today it would be more insightful to think of citizenship as a continuum, with millions of
people having diverse combinations of some rights but not others, with denizenship the
reality for many of us.
A right is surely a universal entitlement. Conventionally, rights and citizenship have gone
together. But the neo-liberal state has been adept at denying people rights and at taking rights
away from people by legal and non-legal ways. They have done this through attaching the
language of ‘obligations’ and ‘conditionality’ to the rhetoric of rights.
Let us remember that there are five types of rights – civil, political, cultural, social and
economic. Let us also remember that anybody can have several forms of citizenship, that is
belong to communities in which rights are granted or taken away.
In this short section, I would like to highlight just two aspects of creeping denizisation.
6
These trends were clear and documented in the early phase of economic liberalisation. G.Standing, “Global
feminisation through flexible labour”, World Development, Vol.17, No.7, 1989, pp.1077-95.
7
Consider the most important aspect of occupational citizenship, the “right to practise”, that is,
the right to do the work we wish to do and feel capable of doing. This has always been a
highly contested issue, stretching back to Babylonian times.7
Most twentieth century labour analysts tended to give the issue scant attention, perhaps
because in their social democratic mould they focused overwhelmingly on the hierarchical
labour relations between capital and labour, or employers and workers. Anyhow, traditionally
the right to practise was controlled by the guilds, and those entering a state-recognised
occupational community became occupational citizens, with access to a wide range of
occupational rights, to which those outside the guild had no access and probably little
knowledge.
The operation of guilds produced a closed internal market, regulated by historically
established rules of entry, induction, apprenticeship, ethics, cultural customs, political rights
of deliberative democracy, voting and representation, social rights in access to forms of social
protection in times of need, and economic rights in entitlement to shares of income gained by
the community.
One can criticise this system – states within a state – in terms of monopoly rent,
grandfathering, inherent conservatism and so on. But we cannot ignore the system if we want
to understand how labour markets have become in the neo-liberal era. For, as mentioned
earlier, the neo-liberal agenda involved the deliberate construction of a system of state
regulation of occupations, which has transformed the significance of the right to practise, as
well as dismantled a fundamentally important collective agency.8
Today, after several decades of creeping reform, often cleverly sold as “deregulation”, the
state has constructed an elaborate system of regulation, in the name of competitiveness and
individualism. Increasingly, that has taken away the ability of occupational communities to
restrict entry, set its own standards, define and enforce ethics, and set up internal routes for
social mobility, through the mechanism of licensing.9 And paradoxically, they have been
taking away time-honoured rights, and turning more people into what might call occupational
denizens, a mushrooming part of the precariat.
The myriad ways this has been done are beyond the horizon of this paper. Suffice it to state
that the shift to occupational licensing by the state has produced many more “ports of entry”,
while breaking down avenues of social mobility inside labour markets, an unheralded
contributor to the growing inequality in labour markets in general. And it has produced many
more avenues by which rights can be taken away.
7
The issues touched on in this section are developed at length in Standing, 2009, op.cit., chapter 7.
8
Milton Friedman, one of the most influential of all the neo-liberals, cut his intellectual teeth by writing his
first book on the perceived need to break down the guild system. One suspects that most social democrats
took little interest in the issues because the ‘professions’ and the salariat were more ‘part of the enemy’ than
allies of the proletariat.
9
At the beginning of the globalisation era, about one in twenty American workers was subject to licensing.
Today it is about one in every three.
8
Let me give two examples of numerous cases one could give. In 2007, the New Labour
government of the UK managed to pass the Legal Services Act, by which it took away the
self-regulatory powers of the bar that had always covered the entire body of legal professions.
It set up a state body, with a non-lawyer as its head, with a mandate to liberalise the legal
occupations and to increase competitiveness, in effect turning legal service into a bundle of
commodities.
The Act was promptly nicknamed the “Tesco Act”, after a well-known supermarket chain.
