Introduction

This chapter compares and analyses work under two social policies that claim to empower service users, recognize human rights and improve service quality, namely, the Social Care (Self-Directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013 and Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) (NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, 2018). Although both policies are seen as much-needed steps towards the social inclusion and human rights of people with disabilities, the private-market consumer focus and inadequate funding of these policies pit the rights of service users against the employment rights of care workers, generating a downward spiral in wages and conditions, as well as serious concerns about quality of care. Both policies place customer choice at the heart of care relationships, providing individualized funding packages to eligible individuals for the purchase of needed or wanted services.

These policies emerged during a time of heightened austerity and witnessed considerable concerns on the part of service users that their personalized funding packages were inadequate to their needs and that their views and those of their families and carers were often overlooked (Productivity Commission, 2017; Warr et al, 2017). This has obvious spill-over effects on service organizations, which receive inadequate recompense for services provided, and frequently experience problems with cash flow and shortfall, providing incentives to drive wages down and increase temporary and insecure employment.

In Australia, funding is assigned to the individual in a pay-as-you-go arrangement. This has propelled the rapid emergence of gig-like or casual, on-demand labour markets for individual home care workers in disability care, supplanting long-established, permanent, non-profit employment. Australia's system of employment regulation and sector-wide wage awards seems ill-equipped to protect workers in this new, fragmented context (David and West, 2017).

In Scotland, care organizations are required to pursue cost recovery from the government after individual services have been provided. For Scotland's voluntary sector, the requirement that funded agencies should adopt New Public Management (NPM) practice has resulted in a prevalence of short-term funding contracts, cuts in services, stricter and often confining performance criteria, and the emergence of a ‘contract culture’ whereby funders determine what type of care is available (Cunningham, 2014). It is ironic that under a policy aimed at consumer empowerment these trends create a greater emphasis on target setting over service users’ needs.

Introduction: the austerity of domestic labour platforms

How to do more with less? This is, essentially, austerity's onerous question. Its default answer, in turn, has been to defer, download and outsource the burden of being overtasked and cash strapped. As Peck (2012, p 632) notes, ‘austerity is ultimately concerned with offloading costs, displacing responsibility; it is about making others pay the price of fiscal retrenchment’ (emphasis in original). These ‘others’ are, frequently, marginalized communities of colour and the low-income urban neighbourhoods they inhabit. Cities, to quote Peck again, are ‘where austerity bites’ as it ‘operates on, and targets anew, an already neoliberalized institutional landscape’, but does so in a highly uneven manner (Peck, 2012, pp 629, 631). What Marxist-feminist scholars have referred to as the ‘crisis of social reproduction’ or, more narrowly defined, the ‘crisis of care’ is thus experienced differently depending on what urban household one belongs to (Fraser, 2016; Hester, 2018). In the face of enduring cuts to publicly provisioned social reproductive services and a ‘post-Fordist sexual contract’ that expects women to excel both as mothers and as entrepreneurial professionals (Adkins, 2016), white middle-class households have increasingly turned to the market to outsource their reproductive tasks (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). As formal and informal markets for domestic work expand, they not only generate income opportunities for working-class minority and migrant households but also intensify their social reproductive challenges (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). Moreover, it has been extensively documented how such feminized and racialized reproductive labour is highly precarious, un(der)-regulated and subject to exploitation by employers and labour market intermediaries alike (for example, Glenn, 1992; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; McGrath and DeFilippis, 2009). It is within this historical and socioeconomic setting that this chapter considers the market entrance of a new type of ‘intermediary’: the on-demand domestic work platform.

Digital platforms amplify existing power dynamics and inequalities while introducing technologies and techniques that produce qualitatively new arrangements, conditions and experiences of work, generally referred to as gig work. Whereas I have elsewhere focused on the historically gendered and racialized techniques that render platformmediated domestic work invisible and devalued (Van Doorn, 2017), here I examine how formally self-employed domestic workers negotiate the engineering of their visibility, agency and income opportunities on two home-cleaning platforms – Handy and Helpling.

Introduction

In industrialized societies unions have traditionally played a key role in regulating the employment relationship and protecting against an unfettered commodification and exploitation of labour. Such exploitation was perceived to pose a threat to workers’ fundamental rights to participate as citizens (Bosch, 2004; Standing, 2011). This was largely achieved through the mechanisms of collective bargaining and industrial action, and by lobbying for a floor of rights for workers in the forms of protective legislation.

