The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class SPECIAL COVID-19 EDITION

anxiety, alienation, anomie and anger.

Recall how more women in the United States are doing more than one part-time job. In Japan too, women as well as men are increasingly immersed in multiple jobholding, combining what appear to be full-time jobs with informal side-jobs

neo-liberalism cements an individualism that weakens the individual, leaving the majority to drift into a precariat sphere, in no position to have realisable dreams.

The global market economy may eventually raise living standards everywhere – even its critics should wish that – but it is surely only ideologues who can deny that it has brought economic insecurity to many, many millions. The precariat is in the front ranks, but it has yet to find the Voice to bring its agenda to the fore.

However, with industrialisation came time regimentation. The nascent proletariat was disciplined by the clock, as the historian E. P. Thompson (1967) so elegantly chronicled. A national industrial market society emerged, based on enforced respect for the time, the calendar and the clock.

the global economy has no respect for human physiology.

We may be at a stage in the evolution of the precariat when those opposed to its central features – precariousness of residency, of labour and work and of social protection

Those inside the precariat have common characteristics but are not united in thinking what should be done.

This debt-driven lifestyle has created a more fragile economy vulnerable to even a minor economic shock.