The reason was that it opened up the prospect of standardised legal services being supplied in
general stores. Some of us might find it attractive that we will soon be able to go into the
supermarket of one’s choice and order a divorce or will through pressing a few buttons or
ticking a few boxes on a standardised form. It will save money, and who likes lawyers
anyhow? But consider the implications for the millions of people working in legal service
work. What will happen is that a class fragmentation will take place within the broad
community of workers providing legal services.
At the top, elite lawyers will concentrate on celebrities and the plutocracy, stooping to the
richer members of the salariat in their spare time. Some will struggle on as part of a hardpressed salariat, with their intense ‘billable hours’ and constant risk of burn out. Many more
will be turned into the precariat, providing services as para-legals or ‘legal services
assistants’. The only thing we consumers will be sure about is that those assistants will not
have proper legal training or qualifications. They will be part of the precariat, without rights
of any meaningful community of practice.
A second example is very different. This concerns the growing regulatory device of negative
licensing, the use by the state of mechanisms to suspend and/or cancel the right to practise.
One common method has particularly hit women. This is called the recency of practise rule.
If someone takes time out from practising in formal employment, perhaps to have a baby and
spend some time in full-time childcare, or perhaps for some other reason, then they may
suddenly find that when they come to renew their occupation, they are blocked from doing so
by the rule that if they have not practised for more than a designated amount of time, they
have to undergo new training and acquire new certification.
The impact of this was brought home recently in the UK when such a rule was tightened in
the medical professions. It turned out that numerous nurses taking time out are blocked from
coming back and are being displaced by migrant nurses coming from other parts of the
European Union and from developing countries. In other words, this is a case – and one could
cite many others – were the refinement and extension of negative licensing is leading to the
displacement of nationals and others with apparent citizenship rights by migrants, often
obliged to accept lower wages and benefits and few if any social rights. Negative licensing is,
in short, a mechanism for excommunicating citizens.
A second area in which denizisation is occurring, and in the process leading to an expansion
of the precariat, is in the sphere of ‘social rights’. Ironically, contrary to the famous claim
9
made by T.H. Marshall, that the 20th century was the century of social rights, one could argue
that it was the century of the rise and fall of social rights.
In the heyday of social democracy, although one can quibble endlessly about welfare state
regimes, the essence of social protection was on a mix of universal entitlements for all
citizens and social insurance, based on contributions, mainly paid for by employers. This
system crumbled with the development of flexible labour markets and the triumph of neoliberalism, and what happened was a general international trend to means-tested social
assistance, with targeting and selectivity at every turn. The right to state benefits quickly
became something of the past.
As we know, means-testing produces poverty traps and unemployment traps, with members
of the precariat facing marginal tax rates of 80% or more. They also produce what I have
called horrendous precarity traps. Now, all these produce moral hazards and immoral
hazards, the former arising from not doing what one would like to do for fear of being
financially penalised, the latter arising from doing what one would wish to do but concealing
it for fear of losing financially. Both have proliferated, contributing to the growth of the
shadow economy.
The results of the trend to means-testing include an erosion of social solidarity. If a state
benefit is only for those deemed to be poor, and if there are pervasive poverty and precarity
traps, the political rhetoric was bound to become increasingly and stridently utilitarian, with
demonization of “benefit scroungers” and the like. A lesson that we thought had been learned
long ago by progressives was quietly abandoned by social democrats as well as wilfully
abused by neo-liberals. The language of the deserving poor and the undeserving poor came
back into the political mainstream.
The result has been entirely predictable. We have seen a steady, remorseless drift to
workfare.10 And in the process there has been the construction of an edifice of mechanisms
by which workers can be and are denied entitlement to ‘social rights’. As just one result, one
outcome has been that in most countries only a minority of the unemployed have access to
unemployment benefits. The latest international onslaught is on those with physical or mental
impairments. And the imposition of behavioural conditionality is spreading under the baleful
influence of libertarian paternalism.
