Guy Standing (2009) Work after Globalization. Building Occupational Citizenship. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, USA. Edgar Elgar. 366 pp. / Guy Standing (2011) The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class. New York and London. Bloomsbury Academic, 198 pp.

Abstract

Guy Standing (2009) Work after Globalization. Building Occupational Citizenship. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, USA. Edgar Elgar. 366 pp. Guy Standing (2011) The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class. New York and London. Bloomsbury Academic, 198 pp.Guy Standing is Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in the UK. He worked from 1975 to 2006 as a senior official in the International Labour Organization (ILO) within different positions: Director of labor market policies, coordinator of labor market research, Director of Central and Eastern European departments, and Director of the Socio-Economic Security Program.Few books on labor and working class issues have in recent years got more attention and caused more critical debate, than Guy Standing's The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class (2011). There has even been a book review symposium in August 2012 and a series of lectures around the world by Standing. It is interesting to note that Standing's former book Work after Globalization. Building Occupational Citizenship (2009) with more or less the same concepts, analysis, and conclusions, but more academically, theoretically, and empirically grounded, without the provocative title and descriptions, did not meet the same interest. Do authors need to use provocative language and smart new words and concepts to get attention today? Standing uses a series of creative neologisms like precariat for precarious workers, denizens for workers and others denied citizenship and labor rights, salariat for a class of salaried workers, proficians for technicians and professional workers, Chindia for China's and India's combined (pool of workers), and several other creations. On the other hand, Standing takes conceptual distinctions most seriously, critically discussing fundamental concepts of work, labor, occupation, and citizenship, and at the same time presenting a radical vision of after As Standing discusses theoretical and conceptual problems to a fuller extent in his 2009 book, the review starts with this and continues discussing The Precariat afterward.Work after Globalization goes back in labor history, before and during industrial labor regulation and welfare capitalism. Standing is especially critical of the ILO era during neoliberal globalization. Social democratic laborism and the tripartite industrial relation system, which was good in establishing national industrial citizenship, that is, labor rights for the core working class, leftinformal and precarious workers without these rights. Because of neoliberal globalization, offshoring, outsourcing, and privatization, millions of workers also lose formerly established rights. Standing makes a theoretical and empirical comprehensive and radical analysis of work during decades of neoliberal globalization with focus on occupational rights, going beyond industrial citizenship, in an attempt to reviving occupation in full freedom (chapter 9) and building basic economic security for all (chapter 10).Standing takes inspiration from Polanyi's Great Transformation (1944) and agrees with the need for socially embedding the destructive capitalist markets (2009, chapter 1). Polanyi argues theoretically for decommodification as the logical future outcome due to the need for a growing public sector and for embedded capitalist markets after the depression in the 1930s and WWII. Pressure would come from civil society to stabilize crisis-ridden capitalist market by public sector expansion and decommodification. Decommodification of labor (reproduction) is situations when persons can sustain their livelihood without reliance on the market. In 1944 Polanyi sees growing decommodification as socioeconomic progress, giving labor more job security and democratic rights by the welfare-state model. Standing finds Polanyi's view of the future market economy in Great Transformation too optimistic and points critically to the Global Transformation, as a second great transformation, which he describes as the neoliberal countermovement and end of the welfare-state capitalism (2009, chapter 3). …