Needed: a new vocabulary of time
I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago. Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights. He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest. Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones. They have always been part of what used to be called the…
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