The precariat is the group primarily affected by this neo-liberal or utilitarian restructuring of
social protection. Those in the precariat are most exposed to poverty traps and precarity traps,
and thus exposed to the threats implicit in the moral and immoral hazards. As such, they are
almost permanently at risk of losing social rights.
10
When I first predicted this in a book on Sweden and in a series of articles in the 1980s, many commentators
dismissed it as alarmist. For the argument that it was coming, see G.Standing, “The road to workfare:
Alternative to welfare or threat to occupation?”, International Labour Review, Vol.129, No.6, 1990, pp.677-91.
Ironically, the man who was the primary butt of that article is now an advisor on social policy to David
Cameron and to governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
10
But there is a further irony, which is that the drift to means testing has perversely favoured
migrants, rather than national citizens. Put briefly, if social policy is made conditional on
‘poverty’ rather than basically on social contributions over an extended period, then there will
be an automatic tendency for those most impoverished to go to the head of the queue for state
benefits and services. This has been happening, and has been the cause of deepening
resentment and ugly xenophobia. One can decry all that and must do so, but one must
understand the inequity that is generating the problem.
There are many other ways by which rights are being taken away or denied, and in most cases
the worst effects are felt by migrants of one sort or another. This leads to the subject matter of
the next section, which will be presented orally in the conference.
4. Migrants as agents of precariatisation
There are numerous forms of ‘migration’, and in a sense we risk falling into an analytical trap
in trying to dichotomise migrants and non-migrants. However, at risk of making another type
of error, let me suggest a few issues that should be on our conference table.
First, migrants have always been the light infantry of capitalism, being generated and moved
around as and when needed. The classic form was labour circulation, moving back and forth
between areas of industrial accumulation and labour reproduction. In this respect, as elegantly
shown by Lenin’s classic study of 1913, labour migration contributed to rural class
differentiation and to incipient proletarianisation.11
Today, this applies more than ever. It begins with processes of internal labour migration, with
the most influential movement consisting of the hundreds of millions of migrants who have
been moving into the new industrial zones of China. This is not a classic proletariat. What the
state authorities have done is facilitate the movement of migrants who do not have the hukou,
precisely so as to deny them access to state benefits or enterprise benefits, as well as to make
their labour in Shenzhen and elsewhere transient and disposable. Being nominally ‘illegal’,
they do not have ‘social rights’. These migrant workers have been enormously influential in
the gradual construction of the global labour market.
More generally, one can say that migrants are the world’s principal denizens. Over a billion
cross-border movements are made every year, and the incidence is rising rapidly. At the latest
count, there are 214 million ‘legal’ international migrants, and one might hazard a guess that
there are almost as many ‘illegals’. This is a strikingly ‘new’ aspect of migration. There are
supposed to be over 12 million in the USA, and countries like South Africa have many
millions in the townships, precipitating some politically orchestrated violence from time to
time.
11
For a discussion, see G.Standing, “Circulation and the labour process”, in G.Standing (ed.), Labour Circulation
and the Labour Process (London, Croom Helm, 1985). An earlier article on which that book was based had
argued that circulation, migration and rebellion were alternative reactions to exploitation and adversity, and
that circulation was most likely when collective action was deemed to have little chance of success.
G.Standing, “Migration and modes of exploitation: Social origins of immobility and mobility”, Journal of
Peasant Studies, January 1981, Vol.8, No.2, pp.173-211.
11
In short, the misnamed ‘illegals’ comprise a huge and growing proportion of the global
precariat. But even ‘legal’ migration has recovered enormously from its dip in the middle
decades of the 20th century, such that in some 70 countries migrants comprise over 10% of
the total population.
Another feature is that modern international migration is unlike that which predominated in
the disembedded phase of the Great Transformation, in that instead of a predominance of
settler migration, the modal migrant is a labour circulant, receiving and sending remittances
and hoping or planning to return to some country of origin.
The migration is also more global in character, with only about a third of international
migration involving moves from developing to developed market countries. Since the crash
of 2008, that share may have dipped rather than risen, given a substantial outflow of
disillusioned Europeans to former colonies.
