ILPC 2027

What type of working life does the vast majority of society experience under the increasingly frenzied, competitive conditions of 21^st century global capitalism? This paper takes a critical birds-eye view of the trends, developments and faultlines in labour, work and employment to ask what should and can be the future of work in order to ensure it meets the needs and aspirations of the many.

Today’s global, consumer fuelled, capitalism is a 24/7 ‘sleepless’ society (Crary, 2013) that reaches ever further and deeper into our lives. As it does so, workers are subjected to complex forms of exploitation, subordination and alienation, more insidious and pernicious than originally envisioned by Marx. Indeed there is strengthening evidence that the pre-eminent workplace regimes of the latter half of the twentieth century, which Burawoy (1985) characterised as based on ‘hegemonic despotism’, are giving way to a resurgent market-driven managerial despotism. Even the cash-rich managerial, financial and creative cadre of this supposed ‘new economy’ have unsustainable time-poor lifestyles owing to the incessant pressure to perform and stay ahead.    

Working lives across the world are increasingly shaped by common, accelerating neo-liberal processes and frequently locked into the same global value chains. There is a trend towards a ‘Walmart effect’ in many developed economies where growing numbers of workers are trapped in jobs with “low wages, miserly benefits, stultifying work, no respect, and no future” (Gupta, 2012: 4).This is the case, whether it be in militaristic Export Processing Zones and Foxconn’s high-tech factories; the world’s growing army of low-paid and underemployed branded service workers; or sweatshop workers in the Bangladeshi textile industry and its ilk supplying iconic brands.

In both the global north and south, few workers escape a gnawing anxiety, if not daily fear, over their job and economic security. This anxiety and the long-term harm of living a market-driven working life is exacerbated by the blurring, even collapsing, boundaries between work and private-life. Employees are also working growing amounts of unpaid overtime as they feel compelled to stay late, give up rest days, work when unwell and even take work home to compensate for cost-reducing lean management regimes. Equally, the option of being able to afford to stop work at an age that allows for a healthy and dignified retirement is rare in the global south and rapidly diminishing in the north.

The paper concludes by exploring the prospects for securing decent jobs, work-life balance and living wages underpinned by justice at work and a substantial social wage. It assesses new worker social movements, such as the US fast food worker inspired international struggle for a living wage and the rising level of strikes and worker protests in China. It then draws on classical and contemporary anti-capitalist ideas to explore what work could and should be like if it is to be truly sustaining and satisfying rather than an anxiety-ridden, stultifying and unhealthy experience that blights the lives of the vast majority.   

1.      Burawoy, Michael (1985), The Politics of Production, London: Verson

2.      Clary, Jonathan (2013), 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso.  

3.      Gupta, Arun (2014), ‘The Walmart working class’, in L. Panitch, G. Albo and V. Chibber (Eds.), Registering Class, London: Merlin Press, pp. 1-39.