“A man, for instance, who at the rate of 1 mark per acre mowed 2.5 acres per day and earned 2.5 marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per acre, mowed, not 3 acres, as he might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2 acres, so that he could still earn the 2.5 marks to which he was accustomed. The opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less [ ] An obvious possibility was to try the opposite policy, to force the worker by reduction of his wage rates to work harder to earn the same amount than he did before” André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (1989:111)
The above scenario described by the radical philosopher of labour André Gorz neatly encapsulates a key contention in this debate. What is enough work? What constitutes good work (for the worker)? - and will that ever change? The future of work debate has primarily contended with notions of a future free from work (Rifkin, 1995; Srnicek & Williams, 2015), yet there are also a host of practical and timely contributions which more precisely focus on reform of work and what that might mean for the day-to-day lives of ordinary working people (Miliband, 1954; Lepinteur, 2019). This has included such measures as limiting working hours, providing more adequate flexibility in working time, and allowing for remote working. The academic focus of reforming work however has traditionally met with utopian visions, particularly prior to the age of readily available quantitative data. That focus is a trend in sociology, economics, geography etc
88 that has attracted debate from such writers as Marx (1976, 1978), Weber (2010), Durkheim (2013), Bell (1999), Galbraith (2007), Giddens (1991, 2002), Beck (1999, 2008), Keynes (1930), Castells (2009, 2012) and Russell (1996). In particular Gorz (1987, 1989, 1999) and Illich (1979, 1981, 2001) have written extensively on the subject focusing acutely in relation to the necessity to reimagine work in an age of increasingly precarious employment practices.
Illich’s approach is fundamentally an anarchist attempt to remove the power of industrial capitalism over individuals to express themselves through their labours. He remarks that “wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption” (1979:10), articulating a vision of society familiar to many. This belief that workers are fundamentally exploited both economically and morally guides a great deal of opposition to the existence of industrial labour as the assumed form of work. Growing from this opposition is the understanding that the world of work as it is currently formulated cannot be changed through natural evolution alone, workers themselves must be empowered and their desire for independent thought and action fostered. Illich (2001) imagined the methods by which this might be done as the development of tools for conviviality which would give people an opportunity to guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.
One important aspect of Illich’s approach was to herald the future role of computers in liberating us from work, the coming of a new information age. Castells (2009) sees this information age as presenting
particularly difficult problem, namely the devaluation of labour. The approaching information age according to Castells has and will continue to polarise the labour force, with particular skilled groups who are
adaptive being able to become actors within capital, and those who are limited and not possessing of informational skills being subject to it. According to Williams (2007) the development of the information age has led to the discarding of human potential and calls into question whether growth and technological advancement will actually cause more harm than good, a notion that is at odds with the traditional Marxist perspective.
The influence of Marx and the legacy of Marxism cannot be underestimated in this subject, for it is in the imagined futures of radical socialists that these questions were popularised (see Marcuse’s One-
Dimensional Man, 2002). Yet that is not to attribute this legacy solely to that school of thought. There is a
long and seemingly more directly influential tradition among free market thinkers and advocates of heightened individualism to redress the role of work in society, a legacy that has shaped the work
environment into which young people today strive. In 1930 Keynes predicted that by the end of the century we would be enjoying a 15 hour work week (cited in Graeber, 2013) a prediction that did not nearly come to pass. Increased living standards and economic growth have not led to a world of satisfaction and maximal leisure, quite the opposite as the resurgence of left and right anti-establishment narratives attest
89 to (Nagle, 2017). In the early 2000’s Britain recorded Europe’s longest working hours, with over a quarter of employees working over 48 hours a week (Kodz et al., 2003), a fact that is not dissociated from the
uninterrupted Thatcherite spell followed by Third Way governance that sought to strip back only a minimal number of Thatcher’s regressive labour reforms across the 1980s and 1990s in Britain (Driver & Martell, 2002).
The relationship between increased growth and longer working hours is particularly prevalent at the lowest and highest ends of the economic spectrum with those earning the least and the most working largely unhealthy hours (Warren, 2002; Chatzitheochari & Arber, 2009). Despite this there is a mixed picture in terms of how quality time is spent, for instance Gauthier et al (2004) found that data from 16 industrialised countries across the globe since the 1960s suggests that in fact parents are spending more time with their children now than they did during the mid-late portion of the 20th century. Further evidence for this is contained in the fact the number of hours worked in the US has remained consistent for decades, and stands at 30% higher than in Europe (Rogerson, 2006). Europeans on average tend towards utilising all of their holiday entitlement whereas Americans do not, despite usually having a smaller entitlement, a salient example of how workers have internalised the factory mentality. Due to this, the American model is beginning to win out. In 2008 the Sarkozy government in France opted to scrap their landmark 35 hour week and in the UK the onset of Brexit has bred calls for further deregulation of the working time directive (Dobbins, 2017).