It is reasonable to conclude that in the affluent countries migrants act to lower the wages of
low-paid workers in the country to which they move, and they have surely helped to induce
the retraction of enterprise benefits for core workers, pushing more into the zone of the
precariat. As such, they have also tended to widen wage differentials.
What is less clear, and certainly less analysed, is the impact on occupational structures.
Generally, in most countries migrants have been blocked from practising many occupations
because of licensing rules that have not recognised qualifications gained in certain other
countries. But as suggested elsewhere in this paper, licensing has also created more ports of
entry, so that for some occupations migrants have been gaining entry.
What is clear is that migrants have been gaining a rapidly growing share of total employment
in rich market economies. An intriguing case is the UK, where total employment has been
falling sharply since 2008 but where migrant employment has actually risen quite sharply.
The really disturbing stories have been around the use of ‘undocumented’ labour migrants.
Since this conference is in Sweden, it is relevant to cite the infamous case of the use of gangs
of undocumented Chinese workers in to labour in northern Sweden to pick wild cloudberries,
blueberries and linganberries for the production of cosmetics. The government effectively
allowed thousands of temporary workers to be abused and exploited, the Swedish Migration
Board claiming subsequently that it could not follow up on abuses. The Municipal Workers
Union, Kommunal, won the right to organise the workers but then complained it could not do
much because the agencies that were employing the Chinese migrants were based in Asia.
There are many anecdotes of governments and unions being ineffectual if not passive. Every
now and then, a story of abuses breaks into the popular media, and groups are expelled or
some compensatory gesture is made. But whether it is Chinese seamstresses in Prato, or
African labourers in agricultural estates in Calabria or Chinese cockle pickers in Morecombe
Bay in England, use of undocumented migrant workers, degraded and desperate, is a
prominent feature of global capitalism. And the victims are just days away all the time from
being turned into villains, demonised as taking jobs from locals, and much else.
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However, the aspect I would like to emphasise here is that we have been experiencing the
emergence of a very new phenomenon, the emergence of labour export regimes. Some huge
countries, most notably China, but also Vietnam, Indonesia and India, are organising the
international transfer of hundreds of thousands of workers on short-term projects. One can
describe this as the new wedge of the global precariat.
In the case of China, huge blocks of Chinese workers, including many convicts, are
transferred to labour on projects, with the most prominent example being dam building. So
far, this organised shifting of short-term labourers has been mainly in Asia and Africa; in the
latter, it is reckoned that there are over 300,000 temporary migrants at any one time. A
common technique used by China is to offer loans with which to pay for Chinese state capital
to build infrastructure or launch factories, on condition that, inter alia, the Chinese can bring
their own workers.
However, particularly since the crisis of 2008, there has been an acceleration of this labour
export system and deep penetration into the most vulnerable European countries, including
Greece and Italy. The most ironic case came in Poland where the government put out to
tender the reconstruction of its highway system. The tender was won by a Chinese state
corporation, with the understanding that it could bring its own workers. Most ironically, the
bid was subsidised by a grant from the European Union. In the end, the contract fell through,
but the future was shown all too vividly.
There are several conclusions one should draw from the situation with respect to migrants as
far as the theme of this paper is concerned. Indirectly and directly, migrants inadvertently
help to make the precariat the new dangerous class. They are seen as Victims, and as Villains,
and ultimately they are Heroes to their families and communities back ‘home’. But their
presence and the prospect of more to come fuels the resentment among others feeling the
downward pressures in domestic labour markets.
5. The Political Threat
The emerging globalisation class structure is having a profound effect on political
consciousness. Put bluntly, the three groups above the old working class – the plutocracy, the
salariat and proficians – receive their incomes in ways that encourages them to be detached
from support for a solidaristic welfare state. By the same token, they are likely to favour
economic liberalisation, although they may be swayed by other visions.
