Introduction: The crisis of work in perspective

In writing about work, and the crisis of work, we must of course establish what we mean by ‘work’. In previous books, we offered a history of the varied sociological definitions of work, noted that there has been a long-term trend in the social sciences to equate work with paid employment – thus ignoring the enormous contribution that unpaid work makes to our socio- economic landscape – and pointed to how work and employment contribute to identities, both individual and collective (Bradley et al, 2000; Erickson et al, 2009; Williams et al, 2013). While the focus of this book is on paid work, involving jobs people undertake in return for wages or salaries, the importance of unpaid household and caring tasks, often carried out by women, should not be overlooked. Perhaps most importantly, there are notable connections between unpaid domestic work and paid employment. People in part- time jobs – primarily women – often value the opportunity to combine paid work with unpaid household responsibilities, not just childcare tasks but also caring for older family members (Rubery et al, 2016). Another complicating factor is that work which is unpaid household labour when undertaken by a family member – domestic cleaning for example – becomes paid employment when a cleaner is hired from outside the family and rewarded with a wage. In distinguishing between paid and unpaid work, then, it is the social relations that structure the work and how it is undertaken, rather than the specific nature of the work tasks themselves, that are important (Budd, 2011).

In capitalist societies, paid work fulfils some important economic functions. The employment relationship, in which a worker takes up employment with an employer in return for a wage or salary, provides the employer with a resource which, managed appropriately, can be used to realize added value from the tasks undertaken. Paid employment of this kind also provides workers with an income, necessary for their subsistence. Importantly, though, work matters, not just on account of its economic value – both for employers and workers, in different ways – but also for myriad other social and psychological reasons, including identity formation and the development of citizenship (Budd, 2011).

Introduction

In exploring the crisis of contemporary work, it is essential to examine the experiences and activities of the trade unions. There is a widespread understanding that unions, as collective organizations of workers, play a crucial part in ensuring that workers are well treated and have their interests represented effectively at work. Trade unions use their bargaining power to leverage pressure on employers to treat workers fairly, pay them appropriately and provide them with decent working conditions. During 2022–23, the popularity of Mick Lynch, the General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union in the UK, was based on his success in articulating the interests of the RMT's members in the media, especially their demands for higher pay and to maintain properly staffed train services and stations, amid a series of strikes on the railways.

Many of the profound problems workers currently experience – extensive insecurity and precarity (see Chapter 3), for example, and commodification pressures (see Chapter 4) – would not have become so acute if the trade unions had been stronger in recent years. Powerful trade unions capable of organizing and mobilizing workers to ensure their rights and protections are defended, and to advance them where necessary, clearly matter (Livingston, 2021). In the hospitality sector, for example, an industry marked by low pay and poor conditions, trade unions have helped workers benefit from higher pay (Papadopolous and Ioannou, 2023).

In general, though, since the 1980s trade unions have themselves been in crisis. This chapter begins by explaining how the crisis of trade unionism, one that is particularly manifest in reduced union membership, was a product of neoliberalization before examining how the unions have sought to respond to the crisis by looking to revitalize themselves. After 2020, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic provided unions with opportunities to build back stronger. Moreover, one key way the trade unions have sought to demonstrate their relevance is by engaging with environmental issues and responding to the climate crisis. Unions are playing a key role in facilitating a ‘just transition’ to a net- zero world by ensuring that workers’ interests are represented in the process of change, even though this has generated some notable tensions and challenges.

Introduction

In other chapters, we explain why we believe that various crises which are at work – the adverse consequences of neoliberalization, the challenges posed by environmental degradation and the climate emergency and the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic – have contributed to a crisis of work. In this chapter, we place this crisis of work in broader perspective, centred on its economic and political dimensions. As we explain, the crisis of work we are concerned with in this book intersects with various other crises, in particular those arising from a dysfunctional economy and labour market and the unstable, turbulent and volatile nature of contemporary politics. The important point about these various crises is that they are not just consequences of the troublesome nature of paid employment but also contribute to it, fuelling the antagonism that lies at the heart of the contemporary crisis of work.

The first substantive topic we focus on in this chapter concerns the economic dimension of the crisis of work, drawing particularly on evidence from the UK. We highlight the dysfunctional nature of the economy and the labour market, pointing to the connections between economic stagnation, labour shortages, weak earnings growth and the ‘cost- of- living crisis’ that escalated during the early 2020s. The crisis of work is thus tied up with the vicissitudes of a neoliberal, overly financialized economic model which is inimical to sustainable growth.

