Words matter. These are the best Guy Standing Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Globalisation, technological change, and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers – those owning financial, physical, or so-called intellectual property – while real wages stagnate.
Capital is taxed much less than labour; subsidies going to capital, the rich, and middle-income earners greatly exceed the benefits going to the precariat and underclass.
People, in general, want to improve their lives and the lives of their children and other loved ones.
What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.
A primary justification for a basic income is social justice.
Chronic insecurity will not be overcome by minimum wage laws, tax credits, means-tested benefits, or workfare.
Collective action remains the best way of renewing the march towards the great trinity of liberty, equality, and solidarity.
Think of how much time is spent looking and applying for jobs. Some of those who have read my book on the precariat have told me they have applied for thousands of jobs. This is scarcely leisure; it is work.
Millions of people in many so-called democratic countries have lost the right to vote, or never obtain it. And millions clearly feel that the political mainstream is not articulating a vocabulary or policies oriented to their needs and aspirations.
Many low-income people in the U.S.A. charged with a crime opt to plead guilty to a lesser offence because they cannot afford to go to trial.
Politicians should reflect on the well-documented fact that fearful, insecure people lose their sense of tolerance and altruism.
If schooling becomes little more than preparation for the job market and consumption, it cannot produce socially responsible and altruistic citizens.
The Latin root of ‘precariousness’ is ‘to obtain by prayer.’ The precariat must ask for favours, for charity, to show obsequiousness, to plead with figures of authority. It is degrading and stigmatizing.
Politicians seem desperate to appeal to their respective versions of the so called ‘middle class,’ unable to empathise with the precariat and eager to dream up fresh and tougher sanctions against society’s wounded.
If the scale of gas is anything like the claims made by its advocates, it has major implications for the economy and British society. Besides its worrying environmental aspects, it could have adverse effects on income distribution.
If I care for an elderly relative without payment, it is not work, is not counted in national income, and, as it is not labour, is not counted as work. Should my neighbour pay me to do precisely the same tasks, it would contribute to economic growth.
Since all political parties blame the others for the economic mess, it is unfair to attribute unemployment to individual behaviour.
If you had a basic income, it would mean that everybody would have a base on top of which their earned income would be taxed at the standard rate of tax. That would increase the incentive to take low-wage jobs.
We are in an era of chronic insecurity and growing inequalities. In that context, we need to have new mechanisms for income distribution which give people a sense of security.
The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that, in many cases, are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.
The precariat is the first class in history to be losing acquired rights – cultural, civil, social, economic, and political.
Many in the precariat know they have to spend considerable time just waiting for opportunities to arise.
A multi-tier social protection system must be based on a modest basic income so as to enable the precariat to build lives involving a balance of different types of work, not just labour in jobs.
Think how modern economics presents work. Only labour that contributes to growth counts.
In the old 20th-century income distribution system, the shares of income going to capital, mainly in profits, and labor, in wages and non-wage benefits, were roughly stable. But that system is no more.
Twentieth-century welfare state capitalism was historically unique in that national income was split between wages and profits, labour and capital.
Sanctions and workfare make it easier for employers to impose insecure practices on desperate people.
The precariat is today’s mass class, which is both dangerous, in rejecting old political party agendas, and transformative, in wanting to become strong enough to be able to abolish itself, to abolish the conditions of insecurity and inequality that define it.
The precariat has been losing cultural rights in that those in it feel they cannot and do not belong to any community that gives them secure identity or a sense of solidarity and reciprocity, of mutual support.
The precariat faces chronic uncertainty about what to do, about what incomes to expect, about state benefits that might be their due, about their relationships, their homes, and about the occupations they can realistically expect.
