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The Global Precariat: Statistics

The emergence of the precariat as a distinctive social class represents one of the most significant transformations in global labor markets over the past several decades. The term itself, a portmanteau of "precarious" and "proletariat," describes a growing segment of the workforce characterized by unstable employment arrangements, lack of occupational identity, erosion of labor rights, and chronic economic insecurity. Unlike the industrial proletariat of the twentieth century, which possessed stable employment relationships and could rely on collective bargaining institutions and welfare state protections, the precariat exists in a condition of persistent uncertainty regarding work, income, and social security. This class formation encompasses millions of workers across both advanced industrial economies and developing nations, manifesting through various employment forms including temporary contracts, part-time work, zero-hours contracts, gig economy arrangements, and informal employment. Understanding the scale and distribution of the precariat requires examining statistical evidence across different regions while recognizing that measurement challenges and definitional variations complicate precise quantification.

At the global level, the most comprehensive proxy for precarious work comes from data on informal employment, which the International Labour Organization tracks systematically. The number of workers in informal employment has grown substantially over recent decades, rising from approximately 1.7 billion in 2005 to surpass 2 billion in 2023 and 2024. This figure represents roughly 58 percent of the global workforce, indicating that more than half of all workers worldwide operate outside formal employment relationships that would typically provide benefits, legal protections, and social security coverage. The ILO's World Employment and Social Outlook reports indicate that while informal employment rates have returned to near pre-pandemic levels, the absolute number of informal workers continues to grow due to expansion of the global labor force. More than one in two workers globally remain in informal employment as of 2024, a statistic that underscores the pervasive nature of labor market insecurity across both developing and developed economies. These workers often face conditions associated with low productivity, poverty, insufficient wages, and underemployment, while being denied fundamental rights at work and lacking access to adequate social protection systems.

The gender dimension of precarious work reveals particularly stark disparities. Women are disproportionately represented in informal and insecure employment arrangements globally, with approximately 80 percent of jobs created for women occurring in the informal economy, compared to roughly 66 percent for men. In low-income countries specifically, up to 92 percent of employed women work in informal employment, compared with 87 percent of men. This overrepresentation of women in precarious work intersects with broader patterns of labor market inequality, as women of working age are employed at significantly lower rates than men—45.6 percent compared to 69.2 percent globally in 2024—a gap of 23.6 percentage points primarily attributed to family responsibilities and unpaid care work. Moreover, women's earnings remain substantially lower than men's across all income levels, with women in high-income countries earning approximately 73 cents for every dollar earned by men, while in low-income countries this disparity widens dramatically to just 44 cents per dollar. These gender-based inequalities in both employment access and compensation compound the vulnerability experienced by women in the precariat.

The Precariat in the United States

The American precariat presents a distinctive profile shaped by the specific institutional features of the United States political economy. While precise statistics on the size of the precariat in the United States vary depending on definitional criteria, research suggests that approximately 85 percent of American workers remain in what might be termed "traditional" employment arrangements, though the conditions and security associated with such arrangements have deteriorated markedly over recent decades. This figure implies that roughly 15 percent of the workforce experiences more overtly precarious employment forms, though this likely underestimates the true extent of labor market insecurity given the erosion of benefits, wage stagnation, and declining job quality even within formally stable employment relationships. The United States stands out among advanced economies for having one of the largest low-wage sectors as a percentage of the total workforce, with projections suggesting that over 80 percent of new non-managerial, non-professional jobs created between 2014 and 2024 fall into the official low-income range below $32,390 annually, with more than a third in the very low range below $21,590.

