The precariat. It’s apparently the social class I’ve belonged to nearly all my adult life. In the growing American class war, it is a growing class. The precariat: Those who freelance or otherwise work without traditional benefits or even minimal assurances of security. Those who live precariously.
I find the class war distressing, unnecessary, and in a major way, unAmerican (if “American” means the old melting pot and “anybody can succeed with hard work and smarts” mentality). The class war is divide and conquer. It’s all about whining and grievance and wallowing. It’s about being stuck and not making any personal effort to get unstuck because only political effort matters.
Yet I liked stumbling across this new word, precariat. It’s so wonderfully descriptive.
I came out of the working class. All our collars were blue, blue, blue. And rather frayed and faded, at that. My parents, like most of that day, wanted more for their kids and, glory hallelujah, they managed to push my siblings firmly into the middle class, sparkling clean white collars and all. (My brother, in fact, used to try to write off the three-piece suits he was required to wear for his job. He classified them as “uniforms” since he wore them nowhere but at work. The IRS would catch this wrongful deduction year after year, scold him, grab some extra money — and miss all the other equally funky tax dodges he successfully pulled off. Yes, definitely middle-class, that boy.)
Me? I may have aspired to the middle class for a while in my 20s (I’ve written before that I was, in fact, the first of the siblings to “make it” in the professional world); but I dropped out as quickly as I dropped in. Before age 30 I had, in my sister’s disdainful words, “chosen life beside a mosquito swamp” over life in the fast lane. I’ve descended farther since then.
But on the occasions I’ve had to think about class, I’ve never been sure what I am. Working class? Nope. Despite my origins and modest income, I don’t have a dirty-hands job or the mentality associated with plodding labor. Middle class? Don’t make me laugh. Bohemian artsy class? Again, nope. I am much too hardheadedly practical and hillbilly-born for that even though I write and draw and reject a lot of conventions.
But “precariat”? Yeah, that fits.
Well, better than all those other terms. I don’t quite buy that We the Precariat live quite so precariously as the pundits fear. When I first began freelancing as a young thing, a recession had hit and a lot of people “securely” employed in the ad/communications world lost their jobs. People like me got busy on the fragments of the work responsibilities they left behind.
Good members of the precariat also build relationships and reputations. I may not know exactly what day of the week or month my clients will pay me. I may not know how much I’ll earn for any given article or effort. But I know that those clients will pay me and that they’ll always do their best to treat me fairly — which is more than can be said about (for instance) the corporation that securely but miserably employed my father for 40-some years.
So yeah, “precariat” is an apt term for people like me and the growing number who live in the so-called “gig economy.”
Technically, to be in the precariat, you must also be in the proletariat: both insecure and low income. Without capital for building a real business. Selling your labor, piecemeal. Hey, I qualify again!
But what the heck. Life itself is precarious. And though the vast precariat lives on uncertainties, name me anybody who ultimately doesn’t. How many fabulously rich stock-market investors have taken spectacular falls? How many “secure” middle-class people have suddenly been rendered precarious by illness, addiction, divorce, accident, or government interference in their lives?
We are all members of the precariat as long as we’re still breathing.
What an interesting word! I may well appropriate it. From your Wikipedia link: “…the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, …” and there’s another word I must research.
The writer seems to assume, however, that all those experiencing ‘precarity,’ whatever it is, are ‘suffering’ from it. For some of us, it’s a chosen lifestyle.
For lots of others, though, probably a condition to be suffered through. When I was still trying to claw my way back into the middle class in California, before giving that up as a bad job and moving to the desert, a certain amount of mental suffering was part of the description.
Interesting reads! Thank you.
(Precariat) HEH. I love it. Now I have a word that is utterly descriptive of me. I can now look down my nose when I tell some one what I am
. When they say “HUH”, I can be artsy fartsy and uppity in my demeanor with my explanation of “Precariat”.
The term precariat may be new, but the situation described (the independent part) is certainly something that’s been around for a very long time.
My father was born in 1886 in the Dakota territories. When he left the ranch in the Black Hills, he took up hunting for the Great Northern Railway, feeding the crews that built the tracks. He was a free lance hunter, and I suspect never wanted to be anything else. In later life, he held several ordinary “jobs,” but his outlook was anything but “blue” or “white” collar.
Don’t believe that he ever saw himself or his family as “suffering” anything because of it. We had hard times, like so many others, but we were always as independent as we could be.
I got to be, more or less, like a “middle class” person for a while before I retired. Damn near kilt me. 🙂
Delightful term, and I embrace it willingly. It’s been almost 20 years since my last “day job” (though I have freelanced and contracted with about a hundred people since then, including some pizza delivery and test scoring for ‘legit’ operations). Now that I am past the Socialist inSecurity mark, I have that smidgen of what was stolen coming back as well, but have found ways to augment it anyway. Never crossed the $30K level even when I was “working for” (rather than with) someone else, but I have rarely missed a meal or lacked a roof over my head. Precariatus perpetuus!
Great term! I’ve been freelancing in one capacity or other for years, and I hate it with the fury of a thousand white-hot suns. I would mortgage my soul for a regular job.
I have a friend who is sweating bullets because the product he’s producing for his employer is getting obsolete, and the employer is going broke producing it, so he’s dreading the “pink slip” experience.
And he simply can’t comprehend working as anything but someone’s employee.
And we’re the precariat?
Steve Trinward has exactly described my biography ( I had to check my ‘pooter files to be sure it was still there … no visible foot or finger prints …) it matches my life so nearly perfectly. Minus the pizza delivery and test scoring gigs we could be twins of different mothers.
Is it allowed to act “hoity-toity” when asked what that word hand printed on my tee shirt means? I wouldn’t want to be dropped back into the “Traditional Lower Class”. I did not enjoy Poverty at all even though I have never really left it behind, as yet. Is there a distinction between the Precariat and Traditional Lower classes? Traditional Lower Precariat maybe?
My new tee (hand lettered for originality points of course) “Proud to be Traditional Lower Precariat.” Available in grey or prison orange.