Similarly, the two groups below the old shrinking core working class – the precariat and
whatever one wants to call the underclass – are detached from the welfare state by their own
misfortune. They do not benefit from it and surely see no prospect that this will change.
Meanwhile, the shrinking core is under strain, since they are finding they are being pushed in
the direction of joining the precariat. We all know that manual employees have seen their
labour securities eroded and have lost much of their sense of agency through trades unions
13
and collective bargaining. But there are factors tending to make some become politically
reactionary.
First, they are increasingly being replaced by the precariat and in particular by migrants with
comparable skills and attitudes perceived by employers to be ‘better’. In short, they are seen
as more malleable, more exploitable and – perhaps most importantly – as more disposable,
with minimal cost or fuss, and with little chance of migrants effectively seeking redress if the
employer has not adhered to some regulatory requirement.
This displacement is causing rising resentment, coupled with the resentment caused by the
restructuring of social protection and the means-testing noted earlier. And this leads to the
biggest threat of all. For the old core of the working class, feeling itself being dragged into
the lower echelons of the precariat, and part of the precariat itself that is made up of people
from manual working-class backgrounds are thoroughly disillusioned with the old social
democratic politics that stood them in reasonable stead for the better part of the last century.
A consequence is that part of the precariat is listening to the sirens of populism, and they are
being led to support neo-fascist politicians and parties. Elements of the plutocracy are fanning
this trend, providing vast funds as with the US Tea Party, and generally supporting politicians
who are selling a heady mix of ‘smaller state’, ‘lower taxation’ and stronger controls of all
‘unsavoury’ elements and ‘strangers’, notably migrants, but also ‘benefit scroungers’ (i.e.,
people “not like us”), as well as “Muslims”, blacks or whatever category is seen to present
the best subliminal text.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to see this as the endgame of neo-liberalism in its crisis
phase. One should not be too sanguine about defeating this ugly manifestation. But subtler
variants are taking shape that in some ways are even more chilling, if only because they are
more likely to become the norm of state policy, whereas one should have confidence that we
will roll back the sheer brutalism of neo-fascism.
The more likely outcome of the growth of the precariat and the intrinsically weak position of
workers in general is an entrenchment of the panopticon state with its utilitarian ethic. The
idea that the happiness of the majority must be promoted, and so that the minority must not
be allowed to inconvenience that perceived majority, is leading to a steady growth of
mechanisms of surveillance, data-veillance and social engineering through the manipulation
of fiscal policy, active labour market policy and conditionality in every sphere of social
policy. If there was more space, these statements would be phased in a more nuanced way.
But the essence of libertarian paternalism is steering behaviour towards norms desired by the
existing structure of the establishment.
There is another angle to the political upheavals associated with the ongoing labour market
restructuring and the spread of commodification, which is that partly as a result of the
commodification of politics itself, an anomic reaction is also taking place politically. This is
feeding the growth of strange movements, such as the Pirates in Germany and Scandinavia
and the emergence of the comedian Bebbe onto the political stage in Italy.
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Meanwhile, the utilitarian drive is advancing. The prospect of the panopticon state goes with
the process of denization, and in particular with a feature of late neo-liberalism, the
increasing incarceration of citizens, and the increasing criminalisation of activities long
deemed acceptable or non-criminal. Country after country has been criminalising more and
more of its citizens, and in the process converting them into denizens, unable to access
anything outside the zone of the precariat, at best, and left at a structural disadvantage in the
labour market and in housing markets as they struggle to compete with fresh waves of
migrants. And what does the state do when the local denizens take to the streets in days of
rage? They simply criminalise them some more. Once criminalised, they lose ‘rights’ for life.
6. Towards a Precariat Charter
The only way out of this politics of inferno, as I have called it, is to forge a new politics of
paradise. Elsewhere, I am trying to develop a full Precariat Charter, and hope many others
will contribute to this endeavour. The starting point is the belief that we need a new
progressive vision. And in this regard, I would like to conclude by describing the principles
that should guide our thinking, before highlighting a few policies that should surely go into
the Charter that have a relevance to this conference’s focus on migration.
