Professor Guy Standing, the author of Precariat Charter, and Doug Saunders Globe and Mail international affairs columnist will discuss BIG, the precariat, and a new form of progressive politics.
Time and date: 6pm 10th April 2015
Venue: 170 Bloor Street West, Suite 710
Toronto ON M5S 1T9
Canada
Contact: info@spurfestival.ca
Phone 416 531-1483
Fax 416 944-8915
Please see for the detail:
SUMMARY: This article discusses the concept of a precariat, the “social class in the making” which the author describes as arising from increasing unemployment and underemployment. The concept signifies a unification of two previously identified groups: the precariously employed and the proletariat. The author argues for basic income as a way to solve the issues this emerging precariat is facing.
Stanislas Jourdan, “Le precariat: <<Une classe sociale en devenir>> [The precariat: A class in the making]” Le Souffle C’est Ma Vie” October 1, 2010.
In this interview with Stanislas Jourdan, Guy Standing discusses how the basic income would remedy some of the insecurities experienced by the ‘precariat’.
The full article is available here:
Stanislas Jourdan, “Guy Standin
g: “The Precariat is growing angry”, Boiling Frogs, 8th November 2012
‘By way of addressing security beyond the workplace, [Standing’s] most compelling suggestion is a basic citizen’s income, payable to all, which would increase the bargaining power of people at the low end, and by cutting across the orthodox benefit systems’ serial poverty traps, actually increase the incentive to work. This idea has been circulating for at least 40 years, and may take just as long to arrive in mainstream debate. But if it seems outlandish by contemporary standards, that actually only heightens its appeal: the same, after all, was once said of the most basic aspects of the welfare state; and even the weekend.’
John Harris, “A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens – review”, The Guardian, 9th April 2014.
John Harris
Abstract: This article traces present-day policy debates on precarious employment to the nineteenth century. Liberal and paternalist versions of state authority emerged as responses to early capitalist development, and precariousness was an issue that contributed to the differentiation between them. The author argues that these connections with the bases of state power help explain why radical alternative approaches [such as basic income] find it so hard to get a hearing in mainstream political circles.
Bill Jordan, “Authoritarianism and the precariat.” Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought, Volume 3, Issue 3-4, 2013, pages 388-403
