Guy Standing

• SOAS University of London

Since 1980, the global economy has undergone a dramatic transformation, with the globalization of the labour force, the rise of automation, and—above all—the growth of Big Finance, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. The social democratic consensus of the immediate postwar years has given way to a new phase of capitalism that is leaving workers further behin...

Rozdział książki Guya Standinga „Basic Income: And How Can We Make It Happen”. Autor analizuje szereg rozwiązań będących odpowiedzią na kryzysy gospodarcze, nierówności i ubóstwo: płacę minimalną, składkowe ubezpieczenia społeczne, pomoc społeczną opartą na kryterium dochodowym, dotowanie żywności, ulgi podatkowe, programy workfare i gwarancję zatr...

This comment critiques the concept of "the informal sector" and explains the meaning of the precariat in considering the perspectives of the authors of the articles in this special issue.

This article argues that the emancipatory value of a basic income is greater than its monetary value, drawing on the results of a large-scale basic income scheme conducted in the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh between 2010 and 2013. The scheme was evaluated by comparing households in villages where everyone received a small cash payment each month...

In this interview Guy Standing outlines the main links between the precariat and the universal basic income. He briefly comments on the relationships of his work to traditional Marxism, and expands his critique of the precariat towards information and communication technologies. He identifies common features of the global precariat, and links them...

Karl Widerquist, Jose A. Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, Jurgen De Wispelaere (eds.) (2013), Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. 606 pp., £120.00, hbk. - Volume 45 Issue 1 - GUY STANDING

The world economy is in the midst of a Global Transformation that is producing a new global class structure. A new class is emerging – the precariat – characterised by chronic uncertainty and insecurity. Although the precariat is still a class­in-the-making, divided within itself, its elements are united in rejecting old mainstream political tradit...

Today's migrants are an integral part of the global precariat, this chapter argues. This involves millions of people flitting among insecure jobs without an occupational identity or secure access to social benefits. Precarians are 'denizens', rather than 'citizens', deprived of rights that citizenship normally includes. The precariat is divided int...

Would it be possible to provide people with a basic income as a right? The idea has a long history. This book draws on two pilot schemes conducted in the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh, in which thousands of men, women and children were provided with an unconditional monthly cash payment. In a context in which the Indian government at national and...

Economist Guy Standing explains how millions of people are in the precariat, and in defining this emerging class, points to the dangerous political and social consequences as well as the exciting progressive revival that this class could produce.

This article sets out a framework for analysing the globalizing labour process, arguing that the old dualisms of ‘capital’ versus ‘labour’ and ‘formal sector’ versus ‘informal sector’ are inadequate and unhelpful. It begins by making conceptual distinctions between work and labour and between labour and labour power, and goes on to identify a globa...

This paper discusses my new book, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014), which builds on key arguments from my 2011 book which introduced the Precariat as an emerging mass class, characterized by inequality and insecurity. A Precariat Charter discusses how rights - political, civil, social and economic - have been denied to the Prec...

Neoliberalism, stemming from the musings of the Mont Pelerin Society after the Second World War, meant a model of liberalization, commodification, individualism, the privatization of social policy as well as production, and – least appreciated – the systematic dismantling of institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity. From the late 1970s onwa...

The world economy is in the midst of a Global Transformation that is producing a new global class structure. A new class is emerging - the precariat - characterised by chronic uncertainty and insecurity. Although the precariat is still a class­‑in­‑the­‑making, divided within itself, its elements are united in rejecting old mainstream political tra...

Progressive politics has always been about the struggle to reduce social inequities and inequalities. What takes priority depends on the type of society we live in. Today people in rich countries live in societies that are tertiary, not industrial, in that what they do is largely covered by “services.” In a tertiary society, one iniquitous form of...

Economic liberalisation associated with globalisation is causing a pervasive growth of economic insecurity experienced all over the world. This is placing urgent demands on policymakers to rethink old policies and institutions. This book sets out a new approach to the assessment of income dynamics, based on identifying the diverse components of peo...

Liberalized markets promoted by the Washington Consensus under globalization have resulted in a global class structure in which new groups have emerged, including a precariat consisting of millions of people subject to flexible, insecure labor relations. The precariat is a class-in-the-making, in that the global market system wants most workers to...