We then move on to consider the crisis- ridden nature of contemporary politics, including the crisis of democracy, and its intersections with the troublesome nature of work. Generally, governments have played a notable part in advancing neoliberalization, particularly in relation to work and employment relations. But workers’ expectations of greater protection, particularly in the context of COVID-19, have challenged the legitimacy of a neoliberal model that favours deregulated labour markets, employers’ flexibility and weak trade unions. The consequence is a more volatile and turbulent political environment, one where support for traditional left- of-centre social democracy has waned. Moreover, ‘populist’ far- right politics has increasingly thrived in settings where, because of neoliberalization, working people feel more insecure and threatened.

Introduction

The crisis of work with which we are concerned in this book is a product of some notable crises that are at work, namely the harmful consequences of intensified neoliberal capitalism, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of the escalating climate emergency. In this final chapter we consider the prospects for transcending the crisis, starting with an emphasis on how work can be made fairer, healthier and greener, particularly by means of a more empowered workforce, represented by stronger trade unions.

Fairer, healthier and greener work – empowered workers and unions

In a context of greater pressures for re- regulation, and amid escalating activism and contention, market fundamentalism may itself be in crisis (see Chapter 8), as people reject the profoundly exploitative model of work with which it is associated. They are increasingly rejecting prolonged wage stagnation and aspiring to improved employment rights and protections. Whether or not a shift in the balance of power away from capital and towards labour is occurring (O’Connor, 2022b), there is clearly a growing expectation that moderating employers’ flexibility is desirable and that workers should be better valued. Indeed, the demands of a ‘just transition’ for the purpose of tackling the climate crisis makes transcending neoliberal capitalism and the – socially and environmentally – unsustainable model of work and employment which characterizes it all the more imperative.

In the field of work and employment relations, there are incipient signs of a greater concern with workers’ interests. Consider, for example, the growing attention being devoted to the ‘good work’ agenda, based on the idea, first of all, of determining certain measures of job quality – for example, pay and rewards, job design, health, safety and well- being and voice – and then advancing ways of improving them (Dobbins, 2022b). The growth in the number of employers who have voluntarily chosen to pay workers a ‘real’ living wage demonstrates the potential effectiveness of interventions driven by a corporate commitment to operating ethically (Heery et al, 2023). The importance of such efforts, along with calls to address other troublesome aspects of contemporary work, through demands for a four- day week, for example, or for workers to have greater scope to ‘disconnect’ from their work outside of standard working hours, should not be disregarded. These things can make a positive difference to people's working lives.

We are surrounded by crises and have lived with, and in, crisis for a long time. The legacy of the multiple crises of the Cold War still haunts our geopolitical landscape; in the UK, our National Health Service is ‘in crisis’; we are told we are facing a ‘crisis of immigration’; we experience mental health crises; there is a ‘homelessness crisis’; the global financial system went into crisis in 2007–8. We could go on. However, we need a sense of perspective and proportion to understand our crisis- ridden world if we are to find ways out of crisis. While there are many ways to conceptualize crisis, and to view crises across a historical perspective, in our current situation the crises we face, be they ‘natural’ or caused by humans, have a common cause in the fundamental operation and antagonisms of capitalism.

In this book, we argue that the changing world of work must be understood in the context of three crises: the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency. These three crises are interrelated and have considerable consequences for people's lives. We argue that these three crises combine to form a ‘polycrisis’ (see Tooze, 2021) which has far- reaching consequences for the world of work and employment. There is a synergy at play here: the polycrisis emerges from the fundamental antagonisms of capitalism and affects work; work is the fundamental generator of the profits of the capitalist system that we are embedded within.

While any crisis may have localized effects on economic relations, two of the major crises discussed in this book – the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency – and their global reach offer the probability of major long- term disruptions to the economy, the third crisis that we explore here. We will view this contemporary conjuncture through the lens of work and employment, and we suggest that work itself is in a state of crisis, a consequence of the economic, epidemiological and environmental crises which themselves are a consequence of the fundamental antagonisms of capitalism.

There is, clearly, much that is badly wrong with work (Pettinger, 2019), not least because of the cocktail of crises we describe in this book.

Introduction

This chapter is concerned with how developments in employment relations, understood as the nature of the relationship between employers and workers, and the contemporary management of employment relations have contributed to the current crisis of work. It demonstrates how intensified neoliberalization, by promoting deregulation, enabling greater managerial control and weakening labour, has contributed to greater employer flexibility, with adverse consequences for workers, particularly in more financialized settings and in a context of greater automation. The crisis of employment relations is thus a product of the increased disconnect between managerial imperatives for short- term efficiency improvements, with the consequence that labour is increasingly treated as a commodity, and workers’ aspirations for decent work and to have their labour valued. This has heightened the antagonisms we discuss in Chapters 1 and 2.

