Precariat (precarious + proletariat) is a term coined by Gary Standing to describe a newly emerging socio-economic category composed of low-paid workers who lack work-based identity and various forms of labour security. In his book, he (in)famously warns that the precariat threatens the current economic order, because poor working conditions, alienation and frustration fuel disobedient and revolutionary tendencies among its members.¹

Standing’s concept has multiple shortcomings. First and foremost, he fails to recognise that due to colonialism and imperialism, precarity has been the standard condition of work (and life) for the majority of people in peripheral countries.² Moreover, even in the global core, precarious labour conditions are something ‘new’ primarily to the members of the middle-class, as the characteristics listed by Standing have historically been the norm for the members of the working class. Labour precarity has also been strongly gendered – with women being socially conditioned to perform unpaid labour – and racialised – with people of colour being structurally discriminated against and exploited through the labour market. 

Another important criticism is that the notion of precariat collapses distinct “variations of precarity into some stable, undivided subject position”.³ People structurally deprived of prospects for upward mobility become lumped together with higher-paid creatives and recent graduates. Thus, what is often discussed as a homogenous group, combines people experiencing a varying degree of vulnerability and different, sometimes even conflicting, interests. Consequently, the narratives in favour of the members of the precariat often actually concern only a particular group within it, namely educated youth who suffer from job uncertainty but possess the platform and digital literacy to raise awareness about it.

For example, in her fieldwork based in Seoul, Cho distinguishes the precariat that can speak, namely university graduates discursively framed as the deserving precariat, and the urban poor (welfare recipients, homeless people, people with disabilities) who continue to be marginalised and abandoned in public debates.⁴ If anything, the latter group is more likely to be labelled as the precariat in the stigmatising sense formulated by Standing, who describes the precariat as explosive and prone to political manipulation and has thus been accused of contributing to the discursive villainisation of the working class as disobedient and quarrelsome.⁵

The question of whose precarity matters is therefore strongly linked to class/race/gender divides, as well as the levels of educational and cultural capital. To avoid turning the precariat into another label pathologising the poor, it is imperative to employ an intersectional perspective that accounts for all these factors. That being said, increasing claims for being noticed and acknowledged as the precariat, suggest that precarity, rather than an exception, is a standard condition of all workers under capitalism (though to a different degree). If anything, critical discussions about the precariat are useful for amplifying the idea that precarity of labour is a condition necessary for creation of capital - understanding that every worker’s sustenance is contingent on their ability to sell their labour allows us to position “insecurity at the heart of wage-labour, rather than [as] the condition of its absence”.⁶ Thus, approaching precarity as a standard, rather than exceptional, human condition under capitalism, creates careful yet hopeful potential for allyship across different social positions.