However, the ability of unions to effectively represent workers (especially through collective bargaining) has been weakened considerably since the 1960s. There has been a combined shift towards globalism, austerity and neoliberalism, exemplified by a rise in liberal market economies (LMEs), of which ‘freeing up’ of labour markets is a core tenet (Fudge, 2005). LMEs typically adopt labour-market policies that are characterized by a decrease in political support for collective representation of workers and minimal regulation or deregulation of the employment relationship. In tandem with (and probably influenced by) the change to regulatory systems and a weakening of union power, there has been a shift away from the standard employment relationship (SER) (Broughton et al, 2016). The SER is essentially a conceptualization of a traditional model of permanent, fulltime, continuous employment (Arnold and Bongiovi, 2013); however, while this model remains dominant in many countries and employment systems, it is widely accepted that the SER is being steadily eroded. What is emerging in its place is a wide range of alternative or non-standard forms of work (Bobeck et al, 2018) that are much more flexible and fragmented in temporal terms. Examples include zero-hours work, gig work and lowhours contracts. According to the European Commission (2017), upwards of 6 million people in the EU are working on an intermittent and ondemand basis. Research indicates that such work has been associated with higher levels of precarity (Kalleberg, 2009; Burgess et al, 2013).

In Ireland, as in other countries, the trade union movement has experienced a steady decline in density (particularly in the private sector) (CSO, 2019).

Introduction

We are only beginning to appreciate the full societal impact of the shift to monetarism and the ideas of the Chicago school of economics. In line with monetarist ideas, Paul Volker, the US federal reserve chairman, moved to tighten monetary supply and push up interest rates to stamp out inflation in 1979 (often referred to as the Volker Shock). This set in motion changes that spelled the end of the era of the Standard Employment Relationship (SER) in both the US and Canada (Cooper, 2017) and the rise of neoliberal austerity policies. The social compromise that allowed workers to bargain collectively and to rely on the state to fill at least some of the gaps in the social wage would gradually unravel. In the intervening four decades a new set of rules and norms have emerged, regulating the relationship between employers and employees. This chapter explores why employment rules and norms took the form they did, the prevalence of precarious employment in the labour market today and the social implications of what this chapter labels as the era of Increased Precarious Employment.

The employment norms associated with the era of Increased Precarious Employment represent one component of a broader shift to a neoliberal form of social organization. Neoliberalism is defined here as a form of social organization where individuals are free to contract, where outcomes are disciplined by the market (Harvey, 2005) and where the role of the family in providing for its members is emphasized over the role of state welfare (Cooper, 2017). Neoliberalism has redefined ‘common sense’ around the role of the state and the rights of individuals. In the process, it has remade institutions such as the employment relationship, and many of the values held by individuals (Brown, 2015; Kotsko, 2018). This chapter will argue that the increased prevalence of less secure employment has as much to do with the ideological shifts embedded in the neoliberal and austerity discourse as it does with rational responses to economic forces.

For many workers, particularly white men who were the greatest beneficiaries of the post-1945 social compromise, employment has become less secure and less rewarding. Since 1979, real wages have stopped growing for most workers. The risks of injury and illness, unemployment and old age are increasingly borne by workers (Cappelli, 1999; Hacker, 2006).

Immigration laws operate as increasingly central instruments of discipline and control, with significant impacts on how work is organized (Anderson, 2010) and how access to substantive rights is granted or denied. Many countries have revived ‘guest worker’ schemes because they are said to promote mutually beneficial outcomes, yet labelling the subjects of these schemes ‘temporary migrant workers (TMWs)’, ‘foreign workers’, or more generally ‘non-citizens’ contributes to profound vulnerabilities for migrants at work. This chapter analyses the role of immigration controls in furthering labour flexibility and worker vulnerability in Canada and the way that this flexibility and vulnerability dovetail with austerity.

