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The Future of Work and Workers: Insights from US Labour Studies
Global Labour Journal
The rollout of sophisticated digital tools-including advanced robotics, data analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things-threatens to disrupt the distribution, role and nature of work in society. Raising the spectre of mass unemployment and social instability, researchers predict that technological progress will soon allow for the rapid automation of many tasks that are currently performed by humans. Already the pace of change appears to accelerate, with the spread of platform-based business models fuelling the growth of gig and crowd work. While reductions in labour supply due to demographic shifts and COVID-19 militate against mass displacement, the prospects for the offshoring of services enabled by information technology (IT) and even the most limited applications of artificial intelligence (AI) will challenge inherited divisions of labour across societies (Autor, 2015; Baldwin, 2016). Most workers, including those far up the skills ladder and those in high-status jobs, will experience some form of disruption to their work duties. 1 Concurrently, other trends such as climate change, financialisation and workplace fissuring threaten to accelerate the ongoing concentration of power across societies in the hands of the wealthy few, leaving workers with less bargaining power and greater uncertainty. Given these developments, it should be no surprise that anxiety about the future runs high. In the United States (US), this has translated into more diverse and more contentious political debates. On the one hand, new visions for pooling collective risk, including the introduction of universal minimum income schemes, have entered mainstream thinking. Yet, on the other hand, policy-makers often continue with long-running efforts to undermine the fiscal power of the state, on which such new policy schemes would rely. Moreover, as economic inequality has grown and younger cohorts' prospects have dimmed, elites have taken more assertive steps to ensure against downward social mobility. Private investments in academic credentials have been a central means for transferring privilege from one generation to the next, whether pursued within or outside of increasingly stratified public education systems, and with the frequent tendency of weakening public provision. At the same time, sections of the population experiencing status erosion have begun to express their grievances in more forceful-and at times violent-ways. Just when mastering the looming socioeconomic transformation requires effective mechanisms for collective action, the public approval of societies' central political-economic institutions has fallen, from Congress and the Presidency to Corporate America. Sadly, this is more than justified, given that even mainstream scholarship has found "substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and … Biased Pluralism" (Gilens and Page, 2014: 564). At the same time, public support for unions is at an all-time high in the United States, according to recent
Review of The Last Good Job in America: Work and Education in the New Global Technoculture
2013
JOHN MARSH REVIEW OF THE LAST GOOD JOB IN AMERICA: WORK AND EDUCATION IN THE NEW GLOBAL TECHNOCULTURE by Stanley Aronowitz One of the most prolific and insightful public intellectuals on the Left, Stanley Aronowitz is also an unreconstructed radical, a part of (to borrow a title of another of his books) The 60s without Apology. This useable radical past is both Aronowitz's greatest asset, and, perhaps, a source of despair for those of us born after the closing of the radical political frontier. Over the years, however, Aronowitz has shown a remarkable facility in a number of disciplines, publishing books on labor history, higher education, and, more recently, science and technology. In The Last Good Job in America, he draws on this considerable expertise for a wide-ranging set of essays that shows us to the penny what late capitalism has taken from workers and educators, and why that debt is likely to remain outstanding for the foreseeable future.
(I'm)Material Labor in the Digital Age
2009
One must be bold enough to ask if mental labor means the millions upon millions of workers who still occupy factory positions or are currently migrating to these positions. Does the much-theorized techno-communicative "countermobilization" strategy for global resistance also include the world's homeless or half-billion illiterates?4 Classical Marxism informs these important questions. Yet as devastating the implications one must at the same time recognize the gravity and reality of transformation, including one recent estimation that "[f]inancial markets trade more in a month than the entire annual global gross domestic product" (Martin). To be sure, late capitalism's "regime of investment" does not include portfolios from the majority of the world's working class poor, but it does account for the increasing concentration of the world's wealth.
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2011
The edited book by Béla Galgóczi, Maarten Keune and Andrew Watt provides to those who are academics and practitioners, and to those who want to know more about the principles on which relocations work, useful insights into and a broad overview about recent developments in international trade and cross-border capital flows. By matching changes in trade structure with changes in patterns of foreign direct investment (FDI), the collection gives us a rich and exhaustive account of relocation in Europe. It offers not only a clear and broad portrait of the major characteristics of international capital mobility and relocation, but it also underlines the pressures exerted on production locations that have induced restructuring waves and often resulted in employers pushing for concessions from employees. The book consists of nine chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion, each of which has been written by different scholars in industrial and employment relations, the sociology of labour and labour economics. Both inter-sectoral differences and the regional or territorial dimension, with regard to the patterns and the special dynamics of restructuring, are highlighted. Concerning the former, the intention is to capture sector-specific features and their crucial role in value chain management in the automobile, ICT manufacturing and services, and the household appliances industries. The chapter on the automobile sector illustrates how the initial intention of Western carmakers to invest in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) countries to gain access to new markets has changed over time: the establishment of new capacities and export platforms has had an effect on industrial manufacturing in high-wage countries. Likewise, in the ICT sector, the vertical specialization of the original equipment manufacturers has resulted in the disintegration of the production chain, as contract manufacturers have taken over different stages of manufacturing. More specifically, the author of the chapter on ICT services argues that, in contrast to the political debate on offshoring, the relocation of software development or IT services shows that the content of work often changes at the source company. Conversely, in household appliances, the most traditional examples of relocation seem to apply, characterized by the closure of production sites in high-income countries and the opening of new establishments in low-income ones. This is explained by looking at the specificities and distinguishing features of this industry, in comparison with the automobile and ICT sectors. The household appliances industry represents a contracting sector in which a net
Predictions that work in Welds such as computer programming, architecture, and graphic design will be globally sourced have raised the specter of job losses among skilled workers in high wage economies. One of the most interesting cases tied to this controversy is that of so-called "runaway" motion picture and television production from the traditional center of entertainment media production in Los Angeles to non-US satellite production centers. Although runaway production is an old complaint in the entertainment media industries, the production location decisions of media entertainment Wrms since the mid-1990s look considerably diVerent than those in the 1980s when a similar alarm was raised. Among the critical diVerences are: (1) the location of an expanded range of production activities in regions outside the "headquarters" location of Los Angeles; (2) the ability of transnational Wrms to access multiple, self-organized and networked pools of skilled labor in production locations outside Los Angeles; and (3) the expanded role of the sub-national state in reducing the overall production costs of transnational Wrms, including those attendant to their use of skilled labor pools. The current controversy provides an opportunity to consider how transnational Wrms use international out-sourcing to address their need for high-skilled and specialized labor in the production process. It also contributes to the on-going theoretical debate over how transnational Wrms are combining the advantages to be derived from territorial agglomeration with those of substitutability of labor skills in multiple locations.
Technology As A Looking Glass: Economics, Labor, Power, and Values
It is an exciting time to be alive. The development of digital technologies has exploded and holds worlds of promise. But it would be hasty to conclude that there is nothing wrong with this current trend. Digital technology tells us a lot about the world, the U.S. in particular. That it is a manifestation of social values means it can tell about cultures and motivations. As such, for this essay I use technology to gain insight into American economic and labor practices. I develop a criteria for meaningful-labor and explain why the U.S. seems to be oriented away from the flourishing of individuals. I end with a few suggestions for the U.S. and individuals concerned with these issues.