This neoliberal American led (though far from exclusively American) model is winning the day. Debates of this sort however began to gain prominence long ago, having developed and remodelled themselves from generation to generation since the industrial revolution (Hobsbawm, 1999; Thompson, 2013). The history of these questions around the future of work reached their height at the beginning of the 20th century. Hunnicutt (1988) opines that the growing belief that industrialisation and advanced technology would eliminate hunger and the worst excesses of disease drove workers during this time to believe that not only would work come to an end, but it would be replaced by leisure in abundance. At this time, particularly in the major industrialised nations of the UK and US, these reforms attracted adherents outside of the academic locus and gained support amongst trade unionists and some political groupings. The debate particularly centred around the role of leisure and the traditional work carried out by women (which at the time remained house work), something Illich (1981) referred to as shadow work, i.e. the labours we must partake in without pay, but with no seeming intellectual, relational, or artistic benefit. Such debates were possible due in part to increases in productive capacity and efficiency, which allowed for room to reimagine the time spent during the working day. One of the sources of increased productivity, and a key driving force behind much of the 20th and 21st century’s ability to produce efficiently, has been technological
90 debate have been met with concern and distrust from the public beginning in the early days of the 20th century all the way up to the present day. Mumford (1964:6) opined that automation hid a concerning prophesy that ‘under the pretext of saving labour, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.”
We see evidence of such debates in the industrial discourse prevalent at the time where Taylorists concerned themselves with such advancements under the auspices of providing healthy working hours (Nyl, 1995), most commonly acknowledged in the factory reforms of Henry Ford. Fordism was based on the mass production of uniform products, using the rigid technology of the production line with dedicated machines and standardised work routines which secure increased productivity through economies of scale, the deskilling and homogenisation of the labour force, and the intensification of labour (Clarke, 1990). Mechanisation, the efficiencies of the factory process line, and indeed the rising employment of women all sowed the seed for this new reality that has expanded and been refined in the century that followed – come what may. The desire and vision to reduce working hours among the Taylorists may not have been perceived as genuine, but it was a hope that came to pass to a varying degree, though never to the extent Keynes predicted. This is an issue which has once again hit the political agenda of late with discussions by the UK Labour Party starting in 2018 about introducing a four day working week (Hope, 2018), a call reiterated by the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC) (Wearn, 2018). A development that follows on from the democratic spirit of the Mitterand presidency in France which introduced the 39 hour working week during the 1980s, followed by a 35 hour working week under the Plural Left government of Lionel Jospin between 1997-2002. In Germany the largest trade union won the right to a 28 hour working week in 2018 for metal and electrical workers in Baden-Württemberg (Chazan, 2018), a deal that is seen as a precedent that will likely be rolled out across the country in the coming years.
Despite these contemporary advances the reality of automation struggled to engender positives for anyone but those who owned the means of production for many decades, not only this but its effect on the income of ordinary workers was seen as having a profound effect on the economy during the post-war period and beyond. Barany & Siegel (2018) suggest that automation gave rise to the eventual dominance of the service sector in the UK. One of the major causes of rising wage inequality across the world is the decline of
manufacturing jobs relative to service roles. This was recognised at the time publicly also. The recession that hit the US in the 1950s was referred to by The Nation magazine as an automation depression (Wartzman, 2017), whilst calling on factory owners to scale back their plans for further advancement.
As remarked by Granter (2009) many American writers took the depression of the 1930s and recession of the 1950s as indications that technology was at the stage where people were set to be permanently
91 eliminated from the production process. This launched a growing desire, particularly among the
increasingly wealthy middle class, that a future lay ahead in which the drudgery of nine-to-five labour might be replaced by a much more fluid and individualised working day (Loeb, 1933). The belief that followed from this possibility was that it might allow for the flourishing of creativity free from the constraints of the severely limited working day. Yet this new future was not without its detractors, Lippman (cited in
Hunnicutt 1988: 261) writes of a common fear during the first half of the 20th century time that such freedoms would allow the working classes far too much time to spend on wasteful hedonism that offered nothing to the collective growth of society. This was a fear not entirely of a restrictive nature, rather reflecting the apprehension that where the end of work might set us free the opportunistic nature of leisure capital would only step in to fill the void. Rose (2010) in contrast remarks upon the growing desire for self-education and lifelong learning amongst the industrial working class in Britain at the time in light of the introduction of the non-working weekend and various reforms to liberate fathers and mothers from the factory floor during this period. This fear was exaggerated by some who were apprehensive about a growth of consciousness among the working class and indeed the degradation of the masculine character
(Cuordileone, 2005). During this time many prominent figures suggested a three day week was ‘imminent’ in the United States, and connected this to the McCarthyite fear of communism during the Cold War (Lynes 1958:346)
Moreover, during the period of greatest fear/celebration that such an unencumbered age may come about there was growing concern that our social norms, values, and broader way of life was not prepared for such liberation on both sides (Srnicek & Williams, 2015). This turning of the tables was seen as a reality that the establishment on a national and international stage was positioned to resist. The welfare state in its 20th century conception was constructed in ignorance of this change and thus the march to full employment continued unabated as the system moved towards a system more closely linked to workfare (Jessop, 1996). This engendered a situation in which the welfare networks created to support workers were ill equipped for the future of work to come. This shift mirrored the industrial shift from Fordist work models (large scale factory floors dependent on production lines) to post-Fordist forms of production (small batch production and specialised products) (Jessop, 1990), designed to facilitate the rise of mass consumerism.