semiproletariat means the class of marginalized workers who lack regular employment, such as working peasants, pedlars, small handicrafts makers, and the underemployed. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 86 out of 100.
Why “semiproletariat” is a great word
SEMIPROLETARIAT — [Noun] The class of marginalized workers, such as working peasants, pedlars, and small handicrafts makers, who lack regular employment and stable integration into the industrial proletariat. From the prefix semi- ("half, partly") + proletariat (from Latin proletarius, "a citizen of the lowest class, who served the state only by having offspring"). Unlike "proletariat," which denotes the industrial working class fully dependent on wage labor, or "lumpenproletariat," which implies a chronically unemployed or socially degenerate underclass, the semiproletariat describes those caught in a half-light of partial integration. It is the peasant who hires out for the harvest but returns to his own meager plot, the street vendor whose entire inventory fits on a cart, the cobbler tapping his hammer in a doorway between shifts—a life suspended between the soil and the machine, defined not by the solidity of its chains, but by the frayed, provisional nature of its ties to the world of work.
Etymology
From semi- + proletariat.
noun
- The class of marginalized workers who lack regular employment, such as working peasants, pedlars, small handicrafts makers, and the underemployed.“To obtain such a cost differential they must either be able to hold back the proletariat's demands for real wage increases, using segments of the semiproletariat as 'strike breakers', or if they transfer a portion of the advantage to the proletariat they must obtain the asisistance of this group to hold the semiproletariat firmly in check - indeed to expropriate some or all of its land resources.”