This article makes the proposition that a right to work can only exist if an individual has a prior right to a basic income. It criticizes the perspective that maximizing the number of jobs is a meaningful way of advancing the right to work, since activity in subordinated labour is scarcely consistent with a freedom-enhancing right to work. In reca...

In the basic needs literature remarkably little critical attention has been devoted to the role of labour. In this paper the prevailing dominant approach to the notion of basic needs and t)1e basic needs 'strategy' of development is criticised, primarily for neglecting human labour as a central, integrating life activity. It is argued that two alte...

Die Diskussion um das Grundeinkommen wird sowohl international als auch in Deutschland sehr intensiv geführt. Dabei ist auffällig, dass die weit überwiegende Zahl der Beiträge, die sich mit dem Vorschlag des Grundeinkommens beschäftigen, sich im Kern um zwei Fragen drehen. Zum einen um die Frage, ob ein Grundeinkommen gerecht ist oder nicht. Zum an...

Anniversaries are poignant human moments, points on a journey, never an end in themselves. Twenty-five years ago, on September 4–6, 1986, a small group of us held a workshop on basic income and on September 6 decided to set up a network, BIEN. The memory is blurred; the documentation is scattered. However, this twenty-fifth anniversary is a testame...

Standing G. Labour market policies, poverty and insecurity Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 260–269 © 2011 United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. The article sets out to evaluate the performance of the conv...

Workfare is the wrong policy response to the insecurities and inequalities inherent in a flexible market economy. It does nothing to counter these insecurities and inequalities and represents an abandonment of universalistic and solidaristic principles. Instead, it subjects a growing minority to coercive measures and immiseration, while allowing th...

The use of behavioural conditionality has spread globally and is linked to the growth of behavioural economics and libertarian paternalism. This comment questions the ethics and effectiveness of this powerful trend and considers the alternative of moving towards universalism and unconditionality.

This article reviews some of the mainstream policies proposed to tackle the economic crisis of 2008-09 and its aftermath, and goes on to advocate a policy of economic stabilisation grants (ESGs). It argues that ESGs, which would be paid to every citizen at a rate that could be varied according to the severity of the crisis, would be more effective...

Drawing on a household and village-level community survey of social income, this paper offers a critique of the widespread use of targeting in Indian social policy primarily through the use of the below poverty line card system, to include or exclude groups from access to subsidised goods and sometimes to public works. It argues that targeting is i...

This article suggests that social scientists should shift from labour to broader concepts of work and, in particular, a new sense of occupation, in which people combine forms of activity that cross the boundaries set by old labour concepts. We live in a tertiary society, not an industrial society. With this perspective, it is suggested that ideas o...

This is an important book. It shifts emphasis from the role of capital to the creativity of labour in the creation of value in the real economy. A central role is accorded to each and all of the skills and occupations which contribute to the construction of an economy and a civic culture governed by the public interest. Guy Standing has made an ori...

The first section considers the issue of prohibiting or limiting child work activity, which amounts to the commonly accepted notion of child labour policy. The second section considers ameliorative labour market policies that seem likely to be introduced or at least offer critics some opportunity of achieving change, attempting to identify the impl...

Casualisation has both negative and positive sides, for both workers and employers. This article considers how the positive sides could be developed while allowing casual work to continue to grow. In reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of casual labour for employers, the paper depicts casualisation (and the related process of ‘informalisatio...

Conceptualizing decent work in terms of socio-economic security, the authors present three sets of composite indexes with which to measure the occurrence of the requisite forms of security at the macro, meso and micro levels. At each of these three levels country, enterprise, individual worker - sub-indexes measure "inputs", processes and actual ou...

L'auteur expose la conception des enquetes sur la securite des personnes (PSS), destinees a observer sept formes de securite liees au travail constitutives du travail decent, a mettre en evidence les aspirations et le sens de la justice sociale des populations, a evaluer, enfin, l'impact des politiques et des institutions. Apres avoir explique sous...

Traduciendo el concepto de trabajo decente en terminos de seguridad socioeconomica, los autores presentan tres indices compuestos destinados a valorar las distintas facetas de la seguridad en los niveles macro (el pais), meso (la empresa) y micro (el trabajador individual). Los subindices aplicados en cada uno de estos tres niveles miden los "insum...

