Guy Standing is a British labour economist. He is a professorial research associate at SOAS University of London and a co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). Standing has written widely in the areas of labour economics, labour market policy, unemployment, labour market flexibility, structural adjustment policies and social protection. Standing's best-known book is The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, published in 2011.

In it, he blames globalisation for having plunged more and more people into the precariat, which he analyses as a new emerging social class. According to Standing, the precariat is not only suffering from job insecurity but also identity insecurity and lack of time control, not least due to workfare social policies.