This is true in Retail. I work at Kohl's, and more often than not, the managers say "we haven't met sales" so they don't give you as many hours, or even call you not to come in on your appointed shift days. All the while, we are making our sales quotas. It's total BS. So, corporate and the store is run effectively, but they squeeze and squeeze the associates.

And after all is said and done, you work 15-20 hours a week @ $8 an hour BEFORE taxes. You NEVER work more then 38 hours a week, even during Christmas -- because they don't want to pay for benefits. I think out of approx. 75 employees, only 5 or 6 are full time. Take home pay is usually no more than $100 to $150 a week. Good luck surviving on that.

Also, the video says the UK minimum rate is £6 an hour. It's actually £5.93 from this site: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/TheNationalMinimumWage/DG_10027201

In US dollars, that's $9.64 and hour, a full 17% more then me. :(

For the record, Australia is faring a little better than other Minority ("Western") countries in this time and in regards to wages etc due to heavy regulations on the labour industry (thanks to Aus's strong union forces) and housing markets. People are still losing their jobs and homes and being forced into low-paid casual employment, but it's not as bad as places like the UK and US. Not anywhere as bad.

"The word “proletariat” refers to a member of the working class of a capitalist society."

No. A "proletarian" is a member of the “proletariat” set.

So sad to see the Corporatists, Capitalists, get the upper hand. Even in America, Wisconsin's government intent on crushing existing unions. Wages falling, world-wide, fewer Western world products bought, with paltry wages, the accountants, financiers, manipulating with the lawyers, leaving the western world proletariat helpless, defenseless. We witness the end of the Western world - it started in Detroit City, U.S.A. once proud American center of world's finest automobiles,the UAW, now, a Third World rubble! Check for yourself on this very same internet! American Middle Class now drive Asian cars. Meanwhile, Asia, fueled in part by Capital and know how, earned by American armpits, absconded to Asian stock markets by the Uber-rich, causes burgeoning growth for Asians, very high profits for the Uber Rich. We watch as the Western World, the American Empire, and its satellites fall to pieces. American Uber-Rich burn more food grade grain in their cars than the rest of the world gets to eat! The proletariat killed off by dishonest medical cartel controlled medical insurance corporations, refusing even basic care to the new class, the precariat, for the sin of irregular employment!

This is possibly the worst new word I have heard in quite a while.

Guy Standig did not coin the term precariat! Sociological discussion on the precariat has been going on for at least a decade in Italy, France, Japan, Finland and many other non-English-speaking countries!

I wouln't put this up to globalisation so diesctly - industrial work has been on the decline for a long time, but as far as I know, this particular phenomenon seems to be rather recent (correct me if I'm wrong). With strong unions and politics in favor of workers, the pressure from incomming workers shouldn't affect conditions this dramatically, since the flow isn't at that level yet. I think it has more to do with the general wave of right wing thingin that has swept over at least europe these past years. Noone would even have suggested to reduce wages for your people before or expected unemploed to put up with just about anything unless they're lazy, just like the attitues to immigrants, gay people and women have gotten worse.

As a card-carrying Marxist (and, I like to think, someone with at least a little sense of aesthetics) this portmanteau makes me cringe. The proletarian's precarious situation, full of risk, has always been the foundation of classical analysis of the working class. The relative security afforded to workers in mid-20th century first world countries is an historical aberration (albeit, of course, an important one that must be explained.) The working class of OECD countries is more classically "proletarian" than their parents were, and less so (because, in part, less precarious) than the workers in peripheral countries with whom they're entering into increased competition.

Uncle B is not anti-Asian! Uncle B begs to know: Why did the Americans with all their social and educational advantages, drop the ball? lose their automotive prowess? Why does China do billions of dollars in research on Thorium reactors, safe reactors, non-bomb producing reactors? Reactors run on cheaper and readily available, plentiful Thorium, while the U.S. remains locked in the 1950's with their hot-kettle, bomb making, inefficient, old fashioned, uninspired reactors? Why do the Uber-rich hold rights to all the Uranium in the Western world? Why does China have a nuclear/electric powered, bullet train network with an associated social infrastructure, also oil-free, and nuclear/electric powered, up and running, growing as we speak, and producing goods for world markets at less than the cost of production for the American, foreign oil powered system? Are Americans, American proletariat, slaves to the foreign oil interests? the oil barons of the world? The Corporatist, Capitalist banksters? Google, torrent the movie,"Who Stole The Electric Car", study this documentary carefully. Tell me now, just who is in control of the proletariat, who determines the fates of the common folk on the streets of America - the proletariat - today? Are American citizens, in fact, slaves locked into a system run by big business, not for the proletariat's benefit, but for the bottom line of corporations, for the dividends payed out to the Uber-Rich who live like parasites off the backs of the proletariat? Even the President, Obama, had to admit that American schools place 39th in the world! A sham education system, set up to occupy the working class until they are needed in factories, and then Asians were found to work for less, provide bigger dividends, and America's Capitalists migrated with the money, to the Shanghai, Beijing, and Hang Seng markets leaving large numbers of American proletariat stranded, without jobs? Without even factories? Without even the tools of production? Look closely at the current Third World ruins in Detroit City, and explain what really happened there!In decades! Forget the racist smoke screen set up by the propaganda machines of the time, and ask, "Where are the very tools of production?" Introspection can be embarrassing, and painful, but it is time now, in America for the truth to be told, for the bare-assed realities to be publicized, while the proletariat still survive to listen! Did you know that the Corporate Powers that be, the American Medical Cartel, owners, dividend collectors of the Health care insurance companies, refuse medical care to the folks you describe as precariat? For the sin of irregular employment, or unemployment? Is this a deliberate attempt to kill off the precariat? You bet your sweet ass it is!They find us of no use to them, they find us expensive to feed. They find us disposable in their Capitalist, Corporatist Cleptocracy!