Comparative analysis reveals that the United States performs poorly relative to other developed nations on multiple indicators of labor market precarity. In terms of in-work poverty—defined as individuals living in households with at least one worker whose employment income remains insufficient to lift them above the poverty line—the United States ranks among the worst performers in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, with levels comparable only to economically weaker European nations such as Italy, Greece, and Spain. The persistence of in-work poverty despite employment reflects broader structural features of the American labor market, including weak labor protections, limited collective bargaining coverage, minimal social insurance, and the prevalence of low-wage service sector employment. Research applying Guy Standing's precariat class schema to the U.S. workforce from 1980 to 2018 demonstrates that this class, characterized by unstable and benefit-free jobs, comprises a large and growing share of American workers, while the traditional working class has shrunk precipitously. This transformation has been accompanied by rising income inequality, with the precariat bearing disproportionate burdens from wage stagnation, benefit erosion, and exposure to economic shocks.

The American precariat's invisibility represents a particular challenge for policy and political mobilization. As some scholars have noted, the precariat in the United States may be so ubiquitous that it becomes difficult to perceive, hidden in plain sight across multiple sectors of the economy. The proliferation of terminology—the gig economy, the sharing economy, the servant economy—sometimes obscures more than it illuminates about fundamental transformations in employment relationships. While public discourse focuses heavily on highly visible platform-based gig work such as rideshare driving and food delivery, these arrangements represent only a fraction of precarious employment. The broader phenomenon encompasses retail workers, food service employees, healthcare workers, educators, and numerous other occupations experiencing declining security, benefits, and wages. The fragmentation or "fissuring" of employment relationships through extensive subcontracting and franchising arrangements allows large corporations to externalize labor costs and risks onto workers while maintaining operational control, a pattern that has accelerated over recent decades.

European Perspectives on Precarity

Across Europe, a new precariat has formed comprising millions of people who maintain employment but struggle to achieve economic security and decent living standards. In the eurozone alone, more than 5.5 million people found employment between 2012 and the late 2010s, yet approximately four out of five of these jobs were part-time or fixed-term positions, largely characterized by low pay according to European statistical agencies. Survey data from the European Council on Foreign Relations reveals stark indicators of financial precarity among European populations, with only one-third of Germans and one-quarter of Italians and French reporting sufficient money remaining at the end of each month for discretionary spending. These figures suggest widespread difficulty in achieving economic security even among those who are formally employed, pointing to broader patterns of wage stagnation and rising living costs that characterize contemporary European labor markets.

The European precariat emerged through specific policy and economic trajectories that scholars have characterized as a "regime of competition" fostered by neoliberal reforms and the constitutional asymmetry of European integration. This asymmetry, identified in early conceptualizations of the European Union's development, prioritizes policies promoting market efficiency while retarding policies guaranteeing social protection and equality. The result has been systematic deregulation of employment conditions under pressures of internationalization and marketization, accompanied by reductions in social protection and the promotion of supply-side employment policies focused on matching existing skills rather than developing new capabilities. This reorientation transformed employment relationships from systems providing protection of employment toward systems promoting competition for employment, delivering what some observers term "a war among the poor" that has produced a precarious younger generation facing diminished prospects compared to previous cohorts. The COVID-19 pandemic particularly highlighted and exacerbated these underlying vulnerabilities, with precarious workers in sectors such as hospitality, retail, and personal services experiencing severe income disruptions and limited access to social safety nets.

Regional variations within Europe reflect different institutional configurations and labor market structures. The United Kingdom's Great British Class Survey of 2013, conducted collaboratively by the BBC and researchers from several universities, identified a seven-class structure with the precariat occupying the bottom tier, described as the most deprived class with low levels of economic, cultural, and social capital. This conceptualization contrasts the precariat with middle-class groups that may possess disposable income but limited cultural engagement, while the precariat possesses interests and aspirations but lacks the financial resources and security to pursue them. Mediterranean countries such as Spain show particularly acute manifestations of precarity, with more than 37 percent of families in the Barcelona metropolitan area spending over 40 percent of their income on housing costs, well above the European average of 25 percent. Such housing cost burdens compound employment precarity, creating situations where even those with jobs face chronic financial stress and limited ability to plan for the future or invest in skill development.