The first principle is that, at the crisis point of the Global Transformation, we must remember
that every new forward march towards a more equitable and egalitarian society has been
based on the interests, insecurities and aspirations of the emerging mass class. Today that is
the precariat.
The second principle is that every new forward march involves new forms of collective
action. The forms that were progressive in previous eras are very unlikely to be progressive in
today’s transformation.
The third principle is that every forward march is about three overlapping struggles by and
for the emerging class – for recognition, representation and redistribution.
The fight for recognition, easily overlooked beforehand, is about legitimising the group as a
social entity. It is about altering images of class and patterns of exploitation and oppression.
It is about recapturing the language of political discourse, inducing opponents as well as
kindred spirits to think, talk and write in terms that resonate with the emerging group. It may
involve displacing images and discourses of the previously progressive class, which become
atavistic, even reactionary. This partial abandonment is painful. But we should not pander to
atavism. This is a danger now. In the UK, for instance, some Labour politicians and their
advisors have been talking in that direction.
The fight for representation must be engineered through collective action. It is most unlikely
to happen otherwise. Today, while the precariat’s struggle for recognition is coming along
nicely, the struggle for representation has scarcely begun. We may see progress in 2012. At
present, politicians and think-tanks treat the precariat as an ‘underclass’, as a disparate group
on the edge of society, to be ‘re-integrated’, re-trained, made ‘employable’, nudged,
sanctioned, treated with ‘tough love’ and CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), and so on.
15
This is wrong, and will surely change. The precariat’s subjectivity requires representation
inside all public and commercial institutions dealing with them as ‘clients’. They must gain
Voice, or agency.
The struggle for redistribution is misunderstood if one adheres to the old ‘socialist project’. It
should be about redistributing or sharing the key assets of the current economic system.
Progressives are, or should be, egalitarians in some sense. They want less inequality, and
should be opposed to the growth of inequalities. If they do not concur with that, they should
find another home and call themselves something else.
However, the biggest question is: What are the assets that should be redistributed and made
less unequal, and made the focus of collective action and struggle?
The next contextual premise for a renewed forward march is that in each Transformation the
emerging mass class redefines the Great Trinity – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (or
Solidarity) – in its own terms. In the 20th century, the so-called ‘left’ gave much too little
attention to freedom. Surrendering that to the political right was disastrous. There is no tradeoff between equality and freedom; they march together or fall together. However, the
progressive’s special commitment is to associational freedom, redefined for every age.
Sometimes called republican freedom, this refers to the capacity to operate in concert,
revealed through actions taken collectively as well as individually.
The challenge is that the desirable character of emerging civil associations is not yet clear.
But what we can say with confidence is that they must be global in orientation, ecological in
their values and wanting to promote and support ‘dignified work’, rather than ‘decent labour’,
as promulgated by the ILO.12
This leads to what should be central to a Precariat Charter. There should be a campaign for
representation of the precariat inside every social policy agency and inside every
occupational regulation agency. At present, the lower reaches of the labour market are treated
as objects to be made more ‘employable’ or ‘socially integrated’ and ‘socially responsible’.
And they are subject to discretionary if not arbitrary decisions by social policy bureaucrats or,
increasingly, by their commercial surrogates. They have no Voice, no agency. This must be
combatted and an agenda for strengthening a system of due process must be developed.
Ultimately, the item of a Precariat Charter that should be emphasised above all is a strategy
for the decommodification of people as workers, or labour power. This should be profoundly
12
This writer has the dubious distinction of having persuaded the newly-elected Director General of the ILO in
1999 to shift from ‘labour’ to ‘work’. As a member of his ‘transition team’, I argued that the ILO should
promote work of all kinds and not just labour. I wanted the slogan to be ‘dignified’ or ‘dignifying’ work, and
thought this was to be the slogan. Unfortunately, I went away for the week end and on returning found that it
had been changed to ‘decent work’, putting a much lower bar to the jump. This is the title given to our
collective report of 1999. Predictably, subsequently the Employers and the Workers (Unions) on the ILO
Governing Body made sure that the theme was subject to recidivism, soon becoming decent labour in ‘jobs’.
