In sociology and economics, precariat refers to people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare as well as being a member of a Proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live . Specifically, it is applied to the condition of lack of job security, in other words intermittent or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.

For Marxists, these people are simply members of the reserve army of labor.

Look up precariat in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The term is a neologism obtained by merging precarious with proletariat.^[1]

The precariat class has been emerging in advanced societies such as Japan, where it includes over 20 million people.^[2] The young precariat class in Europe became a serious issue in the early part of the 21st century.^[3]