In Japan, a distinctive variant of the precariat has emerged, numbering over 2 million people according to available estimates. The Japanese context features particular cultural and institutional dimensions, with precarious workers sometimes characterized by terms such as freeter (a combination of "free" and arbeiter, the German word for worker) or categorized alongside NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training). The Japanese precariat reflects broader transformations in that nation's employment system, which historically provided significant job security through lifetime employment practices at major corporations but has increasingly shifted toward more flexible and insecure arrangements, particularly affecting younger workers and women. These patterns suggest that precarity represents a genuinely global phenomenon affecting advanced industrial economies across different regional and cultural contexts, though specific manifestations vary according to institutional legacies and policy frameworks.

Precarity in Developing Countries and Least Developed Countries

In developing countries and least developed countries, precarity takes forms that are even more pervasive and severe than in advanced industrial nations, with informal employment serving as the dominant mode of labor market participation for the majority of workers. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa exhibit the highest levels of informality globally, while Europe and East Asia show the lowest rates. In 2019, approximately 2 billion persons were in informal employment worldwide, representing six in ten workers, with roughly eight in ten enterprises operating informally. The distribution varies considerably by national income level, with informal enterprises ranging from five in ten in high-income countries to nine in ten in low-income countries. This massive scale of informal employment reflects structural features of developing economies, including limited formal sector job creation relative to labor force growth, weak regulatory enforcement capacity, prevalence of subsistence and semi-subsistence agriculture, and urban labor markets dominated by small-scale commerce and services.

Certain economic sectors show particularly high rates of informal employment across developing regions. Agriculture employs approximately nine in ten workers informally, while domestic work exceeds eight in ten informal workers, construction approaches three in four workers, and accommodation and food services sectors also show elevated informality rates. These sectoral concentrations reflect the nature of productive activities in many developing economies, where mechanization and formalization of agriculture remain limited, where household domestic labor operates largely outside regulatory frameworks, and where construction and services frequently involve casual, short-term arrangements without written contracts or social protection coverage. The persistence of high informality rates despite economic growth in many developing regions suggests that growth alone may be insufficient to generate formalization and improved working conditions without accompanying policy interventions and institutional reforms.

Youth employment patterns in developing regions reveal particularly pronounced precarity, with temporary employment rising notably in East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia. Insecure forms of work represent the only available option for most young people in developing regions, as formal employment opportunities remain scarce relative to the number of labor market entrants. Temporary paid workers with contract durations of less than twelve months now constitute approximately one-fifth to one-quarter of employment among young adults in many developing countries, reflecting a shift away from self-employment and toward temporary wage labor. This transition may represent a form of formalization in the sense that workers receive wages rather than relying entirely on self-employment income, but it simultaneously introduces new forms of insecurity through short-term contracts that provide no guarantee of continued employment or income beyond the immediate contract period. Young women face particularly acute challenges, experiencing higher rates of insecure employment than young men in most developing regions, with the exception of Eastern Europe where temporary youth employment has been declining.

The relationship between precarity and poverty remains especially direct in developing country contexts, where informal and precarious employment correlates strongly with low incomes and limited access to essential services. More than 342 million women and girls will likely be living on less than $2.25 per day by 2030 according to United Nations projections, a figure substantially influenced by overrepresentation of women in informal and low-paid work. The gender pay gap originates from deeply ingrained inequalities that channel women into precarious employment sectors while simultaneously undervaluing their labor. In low-income countries, where social protection systems remain underdeveloped or absent, informal workers lack access to unemployment insurance, health insurance, pension systems, or other forms of social security that might buffer economic shocks. This absence of formal protections means that precarious workers in developing countries face immediate vulnerability to illness, injury, family emergencies, or economic downturns, with limited capacity to smooth consumption or maintain living standards during periods of reduced or interrupted income.

