THE SQUEEZE ON WORKERS November-December 2021 issue of New Internationalist. https://newint.org/features/2021/10/07/big-story-work-squeeze-workers
Low-income countries spend only 1.1 per cent of GDP on social protection (compared to 16.4 per cent for high-income countries), while often shelling out eye-watering sums to service foreign debt. More than half the world’s people – 53 per cent – can expect no social benefits whatsoever from their governments.
Among the many tragedies (the pandemic) exposed was the shocking conditions of those supposedly working on the margins – who in fact form the majority of workers of the world (six out of every ten). These are the people whose work is classified as ‘informal’ .. Numerous agricultural workers now fall into this capacious category, as do the legions of displaced rural workers seeking whatever work they can find in cities.
Work precarity is now almost a given in contemporary employment even in the West, and not just for gig economy workers. Through the neoliberal decades since the 1980s, job security has been eroded both by technology and the attack on labour conditions. Unionization was actively driven down by policy (although the pandemic’s fall-out has brought a surge of people wanting to form and join unions).
The goals of capital growth and productivity that Keynes envisioned were met decades ago – yet we live in an increasingly unequal world and hard work remains the norm for large sections of the workforce, with constant availability, ‘flexibility’ and often unrealistic pressure to upskill just to hang on to work.
SHRINKING SHARE
Since the 1980s the labour share of national income – the amount paid out in wages and benefits – has been steadily declining. .. Meanwhile the portion going to capital keeps expanding; thus ‘simply owning assets such as shares and housing is a more expedient route to economic success;
..‘Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world’. A staggering 83 per cent feared losing their jobs. Such insecurity amid such great productivity and material abundance!...Technology in the hands of capital has also spurred on the race to the bottom, where the jobs that do still require human input get outsourced to countries where labour remains cheaper than the machine.
Another disturbing development is microwork, which has an estimated 20 million people around the world, competing to perform ‘human intelligence tasks’ posted on digital platforms.
..The challenge of advances in automation remains a political one – what to do with the fruits it brings and the labour it substitutes or saves?
Unsurprisingly tech utopians come from across the political spectrum. You can have fully automated luxury capitalism or communism, take your pick.
1 In the former, automation takes over for the lords of capital, spurring relentless planet-busting economic growth, guaranteeing a modest portion for each human to keep them going and stratospheric wealth for the elite, everybody happy. (Sounds suspiciously like trickle-down.)
In the latter, it’s all automatic for the people, with the cornucopia that is produced removing the need to corner resources, resulting in a world of leisure, peace and plenty for all, everybody happy. The problem with this position is that it seems to assume an automatic end to inequality, a battle that much of our political system hasn’t even begun to engage with.
THE REAL FUTURE
.. indeed if asset ownership were to be socialized even partially, then so could work itself. We could prioritize socially important work and divide it fairly, free up people to do the work they love as well as enjoy leisure, and ensure sufficiency regardless of capacity to work. No-one need be surplus in the jobs market.
We could finally reach the levels of solidarity, co-operation and redistribution, and curtailing of excess, that would make urgently needed degrowth something we could all embrace. And perhaps then we would no longer find ourselves listening to a worker-exploiting billionaire, who went into space in a rocket-phallus, waxing lyrical about the fragility of the planet.
Needless to say, we seem far from this turning point.
Dinyar Godrej