Guy Standing agrupa los diversos indicadores elaborados en un indice general. A titulo ilustrativo, presenta un ejemplo con los datos recogidos en Indonesia. Concretamente, Standing combina los indicadores de las seis formas de seguridad -- ingresos, del empleo, profesional, en el trabajo, de formacion profesional y de representacion -- para constr...

The author reports on the development of People's Security Surveys, which are designed to track the seven forms of work-related security comprising decent work, to highlight people's aspirations and sense of social justice, and to measure the impact of policies and institutions thereon. After outlining the main aspects of this instrument (which rel...

The International Labour Organization, set up in 1919 to develop and promote labour standards, is at a crucial point. It has preached that labour is not a commodity and in 1969 received the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then it has run into trouble. This article considers how the ILO has failed to come to terms with the Global Transformation, seeing it...

Just prior to the 2007 General Election, a group of labour lawyers and economists, broadly sympathetic to the Labor Party, produced a Charter of Employment Rights. This article examines the Charter's proposals and its underlying framework, and suggests significant aspects of work and labour have been omitted. It contends that the Charter would have...

There has long been a minority view that providing people with cash is an effective way of combating poverty and economic insecurity while promoting livelihoods and work. The mainstream view has nevertheless been that giving people money, without conditions or obligations, promotes idleness and dependency, while being unnecessarily costly. This pap...

The world is in the midst of a Global Transformation, reflecting the painful creation of a global market society. Globalization was the disembedded phase, in which inequalities and insecurities multiplied as national systems of regulation, social protection and redistribution were dismantled or broke down. This reflected the collapse of labourism a...

One Pager #44 del CIP, ?Dolores del Crecimiento?, argumenta que los programas de transferencia monetaria deben convertirse en un elemento permanente en el �mbito de la protecci�n social en pa�ses en v�as de desarrollo. Este One Pager da un paso m�s en cuanto a esa l�gica al abogar por una subvenci�n universal de los ingresos como base fundamental p...

There has long been a minority view that providing people with cash is an effective way of combating poverty and economic insecurity while promoting livelihoods and work. The mainstream view has been that giving people money, without conditions or obligations, promotes idleness and dependency, while being unnecessarily costly. Better, they contend,...

The term 'social protection' has been widely used around the world and is often treated as synonymous with 'social security', which is misleading. This article considers the numerous terms that have become part of the language of social protection, indicating that the image conveyed by the term is rather different from what is meant by it.

The growth of voluntary initiatives to promote socially responsible business practices has been accompanied by a chorus of criticisms, including claim that much of the activity has been public relations and attempt to deter governments from implementing effective regulations. This paper reviews various types of self-regulating initiative and campai...

Offshoring is an aspect of labor market restructuring that has caught popular attention in the United States, but it has attracted nothing like as much attention in other parts of the world compared with other aspects. Offshoring is a metaphor. It is just one manifestation of fear that is characterizing the globalization of labor market flexibility...

The twentieth century saw the rise and fall of industrial citizenship. The essence of the “embedding” phase of that transformation was the advance of labor-based entitlements, which was a type of labor decommodification.1 In the last quarter of the century, those entitlements were eroded almost everywhere, marking the demise of industrial citizensh...

Just a month after the tsunami may seem early to think of the post-emergency phase, but unless policies are devised correctly now, piecemeal efforts will come when there should be a strategy in place. Many assistance proposals made so far have been predicated on depicting the disaster in terms of a job crisis. However, it should essentially be seen...

This article argues that because of the changing character of work and labour in the context of globalisation, progressives and particularly trade unionists could make a basic income a key part of their agenda. It considers the standard objections and then reviews the various advantages of moving in that direction, towards the realisation of a repu...

Publications of the International Labour Office enjoy copyright under Protocol 2 of the Universal Copyright Convention. Nevertheless, short excerpts from them may be reproduced without authorization, on condition that the source is indicated. For rights of reproduction or translation, application should be made to the ILO Publications Bureau (Right...

While in the position of Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz produced a string of papers, one of which proposed moving beyond the ‘Washington consensus’ to a ‘new development paradigm’, which he hoped the World Bank would espouse. This article offers a critique of that paper and the premises underlying any attempt to reposition an in...

The paper discusses the changing social, economic and political context which is diluting most forms of social protection that prevail in developed as well as developing countries. The welfare state is being destroyed in content. At the same time the trade unions have been weakened. The paper decomposes social income into its various forms, such as...