Applying for jobs, I am constantly frustrated by the sheer amount of employers stating 20-hour or 25-hour part-time positions and no full-time. I can't support myself on 20 hours a week, nor can I find another job to fill in the extra hours I need at exactly the right times, especially since employers expect you to be able to be fully flexible as if you -were- a full-time employee.

TL;DR - It's hard, le sigh, but nice to see people other than myself addressing this issue.

I don't know why this professor Guy Standing is defined as the one coining the term Precariat.
I haven't read the book yet, but the term Precariat was firstly used by Alex Foti at the beginning of '00 in Italy in the context of Mayday Parade:
http://www.republicart.net/disc/precariat/foti01_en.htm

http://precariousunderstanding.blogsome.com/2006/07/27/chris-carlsson-interviews-alex-foti/

http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/02/raunig-strands02en#redir

And there is a lot of papers talking about that concept:
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704

`Precariat` is a term that has been used by activist groups around Europe for at least eight years. In 2003 there were several Mayday (on May 1st) demonstrations in different countries around Europe, that demanded better and more secure income for precarious people (not only part-time and low-paid workers but also students, activists, scholars and research workers, the unemployed, stay-at-home parents etc.). I participated in the one held in Helsinki, Finland. `Precariat` is a term created by the precarious activists, and while it certainly is adapted by people doing research on the subject, they shouldn't be the ones credited for it.

I find myself in the same situation. My father was under the same situation. Constantly changing jobs.

It makes me feel like I have a bleak future ahead of me. There's always the thought of learning a trade, or studying something. And not that I'm looking to leave the working class, it's just to get a better and at least more fulfilling job within the working class. Instead of being a bike messenger, being a cook, electrician, or... anything! Jobs that are so saturated with people with experience, that it seems useless to apply for them or even attempt to learn the trade. Jobs that are still in some cases low paying.

I just recently quit my job as a bike messenger. I did it for 5 years but the industry is dying, and the work is paying less, and the conditions are rough. It's scary to look at my future as a series of low paying jobs that only serve as a means of to pay the cost of living.

I'm just ranting. This hits close to home. Me and all my friends are on this ship.

The laws of incorporation, as they are in the U.S.A. are the root of a great deal of evil in the world. The were formulated a long time ago. They must be altered to accommodate more recent knowledge gains. They must be changed to include environmental factors, human factors, sustainability for human-kind, economic factors. At the moment, a small number of very rich shareholders hold far too much power, institutionalized power in some cases. America must, for its very survival, diversify its energy supplies. Total dependency on foreign oil is proving to be an Achilles heel for the empire. If the $650+ billions of dollars spent by George Bush and his oil baron cronies trouncing Iraq, had been spent developing conventional Solar/Thermal electric power, in the South Western U.S.A. America would be bountiful and fully employed today. America would have a surplus of energy for manufacturing, and would be able to compete with Asia. America, run by morons? Run for an accountant's rules for a better bottom line for share holders? Run by accountancy's rules for Higher ROI? Run by greed? Run by U.S. dollar manipulations? Run by Wall Street Banksters? Run by Lobbyists, not the votes of the proletariat?
Had NASA been commissioned, instead, to resolve the oil dependency problem, Americans may not have been the first to the Moon, or Mars, but: they would now have quite enough energy at low enough prices to maintain their World Power status, to maintain full employment, to provide free and universal health care, dental care, to all Americans, to provide free and superior education to the American proletariat, precariat, to provide a shorter work week for the common folk, the voting precariat, to build nuclear/electric bullet train networks and their associated, nuclear-powered, infrastructures for the precariat, to develop viable plug-in vehicles, to develop Wind Turbine powered villages of extreme self-sufficiency, sustainability, to build self-sufficient, sustainable, dwellings, villages, communities, for the precariat, proletariat, to build Ultra-modern factories, as in Asia, for the American proletariat. It did not happen, it will not happen in the U.S.A.! The rules of incorporation forbid it! Management versus worker paradigm forbids it, It has happened in communist China! The rules of communism, socialism, support this kind of progress! We are astounded at Chinese progress, we cannot match it! but; we had the perfect system? Only time will tell! Right now, America, with its devalued, manipulated, fiat, dollar, sinks like a stone, totally foreign-oil energy dependent, and strangled by the world market price for oil - not a good position to be in as a nation, but oh boy are the speculators having a hey-day! And at the expense of the proletariat, the precariat of the United States! Have the precariat become the new Middle Class? the armpits that pay the bills? Can they bear this load? Is the Empire dying from the center outward? Sadly, it appears that way.

England  ---- OCCUPY EVERYWHERE! 
You/we are the 99% and we cannot/will not any longer exist to make the 1% richer. Go to occupytogether.org. Find out where your local "OCCUPATION" is occurring near you, or organize one in your town. This is a global revolution against the CORPORATOCRACY that has co-opted the world governments. Join the movement now to revive the democratic process and reinstate the authority of the people over the corporate agenda which is enslaving the 99%

this neologism is first in french by Pierre Bourdieu ("Precarité), but nevermind. Also, this is pretty much the def'n of the peasantry: people who are incompletely absorbed into capitalism. So, if it strikes a chord, let the new English word fly.