#Adjunct Reading Room: The #Precariat by @GuyStanding

…at a price any adjunct can manage, in case I don't come up with a movie before midnight...lagniappe if I do.

The Precariat - The New Dangerous Class, a Bloomsbury Open Access book from Bloomsbury Collections, is available in HTML full text for online reading, with page image PDFs for printing or offline reading (licensed by Creative Commons)

Neo-liberal policies and institutional changes have produced a huge and growing number of people with sufficiently common experiences to be called an emerging class. In this book Guy Standing introduces what he calls the Precariat - a growing number of people across the world living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities or careers, stable social protection or protective regulations relevant to them. They include migrants, but also locals.

Standing argues that this class of people could produce new instabilities in society. They are increasingly frustrated and dangerous because they have no voice, and hence they are vulnerable to the siren calls of extreme political parties. He outlines a new kind of good society, with more people actively involved in civil society and the precariat re-engaged. He goes on to consider one way to a new better society -- an unconditional basic income for everyone, contributed by the state, which could be topped up through earned incomes.

This is a topical, and a radical book, which will appeal to a broad market concerned by the increasing problems of labour insecurity and civic disengagement.

More information at Bloomsbury Collections - The Precariat - The New Dangerous Class

Introducing #PrecariousFaculty Network Links (weekly)

… initiates a regular series, this week's links collection opens with a 2009 article that benchmarks where we were then and still holds important observations. Despite significant advances and increased public awareness, not as much has changed as we'd like to think. There's a lot of déja vu all over again to be read in:

• The Adjuncts' Mandate | Inside Higher Ed
  In January, 2009 Gregory Zobel wrote in Inside Higher Ed, "Adjuncts must lead their own labor reform movement. We need our own national movement separate from the AAUP, AFT, and NEA."
  Tags: IHE, Jan5.2009, Zobel, adjunct-labor. Notes:
• recent reports on academic labor by the American Federation of Teachers and Modern Language Association.…Exploitation of contingent academic laborers is growing in scale.…Most essential – the larger picture – is that more adjuncts are being hired, exploited, and abused at more community colleges and universities around the United States than ever before

Joe Berry's July 19 COCAL Updates

...news & links about #ContingentFaculty, #academiclabor & #organizing in #highered. To subscribe to regular Updates, email joeberry@igc.org.  More about Joe Berry.  Updates are also archived at chicagococal.org. Follow COCAL International on Facebook.  

Getting organized...
According to UK political activist Richard Seymour writing in The Guardian, Chicago teachers could strike a blow for organised labor globally. Although risky, a successful, a fight to halt school budget cuts in Democratic heartland would be a huge boost for unions.

ramblings

Time to put this puppy to bed before too late to be interesting, let alone any longer. Recent topping off: yesterday mailbox and social media exchanges were about:

• the TAMU San Antonio adjunct getting booted for having the temerity to expect admin to do something about threatening emails: catch it links, discussion, comments and all on Josh Boldt's Adjunct Project and Con Job (Fb group that has become our electronic water cooler)
• messy mooc musings (+ comments) from Kate Bowles (Music for Deck Chairs, Australia), Jonathon Rees (More or Less Bunk, Colorado) and tidier,  less dramatic, iterations of the same from members of Change 11 cohort, retired physics prof Gordon Lockhart of mooc cow renown

Precariat? R'us? If not, then who?

We're who but not the only ones; now what about who else and 'what'? The University of Sydney, cited below, gives an overview in its news release introducing visiting speaker, UK economics professor Guy Standing (truly, a minimalist home page). 

The precariat consists of a growing number of people around the world who live in social and economic insecurity, without occupational identities, drifting in and out of jobs and constantly worried about their incomes, housing and much else. (sound familiar?)