The 20th century has been the century of the labouring man. It has been also the century when the working class scared rulers almost everywhere, has been twice decimated by world conflagrations, trudged out in support of two competing socioeconomic systems ostensibly dedicated to its interests, and has ended the century by splintering in disarray.

This article provides an overview of recent changes in the former Soviet Union and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. State regulation has been reduced through relaxation of statutory prescriptions and through privatization. Trade unions often retain significant nominal representative status, but have little effective regulatory power,...

The economic and social reforms instigated in the Russian Federation since 1991 have been widely depicted as a success or as setting the framework for success. This article draws on various official and unofficial data to show the depths of poverty, inequality and distress that have been involved, including evidence on de clining life expectancy, r...

U ovom radu nastoje se razjasniti bitni politicki konflikti koji se pojavljuju u zemljama Istocne i Srednje Europe. Pažnja je usredotocena na ona podrucja socijalne politike u kojima jos uvijek nije postignuta suglasnost o mogucim rjesenjima, a koja mogu znacajno utjecati na nastanak novog socijalnog sustava. Analiza je ogranicena uglavnom na one z...

This article provides an overview of recent changes in the former Soviet Union and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. State regulation has been reduced, both through privatization and through the relaxation of statutory prescriptions, though new `framework' legislation has been implemented. The former commitment to full employment has b...

This article considers the international trends to more flexible labour relations in terms of the erosion of seven forms of labour-related personal security and the evolving forms of labour market regulation. It suggests that growing labour market flexibility has been accompanied by a reconstitution of the social wage and a profound re-regulation o...

At the end of the 20th century, after four world conferences on women, debates on the impact of economic development on the lives and status of women — including their life-options and opportunities for betterment — continue unresolved. Is patriarchy on the decline, or is it merely its form that is changing? What effect does development have on gen...

Incl. bibliographical notes

The following is based largely on the fourth round of the Russian Labour Flexibility Survey, carried out in mid-1994 in five magor industrial regions of the Russian Federation, covering over 303,000 workers. The main issues relate to the labour market and employment impact of the economic upheavals of 1991-94 and of the process of enterprise restru...

Unemployment in Russia between 1991 and 1993 could be considered low by international standards. In mid-1993, it was less than 1 percent, and this was against the background of a continuing decline in production and an actual reduction in employment.

With national income and industrial output plunging, and an uncertain shock therapy reform process reaching a crisis, the Russian economy was in a parlous state in 1992 when the survey on which the following analyses are based was carried out. Labor market trends were dismal, and inadequate attention was being given to unemployment, which was alrea...

National output has fallen drastically in Russia in the past three years, and there is evidence that employment has also fallen substantially. Yet officially unemployment has only risen to a little over 1 per cent. This paper argues that in reality unemployment is very substantially higher. It draws in part on a survey of job- seekers registering a...

In the early stages of the industrial restructuring process, Russian industry changed property forms remarkably quickly as managements and work collectives took advantage of the breakdown of the command system, although they did not become fully privatized. The main question this paper addresses is whether the property form restructuring induced be...

Women have played a prominent role in Russian industry. This paper draws on data from the first two rounds of the Russian Labor Flexibility Survey to assess whether the economic and employment changes that occured in 1990–1992 led to their displacement from jobs to a greater or lesser extent than for men. It examines the extent of explicit discrimi...

Perestroika in the Soviet Union has necessitated a radical transformation of the labour market. This book encompasses a broad range of views of labour policy-makers and economists from the USSR and abroad. It analyzes recent developments in employment, unemployment, wages and social protection.

Trades unions potentially have both beneficial and adverse effects for workers and for employing enterprises. In recent supply-side "structural adjustment" strategies, particularly in developing countries, it has been widely presumed that unions have adverse effects and constitute a major source of "market distortion" and labor market rigidity. Thi...

The emerging "Finnish Model" of social labour markets is likely to be a source of growing international interest in the 1990s. This book examines Finland's reputation for economic dynamism and social welfare in the face of the challenges raised by structural adjustment. Prominence is given to the 1987 Employment Act, intended to promote near-full e...

Is it possible to identify the enterprise whose "human resource' practices are exemplary in terms of both equity and efficiency? Using detailed data from a survey of over 1300 enterprises in the Philippines, this exploratory article constructs a series of indices designed to measure performance in recruitment, training, industrial relations and oth...