I've heard a lot about this in the last year or three. The "precariat" you hear about here in the Nordic countries, though, is not just any chav who lives precariously on the edge of poverty. From the WP article: "...the opposite of 'the Technical Middle Class' in Great Britain in that instead of having money but no interests, people of the new Precariat Class have all sorts of potential activities they like to engage in but cannot do any of them because they have no money..."

i.e, these are people with interests, not just hobbies (like ordinary proles), or just burping their way from one beer coupon on the dole to the next from Social Services -- the concept has a definite whiff of "culture worker". Here in the Nordiques, this seems to be further associated with a) femaleness and b) the public sector, in that the typical member of the "precariat" here is a woman struggling to keep afloat from one short-term temp gig as a school teacher to the next -- the secure job of the school-marm of yore is nothing but a fading memory. Or, sometimes the very Social Services lady listening to the woes of the chav is one week's salary from starvation herself... and pay day at Social Services is two weeks off. I have one or two acquaintances (parents of classmates of my son, that kind of thing) who might qualify.

Yet another way these grand new times we live in now aren't really all that much better than the bad old days when we were kids.