Quotes About Precariat

Many in the precariat know they have to spend considerable time just waiting for opportunities to arise.

In financial affairs and dealings with the state, those in the precariat are disadvantaged since they are usually less well-informed and have to do much more to satisfy demands made on them if they want to gain meagre state benefits.

The precariat can be divided into three further groups - atavists, who look back to a lost past; nostalgics, who look forlornly for a present, a home; and progressives, who look for a lost future.

The precariat is the first class in history to be losing acquired rights - cultural, civil, social, economic, and political.

People in the precariat find themselves in the situation where the level of their education and qualifications is almost always higher than the sort of labour that they're going to be able to obtain.

In the interests of competitiveness in a globalizing world economy, governments of all complexions introduced labour-market reforms that promoted flexibility but accentuated the precariat's insecurities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It started as a youth movement, with educated disgruntled Europeans alienated by the competitive market (or neo-liberal) approach of the European Union project that was urging them on to a life of jobs, flexibility and faster economic growth. But their Eurocentric origins soon gave way to internationalism, as they saw their predicament of multiple insecurities linked to what was happening to others all over the world. Migrants became a substantial part of the precariat demonstrations.

The precariat consists of a growing proportion of our total society. It is being habituated to accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living. Often they're unable to say what their occupation is, because what they're doing now might be quite different from what they were doing three months ago.

There is already a generation of European graduates who feel they have been robbed of the better future they were led to expect. They are members of a new class: the precariat.

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.

Although the precariat does not consist simply of victims, since many in it challenge their parents' labouring ethic, its growth has been accelerated by the neoliberalism of globalisation, which put faith in labour market flexibility, the commodification of everything, and the restructuring of social protection.