The Committee to Nuke Elysium

It’s the latest neologism in economic theory, a combination of precarious and proletariat, defining the desideratum of the new model disaster capitalism in which employees are transformed into spare parts, to be used as needed, then discarded.

The precariat has long existed at the margins of the economy in the pieceworkers, temps, and flextimers who scrambled for fleeting employment. But now it’s growing, as jobs once given to full-time employees are instead parsed out to contracting firms, which slice off a hefty portion of worker pay, and as jobs are reduced to temporary “just in time” positions and workers are hired for brief spans as “independent contractors.”