Non-citizenship is an uneven and contingent category, with social locations amplifying or ameliorating a migrant's experience of precariousness (Fudge and Tham, 2017, p 4). Research shows that highend migrant professionals and consultants generally do not experience significant disadvantage as non-citizens; however, this designation does disadvantage those who are differentiated as low-skilled ‘non-citizens’ (Sharma, 2006; Goldring and Landolt, 2013). Indeed, ‘state-defined legal status categories establish configurations of rights for people occupying these categories’ (Bosniak, 2006, p 3), and the rights of those positioned as outside their boundaries are rationed or limited, including rights at work and in the labour market (Anderson, 2010). In addition to a normative political discourse that criminalizes migrants and/or sees them as problems to be ‘managed’ (Munck, 2008), regulations governing work and citizenship increasingly intersect, generating new and compounding insecurities, with the form of labour precarity depending on the specific immigration controls and labour regulation. This chapter explores how features of a new labour regime in Canada in the era of austerity, and the increased presence of ‘temporary migrant workers’ in the quick-service restaurant industry, promote increased labour flexibility and exacerbate migrant workers’ vulnerability. Migrant workers face unique challenges, distinct from those of their domestic counterparts, and with their growing presence in low-wage Canadian worksites, the need to organize at the intersection of work and citizenship has become an urgent project.

Debates about workplace resistance and dissent are a central aspect of Labour Process Theory (Burawoy, 1979; Thompson, 1997; Thompson and Smith, 2017). This chapter focuses on care work in the non-profit social services (NPSS), and argues that resistance in this sector is a series of compromises and moral projects. With the objective of extending Labour Process Theory and commenting on resistance in the context of austerity, this chapter draws on qualitative data and on Ackroyd and Thompson's (1999; 2013) three-part analytic frame (described in more detail later) exploring the dynamics of resistance and dissent in care work.

The NPSS is funded largely by government and grew dramatically under welfare state contracting out (Cunningham, 2008; Eikenberry, 2009). It provides support and care services to a range of populations such as the elderly, young, people with disabilities and people with mental health issues. Agencies come in a variety of sizes, from very small (one or two employees) to very large (1,000+ workers), and some operate as regional or national non-profit chains.

Mirroring the contradictory relations of the austerity-linked, contracted-out state that funds most non-profit care in Canada, workplace resistance and dissent in the NPSS is an unstable equilibrium that can legitimize austerity, act as a catalyst to undermine it, or both. NPSS staff members often have altruistic/social justice identities outside of the workplace, and they seek these values in the organization's mission, work content and workplace relationships. Workers’ personal values often form the bedrock on which oppositional identities and practices are built, enhanced, frustrated and circumscribed, or a combination of all these factors simultaneously (Van Til, 2009; Nickel and Eikenberry, 2016). Most workers assume that altruistic values and identities will be held in common by fellow employees and managers, and seek ways to bond with others in the workplace around this presumed shared identity. In addition, they often educate and mobilize each other around ongoing political and social understandings of social justice and care (Aronson and Smith, 2010; 2011). This shared, oppositional analysis can extend beyond the workplace to analyses of the larger society and the ways that unjust relations are seen to be active in the workplace.

Introduction

Living wage campaigns command substantial popular support, yet austerity is proving to be a poor bedfellow to their implementation. Recognising that the articulation of austerity is bound by the context of political spaces, governmental formations and constitutional forms in which these policies, programmes and political projects unfold (Clarke, 2017), this chapter seeks to tease out these contingencies of place in the impact of the austerity agenda. To do so, it explores the progressive policy to introduce a living wage to the social care workforce in Scotland.

As a strategy to improve workers’ conditions, a living wage endeavours to secure better-than-minimum wages to address the social and economic consequences of low pay. At a time when low-wage earners are experiencing cuts in public services, stagnant real-wage growth and precarious work at the same time as declining union strength, a living wage protects the workforce that is most exposed to market forces as a result of outsourcing and restructuring (McBride and Muirhead, 2016; Parker et al, 2016; Prowse and Fells, 2016). Outsourced social care involves difficult working conditions across multiple sites, with a largely female workforce at the bottom of the wage distribution in a sector plagued by a shortage of workers and high turnover (Howes, 2005). In 2016 the Scottish Government introduced the Scottish Living Wage (SLW) for front-line workers in adult social care in an effort to address cost and quality tensions in the market as well as recruitment and retention difficulties (Cunningham et al, 2018). Intended to relieve the social care sector from a dysfunctional market, the SLW and its implementation present an opportunity to examine the challenges and consequences arising at the intersection of a positive policy initiative and austerity measures.

After briefly outlining the literature on minimum and living wages and on austerity in social care, this chapter presents findings on local authorities’ and providers’ experiences with SLW implementation. Drawing on interviews with voluntary and private social care providers across Scotland, representatives of lead employer bodies, union officials, commissioning authorities and civil servants, the findings suggest that the re-regulation of pay has, paradoxically, prompted greater insecurity in market relations in social care (Cunningham et al, 2018).