Regional variations within the developing world reflect different patterns of economic development and structural transformation. East Asian countries that underwent early structural transformation, shifting labor from agriculture into manufacturing and more recently into services, have generally been more successful in generating shared growth processes that benefit broader populations, though precarity has increased in recent decades as flexibility has been prioritized. In contrast, much of sub-Saharan Africa delayed or failed to achieve structural transformation, with large proportions of the workforce remaining in low-productivity agriculture or urban informal services, resulting in persistent poverty despite periods of economic growth. Latin America presents an intermediate case, with higher levels of urbanization and service sector employment than Africa but also substantial informal sectors and limited progress in reducing poverty and inequality despite periods of economic expansion. These divergent trajectories suggest that globalization's effects on poverty and precarity depend critically on the nature and pattern of economic integration, with countries specializing in low value-added activities or natural resource extraction struggling to generate dynamic employment growth that could reduce precarity.

Conceptual Considerations and Measurement Challenges

Understanding the precariat requires grappling with definitional ambiguities and measurement challenges that complicate straightforward statistical assessment. Guy Standing and other theorists define the precariat through multiple dimensions rather than employment status alone. First, the precariat exhibits distinctive relations of production, characterized not merely by unstable labor but more fundamentally by lack of occupational identity or narrative, creating existential insecurity alongside economic uncertainty. Many in the precariat possess educational qualifications above the level of labor they can expect to obtain, a historically unprecedented disjunction between educational attainment and occupational prospects that contributes to frustration and political alienation. Second, the precariat displays distinctive relations of distribution in its social income structure, relying primarily on volatile money wages without the non-wage benefits, rights-based state benefits, or informal community supports that characterized the traditional working class. Third, the precariat faces distinctive relations to the state, increasingly requiring them to satisfy bureaucratic requirements and navigate means-tested, conditional assistance programs that position them as supplicants rather than rights-bearing citizens.

These conceptual dimensions help explain why the precariat represents more than simply the latest iteration of precarious work, which has existed in various forms throughout capitalist development. What distinguishes the contemporary precariat is its systematic character as an emergent class formation fostered by deliberate policy choices rather than merely cyclical economic conditions or transitional phases of development. The dismantling of labor market institutions and social protection systems since the 1980s, combined with financialization, globalization of production networks, and integration of billions of additional workers into global labor markets through China's and other emerging economies' fuller participation in world trade, created systematic downward pressure on wages and working conditions across developed economies while generating new forms of precarity in developing countries undergoing rapid economic transformation. The precariat thus emerges not as a residual category of those left behind by progress but as an integral component of contemporary capitalism's productive structure.

Empirical measurement of precarity faces significant obstacles. Standard labor force statistics, developed primarily for mid-twentieth century industrial economies organized around male breadwinners in full-time wage employment, capture formal employment status but miss many dimensions of precarity including unpaid work-for-labor (job searching, interview preparation), work-for-the-state (navigating bureaucratic requirements), and work-for-reproduction (care work). The Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom estimated that unpaid care work was worth £1.24 trillion annually, equivalent to 63 percent of gross domestic product were it counted, exceeding the combined value of manufacturing and non-financial services. Yet this enormous volume of work receives no recognition in standard statistics and contributes to insecurity for those who must perform it. Moreover, focusing narrowly on employment contracts can be misleading, as someone on a zero-hours contract might have employment security in the form of continuing contractual relationship with an employer but no income security due to variable hours. Conversely, some apparently stable employment relationships may mask precarity when wages prove insufficient for decent living standards, when pension coverage is inadequate, or when employers retain power to unilaterally alter conditions.

