Understanding the Precariat through Labour and Work

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 globalizing class structure in which a ‘precariat’ is emerging as a potentially transformative new mass class. Denied so-called ‘labour rights’ and social entitlements that went with twentieth century industrial citizenship, the growing precariat needs new systems of regulation, social protection and redistribution. These should be based on work and occupation rather than subordinated labour, will require new forms of collective action and representation, and should seek to redistribute the key assets of twenty-first century tertiary societies, including income security, control of time, financial capital and the commons. INTRO: That should be the starting point in trying to come to terms with what has been happening in the ‘Global Transformation’, the painful construction of a global market system, analogous to Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation (1944), which was about the construction of national market systems. The Global Transformation, in which the globalization era may be seen as the disembedded phase, has yielded global class fragmentation, or a globalizing class structure superimposed on preceding class structures across the world. This contention has raised the hackles of some Marxists adhering to nineteenth century imagery. But understanding twenty‐first century developments is surely easier if we see a more nuanced structure than the old Marxist dualism of capitalist (bourgeoisie) and proletariat.