There is no prospect of any change in perspective until the governance structure of the ILO is changed to allow
Voice for occupational associations and other civil society associations concerned with work and social
protection. This has been made even less likely by the election of a lifetime union bureaucrat as the new
Director General on the day before this conference began.
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different from the strategy of fictitious labour decommodification that shaped the labourist
agenda for much of the 20th century. To put it bluntly, it must enable people to say ‘No’ to
labour if they wish, and to be able to do so without the prospect of starvation or being pushed
into the streets to beg.13
Moving in the direction of a universal basic income as a right is the only way to achieve this.
The imagery and concepts used by the ‘socialists’ of the 20th century somehow could not
conceive of moving in that direction, and that is probably why in the end most moved
remorselessly to support workfare and the creeping welfare conditionality that characterised
mainstream social policy at the end of the century, and which has been accelerating since
then.
Meanwhile, occupational regulation must be overhauled. The global trend has been towards
stronger state regulation, through licensing, dictated by the pursuit of competition and
competitiveness. This has gone too far. The voice of the precariat and other low-rung
occupational interests has been frozen out. We must move towards democratisation of
professional and craft boards or agencies, with a specific voice for the precariat. And there
should be a presumption that an accreditation system is preferable to licensing, except when
externalities and health risks are involved.
At international level, as argued elsewhere (Standing, 2009), there must be a concerted effort
to set global occupational standards, with conversion of MRAs (Mutual Recognition
Agreements) into genuinely global arrangements, and making Mode 4 (movement of natural
persons) of the GATS a reality. One doubts that the ILO as currently constituted can achieve
that, even though it should be one of the main objectives of international migration policy.
7. Concluding Reflections
By way of conclusion, it might be useful to postulate several provocative positions.
First, we must reconceptualise work. It is much more than what we do for a boss, and more
than conveyed by labour. It includes care and reproductive work, and a lot of activities that
we must do in society if we are to function effectively. We need a radical overhaul of labour
statistics and a re-orientation to work rights, rather than ‘labour rights’.
Second, we must be careful about compartmentalising when we discuss migrants and
migration. We are all migrants in one sense; we all move around. We should refuse to
segment our thinking in terms of migrants versus non-migrants. To talk of migrants’ rights is
to suggest that they should be somehow different from those enjoyed by non-migrants. Of
course, one understands the need for international conventions, such as the UN’s Migrant
Workers’ Convention of 1990 and the ILO Conventions passed in the late 1940s. And of
13
By contrast, the precariat would gain if there were full labour commodification, which is implicitly one of the
sources of conflict between the precariat and the old core, or proletariat. The precariat, almost definitionally,
has no prospect of all those non-wage enterprise benefits enjoyed by the salariat and the upper echelons of
the unionised core. Those benefits must be universalised, or ‘socialised’. At present, they are probably more
regressively distributed than money wages.
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course we should oppose the despicable abuses of international migrants by the likes of
Berlusconi and the numerous unscrupulous politicians who portray them as the cause of local
impoverishment and deprivation. But we must not lose sight of the simple fact that we are all
migrants.
Third, the precariat as an emerging entity is intrinsically migratory. It exists “on the hoof”,
electronically, geographically, socially and – at the moment – politically. Intuitively, it stands
for a rejection not just of labourism but also of the unfreedom of entrenched localism,
including the imagined localism of conventional families.
This sense of existential liberation is profoundly radical and transformative, and is why the
precariat is really the new dangerous class. It coincides with a desire for ecological
regeneration, which it understands as a global imperative. The precariat may want to abolish
itself – or its very precariousness – but only to become global citizens or a globally
sustainable society. In this, it is so much more progressive than the proletariat could ever be.
Soon it will move out of its primitive rebel phase; it is doing so now.
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