Professor Guy Standing of SOAS will give the next ODID Distinguished Visitor Lecture on his new book, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens.

Guy Standing's immensely influential 2011 book introduced the Precariat as an emerging mass class, characterized by inequality and insecurity. Professor Standing outlined the increasingly global nature of the Precariat as a social phenomenon, especially in the light of the social unrest characterized by the Occupy movements. He outlined the political risks they might pose, and what might be done to diminish inequality and allow such workers to find a more stable labour identity. His concept and his conclusions have been widely taken up by thinkers from Noam Chomsky to Zygmunt Bauman, by political activists and by policy-makers.

This new book takes the debate a stage further, looking in more detail at the kind of progressive politics that might form the vision of a Good Society in which such inequality, and the instability it produces, is reduced.

A Precariat Charter discusses how rights – political, civil, social and economic – have been denied to the Precariat, and at the importance of redefining our social contract around notions of associational freedom, agency and the commons. The ecological imperative is also discussed – something that was only hinted at in Standing's original book but has been widely discussed in relation to the Precariat by theorists and activists alike

The Lecture will take place on Thursday 15 May at 2 pm in Seminar Room 2.

Guy Standing is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, and a founder and co-President of the Basic Income Earth Network, an NGO promoting basic income as a right. He has held chairs at the Universities of Bath and Monash (Australia) and was previously Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organisation.