"Millions are in jobs for which they are overqualified"– Economist Guy Standing

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This edition is a Q&A Interview, where an expert guest offers their take on the future of work, along with our signature Monday Marvels and Monday Moanings.

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Happy Monday, folks!

This week, I’m talking to Guy Standing. 

Guy is a British labour economist and co-founder of the Basic Income Network.

He has written over 30 books about the economics of work, and is best known for book that studies “The Precariat”, a new social class that has emerged in recent years.

Now in its fourth edition, the book has been translated into 25 languages thanks to the impact it’s had on a huge segment of society. The study addresses how much the precariat class have been shut out by mainstream policies and workers rights.

Guy told me all about:

• The ‘jobs fetish’ that governments have been wrong to focus on

• The educated, but ‘underemployed’, class that many people fall into

• His vision for a better, more beautiful, future of work

Let’s dive in!

Q: Thanks for joining us today, Guy. You’ve said today’s society has a particularly misguided view of work. Can you tell me more?

A: We’ve got to a stage of jobs fetish and GDP growth fetish. Why do we want everybody to be full-time in jobs? It is a form of idiocy. 

My books have all been about how the notion of work has changed for the worst, over the centuries. Up to the 19th century the term ‘job’ was in fact a derogatory term. Throughout many generations and centuries, ordinary people had the same goal: to stay out of ‘labour’ so that they could do ‘work’.

The Ancient Greeks viewed ‘labour’ as something done only by slaves and metics who were seen as non-citizens, and this kind of ‘labour’ was believed to deform both your body and your mind. The Greeks thought about time differently than we do today. They viewed ‘work’, as something that you did with your friends and your relatives around the home. ‘Work’ included reproducing, tending to your community, preserving your resources, and so on. And in order to be able to do ‘work’ properly,  people also had to have ‘idle time’ designed purely to develop themselves and keep themselves mentally astute. I think we've lost the capacity to have idle time today.

The irony is today that most forms of ‘work’ are not counted as work at all. The focus on creating more jobs is being taken to extremes by the current UK government who are saying that GDP growth is our number one mission. Well, it is certainly not mine. 

We have a situation where the most valuable form of work (care work and community work) has been given a value of zero in terms of GDP. And it doesn't get counted as a job. We've lost our marbles if we think that caring for your loved ones, your community or your allotment should be given a value of zero.  

I think that we need to rescue the real ‘work’ – to liberate people(of all genders) to be able to spend more time caring for those they love. To provide people with more time to do things related to public participation in the life of our cities and towns. But, according to the government, if we do those things, it lowers growth. This is madness. 

Q: You’ve also said that today, ‘unstable’ forms of labour have become the norm, creating an entirely new class— you refer to as the precariat. Is this all related to the government’s growth-agenda?

A: In the 1980s the neoliberal economics of Thatcher and Reagan promoted “labour market flexibility” which moved many workers away from standard forms of employment and towards more self-employed, part-time opportunities— what we now know as gig work and freelancing.

From 30 years studying the evolution of labour markets I’ve seen this shift result in a lot of economic insecurity. Less security has been provided by employers, and in turn, more people have struggled to access good wages or work related benefits. 

So a new class structure has emerged, and today we have a tiny percentage of the obscenely wealthy, the plutocracy, who get a lot of their money from outside the labour market. Then there is the salariat class which has employment, security, pensions etc and below them is the precariat which is the focus of the book. Every single day, I receive emails from people saying ‘this is about me’. 

The precariat is defined by three commonalities:

• They are facing unstable and insecure labour (paid forms of work). And, they have to do a hell of a lot of work for labour. Work such as retraining, waiting around, applying for benefits …stuff that they don't want to do but have to do. And they don't have an occupational identity or a feeling of a ‘career’ that they know they will be doing in 10 years time etc.

• They experience volatile wages without any benefits, such as paid leave, paid holidays or access to secure state benefits. They are chronically in debt. So they have to be scrambling around for work. You could call it entrepreneurial or you call it something more pejorative. 

• They are losing rights. Social, economic and cultural rights. 

The word precarity comes from the Latin idea of ‘prayer’. The notion is that the precariat must relying on (pray for) the charity of others who are being generous, or nice. And this is humiliating for millions of people who are facing a future of work that is demeaning but also causing chronic stress, mental ill-health and suicidal tendencies. 

We're at the crisis point and pushing for more jobs is not going to solve it. 

I want a politician to stand up and say “my policies will reduce the number of jobs in Britain by 10%”. That would be courageous.

Q:  I think many people will be able to relate to these challenges. What about well-educated people, are they immune to falling into the precariat?

A: There are three groups within the precariat. One of these includes those educated to university level education, who are known as the ‘progressives’.

Members of the other two groups typically don’t typically have as much education, they come from working class communities or are migrants.

The progressives thought they were going to leave university with stable careers, but did not. They end up outside of the traditional full-time employment structure, with a range of different forms of work and activities (portfolio career).