This disconnect was particularly evident at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. As the chapter shows, the expectation that the experience of the pandemic would temper the trend of labour commodification, because workers’ efforts were better valued and their interests more clearly recognized, was somewhat misplaced. The imperative for short- term efficiency gains meant that employers prioritized managerial control and flexibility objectives, with adverse consequences for workers. There is an increasing recognition of the contribution that a greater focus on sustainability in employment relations can make to improving the quality of people's jobs and addressing environmental degradation, particularly by mitigating the effects of the climate emergency. However, the last part of this chapter shows that efforts to manage employment relations in a sustainable way, in order to tackle the climate crisis and promote decent work, are of very limited effectiveness, not least because of the large extent to which corporate interests are privileged.

Neoliberalization, financialization and labour commodification

As we explain in Chapter 1, the contemporary crisis of work is, in important ways, a function of a long- term process of neoliberalization that commenced in the 1980s. When it comes to employment relations, one of the most notable features of this process concerns the marked increase in employer discretion, particularly in the Global North, arising as a consequence of greater labour market deregulation and the diminished power of the trade unions (Baccaro and Howell, 2017).

Introduction

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on two critically important dimensions of contemporary work and employment: the function of labour markets in distributing workers to various roles in organizations and occupational hierarchies, and employment relations, concerning the interplay between workers and employers, including the role of managerial approaches in shaping these relations. Implicit in these chapters, and sometimes also explicit, is an understanding of how capitalism produces inequalities – between managers and employees, for example, or between those in roles at different levels within occupational hierarchies. Such inequalities, we argue, produce antagonisms, especially the classic antagonism between capital and labour, as highlighted in the work of Marx and manifest in class conflict. But workplaces are also the site of many other forms of inequality, and these also generate antagonisms: those arising from the many forms of sociocultural difference, such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, sexual orientation and dis/ ability. Countries in the Global North have enacted legislation, to varying extents and in different ways, aimed at combatting unfair discrimination at work. In the UK, for example, the Equality Act 2010 consolidated pre- existing legislation prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race and other so- called ‘protected characteristics’ and extended protections elsewhere (for example, gender reassignment). Overwhelmingly, major employing organizations now operate policies focused on promoting equal opportunities and/ or facilitating greater diversity and inclusion, not least because of the presumed business benefits that arise from doing so.

As this chapter demonstrates, however, inequalities remain profoundly important in contemporary work and employment, notwithstanding governmental and organizational efforts to address them. We focus, to start with, on a dimension which governments and employers typically overlook, namely the prevalence of disadvantage based on social class and the disparities experienced by people from working- class backgrounds. Underpinned by an intersectional approach, the remainder of the chapter then covers three further social cleavages – relating to gender inequality, racial and ethnic disparities in employment and the parlous position of young people, especially those from working- class backgrounds. The chapter demonstrates that there is a crisis of equalities, as disadvantage at work has been exacerbated under conditions of intensified neoliberalism, a crisis which is responsible for, and has been influenced by, other notable crises – relating to poverty, care, housing and the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting antagonisms help to fuel the contemporary crisis of work.

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the key implications of, and responses to, the crisis of work; a crisis which has been profoundly affected by crises which are at work, namely the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of the escalating climate emergency. We start by exploring the implications for neoliberal capitalism itself. Marx famously argued that capitalism in general was continually being undermined by its own contradictions, such as states of overproduction and underconsumption or the continual search for profits leading to overexploitation of workers and thence to labour unrest and contention. Intensified neoliberalism, particularly in the aftermath of the 2007–8 global financial crisis, has fuelled antagonism, not least because of greater employment precarity (see Chapter 3), the way in which labour is increasingly treated as a commodity (see Chapter 4), prevailing inequalities (see Chapter 5), the weakness of the trade unions (see Chapter 6) and escalating cost- of- living difficulties (see Chapter 7). As a consequence, neoliberal capitalism itself seems to have become immersed in crisis, arising from a backlash against free market and deregulatory policies, a backlash exacerbated by the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing recognition that pro- market policies which favour big corporations are inimical to addressing the climate crisis.

As this chapter shows, neoliberalism has responded by taking a more authoritarian guise, accommodating the rising influence of right populist politics (see Chapter 7). How far this can sustain neoliberal capitalism is open to question, however, given the extent to which neoliberalism has become subject to challenge. Resistance to work, manifest in the anti- work movement, is one illustration of this, especially given the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic in changing workers’ attitudes. Moreover, integral to the crisis of neoliberalism are the collective efforts of workers, activists and campaigners to challenge it. Simon Springer's vehement and controversial diatribe, Fuck Neoliberalism (2021), demonstrates that moments of crisis almost inevitably fuel protest and opposition. While individuals may be powerless in the face of the ravages of neoliberalism, crises such as those described in this book tend to provoke collective responses.

Introduction: what are labour markets, and why are they in crisis?

