Keiser Report: The Precariat - The Dangerous New Class

[marmar]

Published on Aug 1, 2015

In this special summer solutions episode of the Keiser Report Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert are joined by Guy Standing, co-President of the Basic Income Earth Network and author of The Precariat: The Dangerous New Class, to discuss the problem of declining incomes, automation of many jobs, and the rise of the Precariat. As a possible solution to the problem of ever fewer high paying jobs, they discuss basic incomes - the arguments for and against.

[merrily]

1. Precariat-wikipedia

In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare as well as being a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of lack of job security, in other words intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.[1] The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat

IOW, a USian wage earner

[Demeter]

2. The ONLY solution is true Solidarity

Communalism, sharing of resources for survival and developing means of communal production of the necessities of life.

This runs totally against the Consumer-driven grain. It's going back to the Flower Children of the 60's, without the drugs (sorry) because we won't be able to afford such escapist behaviors.

And from this nucleus of People Power, develop a Communal form of capital-formation and political power.

I personally don't think Humanity is up to it---not the male ego part, at least. But if there are enough unattached women with at least seed capital and undamaged maternal instincts....the species might survive.

If this sounds like Women's Country, make the most of it.

[Warpy]

3. There's a short BBC doc over at You Tube

that follows kids in their late teens and early 20s who might have been marginal workers in years gone by, doing unskilled work at the mines and such, but who now have absolutely no prospect of a steady job. They do jobs by the hour, a good one is walking up and down the street in a sandwich sign advertising something, that one lasts for four hours. Others might hand out leaflets for an hour or do odd jobs for an hour or two. Every job requires time to hunt it down. The pay is barely enough for one or (on a good day) two cheap fast food meals. Either they're still living with parents or they're in squats or on the street.

This is what Standing is talking about, not so much the people who work for temp agencies and have no benefits but can count on long periods of full day jobs.

I despise what is being done to workers across the west, but most specifically in the US and UK. There has to be a way to lift up workers in the third world without pushing us down so far.