Standing was born on 9 February 1948. He gained his bachelor's degree in economics from the
University of Sussex in 1971. After taking a masters in
labour economics and
industrial relations at the
University of Illinois, he received his doctorate in economics from the
University of Cambridge in 1977. From 1975 to 2006, Standing worked at the
International Labour Organization, latterly as director of the ILO's Socio-Economic Security Programme. and for creation of the Decent Work Index. In 1986 he co-founded the
Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), a group of individuals and organizations to advocate
Universal Basic Income (UBI) in its modern form. From April 2006 to February 2009, he held a position of Professor of Labour Economics,
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. leaving in 2013 to become professor of development studies at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since October 2015, he has worked in Professorial Research Associate,
SOAS, University of London. He was elected
Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2009.
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class protest in 2011 Standing's best-known book is
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, published in 2011. In it, Standing coins the term
precariat to refer to the class of people suffering from precarity and job insecurity, which he analyses as a new emerging social class, and blames
globalisation for having plunged more and more people into the precariat. The book has been translated into 25 languages. Standing describes the precariat as an agglomerate of several different social groups, notably immigrants, young educated people, and those who have fallen out of the old-style industrial working class. After writing his 2011 book, Standing work has focused on
unconditional basic income,
deliberative democracy, and the
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