'The Precariat’: A discussion with Guy Standing

An opportunity to hear Professor Guy Standing discuss his book The Precariat

The seminar will present the “Precariat” – an emerging class, comprising the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives.

“Every progressive movement has been built on the anger, needs and aspirations of the emerging major class. Today that is the precariat. The protests spreading across the world are manifestations of the precariat taking shape.” Guy Standing, The Guardian, June 1 2011

Guy Standing’s policy response to the precariat includes a Basic Income – the core of the proposal is that every legal resident of a country or community, children as well as adults, should be provided with a modest monthly income. There is growing interest in the trade union movement in a Basic Income and the discussants’ responses to Guy Standing will concentrate on this issue.

Guy Standing is a world-renowned expert on work and human security. Currently Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath, he was previously Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organisation, where he worked for 30 years.

Prof Ruth Lister is the Honorary President of the Child Poverty Action Group, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Loughborough University and a Labour member of the House of Lords. She has an outstanding reputation as an academic and as a campaigner against poverty.

Karen Jennings is UNISON’s Assistant General Secretary for negotiations, bargaining and equalities. She was previously UNISON’s senior national negotiator for health.

Free event with lunch. Room 1, 5th floor, Congress House, Great Russell Street, WC1B 3LS London, 17 January 2012 from 12pm to 2:30pm

Request more information by emailing Emma Hendy or register your interest here.

 

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A little social caution

We've all shared those water cooler moments of irritation at our managers' lack of judgement, compassion or competence, when we've let vent to whispered whinges that we hope our colleagues won't pass on and will eventually forget.

But how many of us have considered the implications of doing it online - a sniping email or a heat-of-the-moment Facebook rant?

A new report by GMB reveals that so-called 'social intelligence monitoring' of a negative 'digital footprint' can have devastating consequences if employers take advantage of a new generation of surveillance software that tracks online social activity. Updated from a 2005 GMB publication, From Workplace Watch To Social Spy: Surveillance In (And By) The Workplace by Professor Michael Blakemore reveals that deeper integration and power of surveillance technologies ensures that surveillance power is staying ahead of the rapid growth in the volume of information generated by increased computing power and software sophistication.

This runs counter to what some said in 2005, when they believed that the sheer volume of information and its distributed nature across many data sources and domains meant that 'information overload' was a protection against the information being used coherently.

Paul Campbell, GMB Organiser, said: "There has been a rapid blurring of the boundaries between private and public information. Individuals are leaving a massive digital footprint that can be used against them which will remain in cyberspace forever.

"Employers and employees need to develop protocols for dealing with this vast quantity of information. GMB in this report is giving advice to members as to what to do and not do so that they don't become a victim of this new 'Social Spy' technology."

GMB's summary of dos and don'ts show how not to leave a trail of incriminating evidence that could be harvested by an employer using these new surveillance technologies.

 

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We're all in this together?

Janet Daley has conflated technological advance and economic growth, which I’m fairly certain she spends most of her other life extolling, and must have lived in a very different 1960s and 70s to me.

Single mothers were mostly reviled, not used as cuddly childminders you kept in the attic; my black neighbours and Irish family were faced daily with outright bigotry; homosexuality was only partially decriminalised in ‘67; my mother didn’t go out to work because we didn’t own a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner and most of her time was spent doing housework; my father decided what went on TV because he was the ‘head of the house’; when we didn’t have a car, we walked or used public transport so I saw my grandmother rarely because she lived an expensive train journey away in...Cheshire.

Nowadays, people like me can have a (15-year-old) car to get to work in, can study independently because we own computers, keep in touch with friends and family and stay up to date with current affairs, and even drop a thought or two of our own in, because we have smartphones.

That’s what the elite – the political leaders, the rich, the chattering classes – are threatened by: the erosion of their influence by the democratisation of knowledge and autonomy: ‘chavs’ like me have the same access to what they’ve had for a long time; people have fought for and won equality, as a political right, with the few who could afford it back in the golden era when we were all under their ‘superior’ thumb. The hypocrisy of the meritocrat is that they are always more meritorious than the rest of us.

On the other hand, we have 2.5m people out of work, nearly 1m or 25% of our young people; we’re seeing pay freezes and pension cuts; the financial sector gambles with our money and takes tax handouts when it goes wrong; politicians think they’re above the law; corporations are fleecing us and trying to make profit out of our public services.

So it’s not about social breakdown, or celebrity culture, or individual ‘acquisitiveness’. It’s a social revolution: people just aren’t engaged in the existing political and economic infrastructures and they’re beginning to do something about it.

Paul Mason says it much better than I can: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15326636.

And here are the four charts that explain what the protesters are angry about... http://read.bi/4Charts.

 

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NHS vigil

The social contract is being all but torn up by the coalition government, without the rigour of proper parliamentary or democratic consultation, in its various attempts to privatise and marketise huge swathes of publicly funded services - the 'big society' philosophy of collective taxation that existed decades before David Cameron ever copycatted the inimical discourse of subordinating everything to free-market economics, subjecting ordinary working class citizens to his ideologically driven scorched-earth policy of public cost-cutting, driven in tandem with his laissez-faire attitude to the feral rich, or his underplaying of the responsibility those in authority must share for the very worrying recent spate of criminal activity we saw on our very own streets in Birmingham.

I am extremely worried about our public services, but in particular I fear for the very existence of the NHS given the current plans. Up-to-date legal advice suggests that big problems remain. The legal opinion is here: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/NHS-legal-advice.

One of the key issues highlighted in the legal opinion is that the Secretary of State’s duty to provide a National Health Service is removed, which effectively washes the government’s hands of responsibility for provision. While Obama fights to universalise America's health service, the coalition is opening up the NHS to potentially become a system riddled with inequality and unfairness.

Other problems identified include exposing the NHS to competition law; allowing private companies to be paid to work on NHS commissioning; eroded political accountability for the health service; and money wasted on costly procurement procedures.

 

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Alternative Vote or First Past The Post?

 

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March for the Alternative