Guy Standing Quotes

If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.

People in the precariat find themselves in the situation where the level of their education and qualifications is almost always higher than the sort of labour that they're going to be able to obtain.

Africa's informal economy is one of the most innovative and inventive environments in the world. Yet it is an environment with little regulation in which workers are often exposed to hard conditions and live without a safety net.

Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers.

In prosperous times, the marginal workers get by. But in tough times, they get the shaft.

In the garment trades, on the other hand, the presence of a body of the disfranchised, of the weak and young, undoubtedly contributes to the economic weakness of these trades.

Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.

With high underemployment - currently over one million part-time workers in the UK want to work more hours - sanctioning clients who cannot increase their hours seems to be both unworkable and unfair.

Control would be exercised by a few over the political conduct of the many by first acquiring that control over the labor and earnings of the great body of people.

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary worker.

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

… employers use newcomers [illegal immigrants] to drive down wages because they are … in the shadows.

By the "mud-sill" theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be -- all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all.

In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students.

Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.

Retraining for the precariat is stressful and demoralising; often, they learn new tricks only to find them obsolescent or unwanted.

Workfare will merely accentuate the growth of the low-paying, insecure labour market.

Some people welcome the flexibility of a zero-hours contract. But their growth is symptomatic of a wider issue - increasing job insecurity and falling living standards in David Cameron's Britain.

We need to roll back precarious employment models. Temporary and limited contracts were initially seen as a way of introducing more flexibility so as to bridge periods of need in certain phases of production. Some employers have taken advantage of the model to push down wages. In general, we must strive for equal pay for equal work.

I am entirely in accord with the idea that it is hardly worthwhile to try to give a better way of life to those who will not work and help themselves, but there are many, many people who work hard and for one reason or another have very little return for their labor.

[It is] a dangerous thing, it seems to me, when any one part of this country suggests that it may be a better place … merely because it has cheaper labor to offer. That never has been a thing, as far as I know, that we have been proud of.

In some countries the laboring poor were called freemen and in others they were called slaves but that the difference of the state was imaginary only…. the condition of the laboring poor in most countries, that of the fishermen particularly in the Northern states, is as abject as that of slaves.

Under the guise of trade deals and trade agreements, its [free trade] really been used to keep workers in the world suppressed in terms of their wages or qualities of life.

The Southern States have enacted Black Codes with the aim of keeping former slaves subservient to the white race and compelled to labor for low wages.

Workers all too frequently have been taking it on the chin. They're working hard and falling behind, all too frequently.