The distinction between precarity, insecurity, and instability requires careful attention. Instability refers to volatile fluctuations in hours, earnings, or employment status. Insecurity denotes absence of adequate protection against risks and shocks. Precarity, etymologically derived from the Latin root meaning "to obtain by prayer," connotes a condition of lost citizenship rights—social, civil, economic, cultural, and political—that reduces people to the status of supplicants dependent on the discretionary power of employers, bureaucrats, or other authorities. This conceptual precision matters politically because conflating all three phenomena obscures the specific mechanisms through which contemporary capitalism generates precarity and the corresponding policy interventions that might address these conditions. Reforms targeting employment stability alone, for instance, might do little to address the broader erosion of social protections and citizenship rights that characterize precarity as a social condition.

Trends and Future Prospects

Recent trends suggest continued growth or at minimum persistence of precarious employment across most regions and income levels. Global unemployment rates remain relatively low by historical standards, standing at approximately 4.9 percent in 2024 according to ILO projections, yet this aggregate figure obscures substantial jobs gaps, with an estimated 435 million people worldwide wanting employment but unable to find it, compared to 189 million officially counted as unemployed. The jobs gap rate of 11.1 percent exceeds unemployment rates by more than two-fold, indicating widespread labor underutilization beyond what conventional unemployment statistics capture. Moreover, those who do find employment increasingly encounter precarious conditions, with working poverty rates failing to decline significantly and in some cases increasing. The number of workers living in extreme poverty earning less than $2.15 per day grew by approximately 1 million in 2023, while those in moderate poverty earning less than $3.65 per day increased by 8.4 million, suggesting that economic growth has not translated into improved living standards for substantial portions of the global workforce.

Income inequality has widened in recent years, with erosion of real disposable income among lower and middle-income workers even as returns to capital and compensation for elite workers have increased. Real wages have stagnated for approximately three decades in the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other OECD countries, while the precariat has experienced actual declines in real wages and increasing wage volatility. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these trends, with precarious workers in hospitality, retail, personal services, and other sectors experiencing severe income disruptions and limited access to support programs, while some forms of precarious work such as delivery services expanded rapidly. Post-pandemic inflation has disproportionately burdened lower-income households, which devote larger shares of spending to necessities that experienced particularly sharp price increases. Analysis of consumption patterns reveals that post-pandemic surges in transportation, housing, and food inflation affected younger, lower-income, Latino, and Black households most severely, contributing to political backlash against incumbent governments across multiple democracies in 2024.

Demographic shifts may intensify precarity pressures in coming decades. Youth unemployment and underemployment remain elevated globally, with approximately 64.9 million people aged 15 to 24 unemployed worldwide in 2023. While this represents the lowest number in the twenty-first century to date and reflects recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic's peak impacts, youth continue to face substantially higher unemployment rates than older workers and disproportionate concentration in precarious employment when they do find work. The youth unemployment rate of 13 percent in 2023 remains nearly three times the overall unemployment rate. Young workers also experience significant wage discounts relative to older workers, earning substantially less even when controlling for experience and education, partly due to overrepresentation in part-time, temporary, and informal work. These patterns suggest that cohorts entering labor markets in recent decades may face permanently diminished lifetime earnings and employment security compared to earlier generations, with potentially profound implications for household formation, fertility, political attitudes, and social cohesion.

Technological change introduces additional uncertainties regarding future trajectories of precarity. Automation and artificial intelligence may displace workers in some occupations while creating new forms of precarious platform-mediated work in others. The proliferation of digital platforms enabling gig work represents one manifestation of how technology can facilitate fragmentation of employment relationships and transfer of risks onto individual workers, who must bear costs of equipment, insurance, and income volatility while platforms extract value through their intermediation. However, technology also potentially enables new forms of worker organization and collective action, as demonstrated by various platform worker organizing efforts in recent years. Whether technological transformation ultimately increases or decreases precarity likely depends substantially on institutional responses, regulatory frameworks, and power relations between capital and labor rather than being technologically determined.