Introduction

Ireland stands as one of the countries most severely affected by the Great Recession (GR) and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which necessitated unprecedented remedial measures in the form of a ‘bail out’ by the three international institutions known collectively as the Troika (International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission), through promulgation of emergency legislation and the adoption of severe austerity measures (Robbins and Lapsley, 2014). Such interventions impacted on all sectors, including the social economy, with the Irish Non-Profit Voluntary and Community Sector (NPVCS) being forced to do more with less, which had implications for how it did its work and managed its people.

This contribution illustrates one of the themes of this volume's Chapter 1 on how austerity may be framed. In this case, austerity may be interpreted either as a continuation of an established neoliberal ideology or as a not-to-be-wasted opportunity that is unique to a particular era in time (Pierson, 1998; Clarke and Newman, 2012). The economic success of the Irish economy from 1994–2007, better known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, was in stark and sudden contrast to the recessionary-fuelled era of 2008 to 2016, in which austerity dominated (Murphy, 2014). This unprecedented period in Irish socioeconomic history placed intense financial pressures on all sectors of the Irish economy as government spending and revenues drastically contracted and taxation increased (Roche et al, 2017). The NPVCS was not immune, given it high dependency on state funding and its close relationship with government in terms of governance, regulation and service contracts.

To provide insight into the dynamics of austerity in the Irish NPVCS context, this chapter draws on a qualitative-based empirical study within the subsector of Physical and Sensory Disabilities (PSD), built around two principal service providers, anonymized as Alpha and Omega. It argues that government funding and service-level agreements (SLAs) created the conduit for New Public Management-(NPM) orientated thinking and practices to enter the sector and exert downward pressures on how it manages people and work. Coincidentally, this conveniently aligned with austerity ideology and gave new impetus to NPM. The findings show strong evidence of NPM-orientated changes in work and human resources management (HRM), propelled by strong isomorphic pressures that had accelerated and intensified during the era of austerity.

Introduction: neoliberalism, austerity and the human-service workplace

In both the US and Europe, human-service workers are the ‘first responders’ for people and communities in need. However, since the late 1980s, the convergence of neoliberal social policy and mounting austerity in this arena have restructured the nature of work and the labour process (Landsbergis, Grzywacz and LaMontagne, 2014; Farnsworth and Irving, 2018). The results have dramatically affected the social relations of production and the capacity of human-service workers and agencies to provide quality care.

Scholars from various disciplines and many countries have studied the impact of neoliberal austerity on the scale and scope of social welfare programmes (Abramovitz, 2014), the hollowing-out of the welfare state (Ehrenreich, 2016) and the slow-down of the economy (Rogowski, 2019). Others have examined its impact on the well-being of different population groups, especially the poor, low-wage workers and service users (Soss, Fording and Schram, 2011). Yet few researchers have examined the impact of neoliberal policies on workers, mostly women, employed in public and non-profit human-service organizations (Baines, 2004; Abramovitz, 2012). We need more information about the ways in which neoliberal austerity has changed work organization, service provision and the working conditions that shape the daily experience of workers and service users in human-service organizations.

This chapter draws on social science literature and our survey of the New York City (NYC) human-service workforce to discuss the impact of neoliberal austerity on the organization of work and the humanservice workforce in the US, where women, especially women of colour, predominate. Using the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory, we (1) explain the rise of neoliberal austerity; (2) identify five neoliberal strategies designed to dismantle the US welfare state; (3) focus on the impact of privatization, a key neoliberal strategy; (4) drill down to show how privatization has transformed the organization of work in public and non-profit human-service agencies; and (5) detail the experience of nearly 3,000 front-line, mostly female, human-service workers in NYC. Neoliberal privatization is most often understood as selling off public assets and/or shifting the responsibility for welfare state programmes – such as Social Security and Medicare – from the public to the private sector.

Introduction

This chapter draws on a research study carried out with UNI Global Union (the Global Union Federation for unions representing workers in private sector service industries). A total of 58 interviews were undertaken with officials and activists of UNI Global and their affiliates from around the world with a view to investigating union responses to the changing world of work. This chapter briefly outlines three of the 25 cases from this study of union resistance: namely, Sindicatul IT Timişoara in Romania; Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Empresa Teleperformance de a Republica Dominicana in the Dominican Republic; and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in the US. It will focus on new forms of unionism for the 21st century. The chapter begins with a brief outline of the challenges faced by unions in the context of austerity and then moves on to examine the cases, which reflect a range of union activity: from elements of social movement and community-based unionism with little immediate ‘pay off’, to forms of unionism that have secured collective bargaining agreements and transformative increases in membership.

