The phenomenon first received media attention in 2004. Why so late? Well, its center is a ghost-like class of people. It’s neither the proletariat nor the middle class; it’s somewhere in between.
Karl Marx, the ideologist of Communism, once wrote about the “absolute impoverishment of the proletariat.” For the precariat, on the other hand, relative poverty is an attribute. Its representatives are not dying from hunger, but they live in worse conditions than those who hold a permanent job. They themselves do not have one, and are unlikely to obtain one. In a lifetime, they generally go through 30 employers.
The term “precariat” comes from the Latin “precarious,” which has two meanings, both of which are fit to describe this group. The first describes the state of begging, obtaining something based on mercy. And the second suggests a state that is temporary, unreliable and transitioning.
So, the precariat are people who live on temporary earnings, and when they have none at all, they live on the mercy of their parents, relatives, partners or friends. To be more precise, they’re not just “people,” they are “young people.”
As sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman writes: tell me your year of birth, and I will tell you what class you belong to. The precariat are people who were born in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the unemployment rate of people aged 15 to 19 is 12.6 percent, equivalent to approximately 74 million people.
The situation is worst in the Middle East and North Africa, with a rate of 24 percent. The best-off are those in East Asia, at 10 percent, while the European Union is somewhere in the middle with a rate of 18 percent.
But these statistics are significantly underestimated. Unemployment is only counted among those who are not enrolled in school. However, modern universities, with the exception of the most expensive ones, are currently functioning as babysitters, harboring young people from the labor market.
Here in Ukraine, the word “precariat” is rarely used. It has no entry in the Ukrainian Wikipedia, although the German, Polish and Russian versions have such an entry.
Ukraine often lags on certain things. But that does not mean that these phenomena bypass us. Youth unemployment among Ukrainians is at 20 percent, excluding those who are studying.
Few people know that Ukraine is placed among the top 10 nations in the world for university enrollment. I suppose that for many of them, this may be because the university is a place to hide from unemployment on their parents’ money.
What makes it worse for Ukrainian students is that they’re paying for a defective product – poor quality education that reduces their chances of employment.
There is a simple test to check the quality of education: education is what remains when you have forgotten everything else. All Ukrainian students have to study a foreign language, most commonly English. To test them, try to talk to a university graduate in English. It’s pretty clear what the result will be – not very good.
It can’t be any other way at the moment. Just look at the number of mistakes our president makes in writing, or who our education minister is. Removing both from power is paramount for the future of a whole generation.
However, there isn’t a single political party in Ukraine that caters to the precariat. It’s clear why the Party of Regions doesn’t: when they think about children, it’s their own they have in mind – specifically, how to make them millionaires or extract them from the paws of investigators or courts when they have beaten, run over or killed someone.
What is surprising is the opposition’s lack of input on the matter. It continues to rely on national democratic and other old-fashioned party benchmarks – and this is not what the youth is interested in.
The problem is not that the youth lacks patriotism. Sociological studies show that the younger a Ukrainian is, the more they consider themselves tied to the Ukrainian tradition, the more they support Ukrainian independence and the more they are ready to go to war for Ukraine, should the need arise.
The precariat in general, and the Ukrainian precariat in particular, is not beyond politics. It’s beyond the current state of politics. These people’s slogan, be they in New York, Istanbul or Rio, is: we need to change the way of living, not the politics.
Yaroslav Hrytsak is a Lviv-based historian. This op-ed was first published in Krayina magazine and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
