The Precariat

Low-paid, insecure and casual work has spread across the British economy since the financial crash of 2008. In that year, one in 20 men and one in 16 women worked in the casualised labour market. Now, one in 12 of both men and women are in precarious employment, which includes zero-hours contracts (ZHCs), agency work, variable hours and fixed-term contracts, according to new TUC data.

In 2008 there were 655,000 men in the casualised labour market. That number has risen by 61.8% to 1.06 million. The casualised female workforce has increased by 35.6%, from 795,000 in 2008 to 1.08 million in 2014.

Since 2008, only one in 40 new jobs has been full-time. Over the same period, 60% of net jobs added have been self-employed and 36% have been part-time.

According to the Work Foundation, however, 44% of zero-hours contract jobs last for two years or more and 25% have lasted for five years or more. A survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development estimated that there are more than a million zero-hours contract workers – 3.1% of the UK workforce – four times the estimate of the Office for National Statistics in 2012.

“For many women, ‘flexibility’ has become synonymous with being at the beck and call of employers,” said the TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady. “Job insecurity isn’t just something that affects women in industries like retail and social care; it is a problem across the labour market.”

The idea that pro-capitalist Labour will do anything concrete to upset this particular anti-working class bandwagon, is nonsense. The capitalists gain from it substantially, and will not give it up, and Labour, being a staunch pro-capitalist party, will huff and puff but--do nothing. If the workers got organised and fought back with militant strikes, Labour would oppose them. The trade unions need to get off their knees and must abandon the Labour Party. The Labour party is a dead weight and will never do anything for the working class.

We face a stark choice. Either we accept that poverty and precarious employment is life for a large section of the population or we talk about revolution. The workers do need to organised and fight back, because nobody else can do it.