Guy Standing is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, and Hon. Co-President and Co-Founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an NGO that promotes a basic income as a right.

He has written and edited widely in the areas of labour economics, social protection and, more recently, rentier capitalism and the need to revive the commons.

Guy's best-known book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) describes an emerging mass class facing multiple forms of insecurity and the loss of citizenship rights.

Other books include The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (2016), which shows how global capitalism has been rigged in favour of owners of property (physical, financial and intellectual), Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017), Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (2019), The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea (2022) and The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty (2023).

From 1975-2006 Guy worked at the International Labour Organization, latterly as director of the ILO's Socio-Economic Security Programme, which was responsible for a major report on socio-economic security worldwide.

In 2006 he became Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath, and in 2013 Professor of Development Studies at SOAS.