The commonly used term ‘labour market’ is an example of what Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) and Pettinger (2019) describe as a ‘capitalocentric’ concept, meaning one that implies the ubiquity, universalism and inevitability of capitalist economic systems. A labour ‘market’ is one in which an individual's capacity to work (labour power, as mentioned in Chapter 2) is bought and sold as a commodity, and the term connotes physical sites of hiring and firing, or even slave ‘markets’. In the current context, labour markets are not physical but abstract: they are the patterns of employment opportunities through which individuals find jobs or occupations.

We speak of labour markets in the plural because these arrangements are geographically specific and diverse. In the UK, the local labour market in largely rural Cornwall is vastly more limited than that in London. In general, working- class people, especially youths, tend to seek employment in local labour markets, while middle- class people may access local, national or, more recently, as part of the mechanics of globalization, international labour markets. Ironically, the most underprivileged and desperate jobseekers, migrants and refugees, are also likely to seek work internationally, often ending in informal roles and treated as ‘illegal’ by the authorities.

This is the first of the chapters in which we explore in more detail how the crises of work and of neoliberal capitalism, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, are playing out in various aspects of working life. We assert that labour markets are in crisis due to the disruptions and changes inherent in the dynamics of capitalism, especially in the current neoliberal phase. While in the UK in the post- war decades, centred on industrial forms of production, labour markets remained relatively stable, as the economy shifted to its post-industrial service- based forms in the late 1970s and 1980s, the occupational structures and the supply of labour fell out of kilter, causing unemployment to rise in former industrial areas such as South Wales and North East England.

We are very pleased to introduce the latest volume in this book series, Understanding Work and Employment Relations. Crises at Work, authored by Steve Williams and Mark Erickson, is the fifth text to be published in the series.

This series has been designed as a space for both monographs and edited volumes to highlight the latest research and commentary in the academic field of employment relations. The series is associated with the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA), which marked 70 years of existence in 2020. The series seeks to draw on the expertise of the membership of BUIRA and contributions to its annual conference, as well as employment relations academics from around the world. Employment relations is a mature field of study and continues to be of relevance to academic and practitioner audiences alike. BUIRA recognizes the broad nature of the field of employment relations and acknowledges that the field of study is constantly developing and evolving. BUIRA regards employment relations to be the study of the relation, control and governance of work and the employment relationship. It is the study of rules (both formal and informal) regarding job regulation and the ‘reward–effort bargain’. These issues remain relevant today, in an era where the standard employment relationship has become increasingly fragmented due to employers’ pursuit of labour flexibility and in which we see the continued expansion of the gig or platform economy. Employment relations – and adjacent research areas including human resource management (HRM) and the sociology of work – is taught widely in universities around the world, most commonly in business and management schools and departments. The field of study is multidisciplinary, encompassing law, politics, history, geography, sociology and economics. HRM has a tendency to focus uncritically on management objectives, without exploring issues of work and employment in their wider socio- economic context and has its disciplinary roots in psychology, whereas employment relations retains a strong critical social science tradition. As scholars in this area, we feel there is a need for regular, up- to- date, research-focused books that reflect current work in the field and go further than standard introductory texts. Through this book series, we aim to take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding work and employment relations, and we welcome proposals from academics across this range of disciplines.

Introduction

The material we present in this book supports and illustrates our core argument: that capitalism has a permanent tendency towards crisis, that this has engendered other crises – notably epidemiological crises and the escalating climate crisis – and that while capitalism remains the global economy’s primary mode of operation, these crises will continue and will worsen. The crisis of capitalism is visible across societies, communities and cultures, but our focus on work is quite deliberate: work is at the centre of the operation of capitalism; indeed, it is the thing that generates the profits of capitalism that maintain its momentum and purpose. At the outset, we need to identify what we mean by ‘crisis’ and, specifically, if we think that a crisis is an extraordinary event, something that marks a turning point or is an emergency, whether it is possible to be in a permanent state of crisis.

The permanent tendency to crisis

Hay notes that while the concept of crisis is ubiquitous in political discourse from the 18th century to the present day, it is a concept that has received little analytical attention, remaining diffuse and underdeveloped (Hay, 1999). Hay attempts to rectify this, at least for political theory, by describing ‘crisis’ as ‘a moment of decisive intervention in the process of institutional change’ (1999: 320). Placing the state at the centre of any particular crisis is, for Hay, an important move, and we may want to follow aspects of this definition in considering our three crises; after all, in the UK the state is the actor with the most power – economic, military, symbolic – and the most agency. Hay uses this definition of state intervention at a crucial moment to understand the UK, and other, government responses to the 2007–9 ‘debt crisis’ (Hay 2013), and it is clear that without this dramatic state intervention global banking systems would have collapsed.

The 2007–8 global financial crisis was the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Vermeiren, 2021: 1), plunging capitalism into chaos across the globe. Initially seen by many on the left as the possibility for a complete change in how economies operated, it soon turned into a victory for finance capital as central banks and governments poured money into shoring up capitalist institutions and the whole capitalist system itself.