Climate change and ecological crises may profoundly affect patterns of precarity in coming decades. Environmental disruptions disproportionately impact precarious workers, who typically lack resources to buffer climate-related shocks such as extreme weather events, crop failures, or displacement from coastal or environmentally degraded areas. Agricultural workers, a category with among the highest informality rates globally, face direct exposure to changing rainfall patterns, temperature extremes, and increased climate variability that may devastate livelihoods. Urban informal workers in sectors such as construction and outdoor commerce similarly experience direct exposure to heat stress and extreme weather without the workplace protections or income security that might enable adaptation. Transitions toward more sustainable economic models, while potentially necessary for long-term environmental stability, may also generate transition costs and displacements that fall heavily on precarious workers unless carefully managed through just transition policies that provide alternative employment opportunities and income support.

Political Implications and Social Movements

The growth of the precariat carries significant political implications that have become increasingly visible in recent years. Electoral developments including the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the election and re-election of Donald Trump in the United States, and various populist movements across Europe and other regions have been interpreted by some analysts as expressions of precariat frustration with economic insecurity and political marginalization. The 2024 elections across multiple democracies, characterized by substantial anti-incumbent swings, have been analyzed through frameworks emphasizing precariat grievances regarding inflation's disproportionate impacts on lower-income households, immigration's perceived labor market effects, and broader senses of economic opportunity decline. These political manifestations suggest that the precariat, while not yet fully organized as a class-for-itself with coherent political program, has begun to exercise electoral influence through protest voting and support for candidates and movements challenging established political orders.

Labor organizing among precarious workers faces distinctive challenges compared to traditional industrial labor organizing. Precarious workers' fragmented employment relationships, high turnover, and frequent movement between jobs complicate stable union formation and collective bargaining. Employers' use of subcontracting, franchising, and platform mediation obscures employment relationships and enables evasion of labor law protections. Many precarious workers, particularly in informal employment in developing countries, operate entirely outside regulatory frameworks that might provide organizing foundations. Yet despite these obstacles, various forms of precarious worker organizing have emerged, including sectoral unions in countries with stronger labor law traditions, platform worker cooperatives and associations, community-based organizing of domestic workers and day laborers, and social movements addressing precarity's broader dimensions beyond workplace concerns alone. These organizing efforts demonstrate that precarious workers possess agency and capacity for collective action despite structural constraints.

Political responses to precarity range across an ideological spectrum from market-oriented flexibility advocacy to comprehensive welfare state expansion proposals. Some policymakers and economists argue that labor market flexibility, including the forms of employment that generate precarity, represents necessary adaptation to global competitive pressures and rapid technological change, suggesting that imposing greater rigidity would reduce employment levels. This perspective typically advocates for minimal employment protections combined with active labor market policies to facilitate rapid movement between jobs. Alternative approaches emphasize strengthening labor protections, raising minimum wages, expanding collective bargaining coverage, and developing more comprehensive social protection systems that decouple basic security from employment status. Universal basic income proposals, advocated by some analysts including Guy Standing, represent one manifestation of this latter approach, aiming to provide unconditional income floors that would enhance workers' bargaining power and enable refusal of the most exploitative employment arrangements.

The prospects for the precariat becoming a transformative political force remain uncertain. Standing and others theorize that the precariat possesses unique potential as a transformative class because it intuitively seeks to abolish the conditions defining its existence rather than merely seeking improved position within existing hierarchies. However, the precariat remains internally divided along multiple dimensions including nationality, immigration status, race, gender, age, and educational attainment, complicating development of unified political identity and program. Some segments of the precariat may direct frustration toward immigrants or other marginalized groups rather than toward structural causes of precarity, a dynamic that right-wing populist movements have sometimes exploited. Building precariat class consciousness and developing political strategies that address precarity's multiple dimensions while forging alliances with other progressive forces represents an ongoing challenge for labor movements, left political parties, and social movement organizations. The precariat's size and strategic position in contemporary economies suggest that its political trajectory will significantly influence whether the coming decades witness reduction of precarity through enhanced protections and security or further intensification of insecurity and inequality.