Professor Guy Standing

Guy Standing is a Professorial Research Associate and former Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. From August 2006 until January 2013, he was Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in the UK. Between April 2006 and February 2009, he was also Professor of Labour Economics at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

From 1999 until March 2006, he was Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1998-99, he was in the “transition team” set up by the ILO’s new Director-General to help restructure the organisation. He was previously Director of the ILO’s Labour Market Policies Branch, and before that Director of the ILO’s Central and Eastern European Team, based in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. 

Professor Standing is a founder member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an international non-governmental organisation that promotes basic income as a right, with networks in over 50 countries. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Cambridge and a master’s degree in industrial relations from the University of Illinois. He has written and edited books on labour economics, labour market policy, unemployment, labour market flexibility, structural adjustment policies, social protection policy, rentier capitalism and its predations, and the need to revive the commons. His most recent books are The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty (2023), The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea (2022), Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now (2020) and Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (2019).

Professor Standing was coordinating editor and main writer of the ILO’s Economic Security for a Better World, a global report issued in 2004. He is on the international editorial advisory boards of several academic journals, including Development and Change and the European Journal of Industrial Relations. He has conducted household and enterprise surveys on labour and economic security issues in over 25 countries, and has advised many governments on the design and implementation of labour force surveys.