The world of work is changing rapidly and, while there are important geographical variations, a number of global trends present challenges to trade unions. The major changes in political economy that have taken place since the 1970s – the emphasis on the dominance of the market and, by association, trade liberalization, de-regulation and financialization – have become the accepted economic ‘common sense’ around the world. In this context, employment relationships that diverge from standard forms, for example, temporary, part-time and agency employment, as well as bogus self-employment, are on the rise in developed economies (ILO, 2016). This comes at a time when standard forms of employment remain unattainable for many working within the informal economy elsewhere. This work is associated with lower wages, reduced social protection, income insecurity and poorer working conditions, as well as challenges over rights to unionize and engage in collective bargaining (Eurofound, 2013). These developments in the world of work take place against a context of rapid and far-reaching technological change that has aided outsourcing, offshoring and the fragmentation of production processes locally, regionally and globally.

While many of these trends predate austerity, it is undeniable that post-2008 retrenchment policies have exacerbated them.

The premise on which austerity is founded is that markets should take over responsibilities from the state (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2012; Farnsworth and Irving, 2018) and therefore more responsibility should be placed on people to self-provision through wage employment or through unpaid labour. This is argued to be good for the economy, as in a globalized world employers would resist paying higher taxes. Under a low-tax regime and with access to an enlarged and flexible labour supply, existing employers would expand employment and new entrepreneurs would spring up to offer opportunities to work for all, provided no one was too choosy about what the work was or when, where or for how long they had to do it.

In the period since 2010, when austerity mania took over government policies fuelled by media calls to balance the books, a great deal has happened and a new mythology is emerging to replace the austerity mythology of perfectly functioning markets offering an alternative to state welfare systems. Instead of promising as much employment as we want, provided we are not fussy about conditions or security, the new mythology is the need to adjust to the demands of the unstoppable force of technology, which may result in mass destruction of jobs, and even the end of work as we know it (Frey and Osborne, 2017). The implications of how this forecast of a work Armageddon fits with the austerity agenda and the role of the state have not yet been fully thought through by politicians and those setting the international policy agenda. If, instead of offering self-provisioning through work as the means of survival, the predictions of mass job destruction are taken seriously, then there is no credibility to the argument that there is no need for state intervention in the labour market and social system. No one is seriously suggesting a smooth transition to, for example, full employment around a shorter working week under the impact of the artificial intelligence and digitalization revolution. To enable people to provide for themselves, some degree of state intervention will be needed to ensure a redistribution of work and resources, otherwise governments can expect to face the political discontent that would come from mass unemployment supported by benefits that have been cut to the bone under austerity.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sketches out some of the major debates concerning austerity, neoliberalism and work. Given the international content in this volume, austerity debates are sketched in broad strokes rather than being specific to national contexts. Austerity is viewed as a set of interwoven policies aimed at reducing public debt and expenditure, increasing consumer taxes and purportedly stimulating economic wellbeing through corporate tax cuts and support for private business. Since the 1970s, austerity policies have been closely associated with neoliberalism, a set of policies and processes that valorize the private market as the solution to all social and economic problems and seek to reduce or eliminate social entitlements and public provision (Harvey, 2007; Evans and McBride, 2017). Austerity policies are underscored by neoclassical economics assertions that cutting public budgets and reducing government debt will generate ‘confidence’ and a return to growth and prosperity during difficult economic times (Blyth, 2013, p 3).

The current wave of austerity policies stems from the aforementioned neoliberal economic consensus that pervades developed economies, albeit in an uneven way. The current iteration of austerity, rather than its ongoing presence as an integral part of neoliberalism (Pierson, 1998; Clarke, 2017), was triggered by the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007– 08. Neoliberalism's emphasis on creating freedom of capital and lifting restrictions on international finance (Harvey, 2007) led to the financial ‘light touch’ regulation that governed the US sub-prime and other national housing markets. The financial crisis that followed the collapse of these housing markets threatened the entire global economy (Lethbridge, 2012). The initial government responses in 2008–09 were fiscal stimulus packages, which increased government borrowing and levels of debt, and simultaneously prevented deep and lasting recessions.

The second stage of crisis involved governments taking the opportunity of crisis to reduce the real and purportedly high accumulated levels of debt created by the GFC and previous decades of social spending (Mendoza, 2014; Stiglitz, 2014; Evans and McBride, 2017).