They want to be able to slow down – they don’t agree with the growth agenda and are seeking more ecological, sustainable activities like being in nature, which is the exciting part.

But this is also the challenge – and the reason we have a political crisis – because politicians have not tried to offer an agenda for this progressive group. 

This is the first time in history when we have millions of people who have a level of education higher than the level of a job they're likely to obtain. Underemployment is a term you are likely familiar with. Based on the supply of suitable jobs they're often required to have a level of education above what the job requires in order to get that job. It's a very strange double phenomenon we’ve never had before.

Millions of people are entering jobs for which they know they are overqualified. Mentally and aspirationally they feel demeaned and frustrated.

Q: So if more jobs isn’t the answer, what is? What changes should we aim for to create a better future of work?

A: We need policies that enable people to do a combination of different work activities. To stop putting jobs on a pedestal.

I want to see a system where we automate some of the worst kinds of jobs going. Jobs like cleaning public toilets, supermarket roles or warehouse roles. These are technically unnecessary. 

Then we can start adjusting our social protection system, fiscal and income distribution policies in a way that allows us to do other – less demeaning – forms of work more feasibly. It could be a virtuous circle where revenue gets redistributed into the system, freed up by the automation and distributed more equally amongst workers.

I think it's the government’s responsibility to offer better social protections for workers and a platform so they can bargain more effectively with employers. When you’ve got no assured benefits you don't have a strong bargaining position – which is the place so many people are in. The precariat is growing all the time. That's why we're having rising suicide rates. The uncertainty is fostering crime, because people are desperate.

It's about time we woke up. The future of work has got to include everybody. Unless everybody has dignity, many more of us will face indignity with our families with our friends and with our communities.

The future of work has to be uplifting. It has to be enthusiastic,  beautiful, and joyous.

I want to spend more time on an allotment. You might want to spend more time on artistic work. Another person might want to spend more time networking and building a drama centre… whatever one's enthusiasm, it's all work. A future of work in which you focus on dignity will force the politicians to come up with better solutions. We're not going to get to Net Zero unless we make energy prices higher. But the only way to avoid that is to say that the revenue will be recycled as part of the basic income.

Q: So Universal Basic Income must also be part of this solution? 

A: I never use the term Universal Basic Income—I call it Basic Income because it should be implemented pragmatically, requiring people to have lived in the country for a certain period before becoming eligible.

But yes, while it’s not a silver bullet, I do believe that having a basic income is absolutely essential to stop the drift towards the sort of plutocratic politics that we're seeing.

There are more jobs today than at any time in history… but the rewards and income for doing it have been going down—and that’s the crisis. AI and automation are creating much more income for the owners of the technology.

So what a Basic Income provides in this context, is that it would enable people to bargain more with employers who are trying to exploit them because they can instead say ‘no’ more effectively. Basic Income could mean saying no to degrading work and focus on something meaningful—whether that’s creative work, community projects, or an entrepreneurial pursuit.

Q: And, finally, what about entrepreneurship — how might that option fit into this paradigm?

A: As with everything we’ve spoken about today, it also requires a better system of protection.

Many successful entrepreneurs owe their success to the security that allowed them to take risks. James Dyson, for example, is a billionaire. He is a rare specimen who was able to conduct thousands of failed experiments. He was supported by his wife, a well-paid teacher, who gave him a basic income. 

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has openly admitted that financial support gave him the freedom to experiment. Yet today, most people can’t afford that leap. Instead, they’re trapped in a cycle of survival—where innovation and ambition are crushed by economic precarity.

The UK’s Universal Credit system by contrast, is completely misnamed—it imposes harsh sanctions, punishing people for being a few minutes late to an interview or not applying for enough jobs, regardless of their circumstances. It strips away dignity, forcing people into a survival mindset rather than enabling them to thrive. 

If you want a civilised society, then everybody needs to have basic security. Everybody.

To learn more about Guy’s work: Stay up to date with the Basic Income mission and check out his current projects, research and published books here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s interview with Guy. What else do you think should be considered? Share your opinions in the comments or reply directly!

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And, in other news this month…

👍Monday Marvels 

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) recent figures show that Britain’s jobs market is healthier than expected following recent business surveys — revealing that UK workers’ pay grew sharply in the final quarter of last year.

👎 Monday Moanings

The IRS is starting to make mass layoffs (c.7,000) as part of Elon Musk and the U.S. DOGE Service efforts to update technology at the Federal agency. Many workers were not prepared and will not know how to get needed medications without health insurance or will struggle to make mortgage payments, said the Kansas Union President.

That’s it for today — see you in two week’s time for the next Monday Mornings Briefing exploring the good, the bad and the ugly of the Creator Economy…

Monday Mornings is written and hosted by Ellen Donnelly, a writer, speaker, and business coach focused on the future of work. She specialises in the shift towards mass entrepreneurialism, and supports founders navigating career pivots in her private coaching practice, The Ask.