The Dignity of Labour. Jon Cruddas
to human labour excluded from modern social democratic and socialist thinking. We contrast this approach to justice, excised from today’s progressive conversation, with more popular deterministic and utilitarian thinking on the left. The concluding chapter 9 returns to the crises of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarian populism. We discuss modern politics and post-pandemic labour regulation and end with an inspection of UBI and some practical suggestions for the organization and regulation of labour.
The basic argument is a simple one: the dignity of labour should inform how we order society and contribute to the renewal of a social democratic vision of justice.
Notes
1 1. Politics as translated from the Greek to mean ‘affairs of the city’.
2 2. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell Publishing, 1991, p. 240.
3 3. D. Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Hurst, 2017.
4 4. In this introductory chapter, we use the terms ‘work’ and ‘labour’ interchangeably. In later chapters we separate ‘labour’, ‘work’ and ‘employment’.
5 5. I tend towards the parochial. Seamus Heaney referring to his fellow poet Patrick Kavanagh thought of parochialism as permission to ‘dwell without cultural anxiety among the usual landmarks of your life’. S. Heaney, ‘The placeless heaven’, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1987, pp. 371–80.
6 6. J. Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, Atlantic Books, 2018.
7 7. This is not to ignore work being published in journals such as New Technology, Work & Employment and Futures of Work. These contributions are important. The argument simply acknowledges the general success of liberal economics in neutralizing what used to be described as the ‘labour question’.
8 8. No original research was carried out for the 2017 Taylor Review of modern working practices compared to the extensive programme that informed the Donovan Royal Commission in 1968 or the high-quality survey and case study research programmes overseen by the then Department of Employment until the early 2000s. The National Board for Prices and Incomes (1965–70), the Commission on Industrial Relations (1969–74), the Bullock Committee on Industrial Democracy (1975–7) and later the Low Pay Commission from 1997 all initiated substantial pieces of independent research into the world of work. See W. Brown, ‘The Donovan report as evidence-based policy’, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 50, No. 5–6, 2019, pp. 419–30.
9 9. P. Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Allen Lane, 2017, p. 330.
10 10. R.S. Foa, A. Klassen, M. Slade, A. Rand and R. Collins, The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020, Centre for the Future of Democracy, 2020. The Hansard Society, Audit of Political Engagement 16, 2019.
11 11. M. Sandel, ‘Populism, Trump and the future of democracy’, Open Democracy, 9 May 2018.
12 12. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.
13 13. M. Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment, Oneworld Publications, 2016.
14 14. Carl Frey and Mike Osborne, ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?’, Oxford Martin School Working Papers, September 2013, University of Oxford.
15 15. Daniel Susskind and Richard Susskind, The Future of Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, Oxford University Press, 2015.
16 16. ‘How robots change the world: what automation really means for jobs and productivity’, Oxford Economics, June 2019.
17 17. Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, Jonathan Cape, 2019. Similar themes have recently been played out in films such as Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina.
18 18. A. Huxley, Brave New World, Chatto & Windus, 1932. G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Secker & Warburg, 1949.
19 19. Also see E. Davies (ed.), Economic Science Fictions, Goldsmiths Press, 2018. Contributors discuss the relationship between science fiction and economic narratives, with many arguing the positive case for using science fiction to reimagine how technology overturns neo-liberalism.
20 20. See especially R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (eds), Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, 2015. N. Srnicek and M. Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Verso, 2016.
21 21. D. Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Allen Lane, 2018.
22 22. H. Reed and S. Lansley, Universal Basic Income: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?, Compass Publications, 2016. G. Standing, Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen, Pelican Books, 2017.
23 23. M. Taylor, Good Work: The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices, UK Crown Press, 2017.
24 24. In February 2018, the ONS suggested that flatlining productivity since 2008 was due to more and more people working in unproductive industries such as food and drink services rather than more productive ones and to static labour mobility.
Part I: The Economics of Labour
Work and human labour are clutch political issues.
In this first part of the book we chronologically address the political representation of labour since the end of the Second World War and inspect how various economic frameworks have directed alternative approaches to labour regulation.
Throughout we reflect on the influence of Classical Political Economy, Marxism and Neo-Classical Economics in shaping competing political debates on labour regulation. The first considers embodied labour as the source of a commodity’s value, the second the exploitation of a person’s capacity to work as the source of profit under capitalism, whilst the third essentially ignores the organization of work. Each abstract economic framework has influenced the study of industrial relations, industrial sociology and personnel management, and we review their contributions in post-war debates over the organization of work.
The story shifts from post-war social democracy by way of Thatcherism to fractured neo-liberalism and fashionable Marxism and ends in modern political bewilderment and a desperate desire for something different; a journey navigated through the contested political representation of human labour.
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