The Brave New World of Work

Ulrich Beck

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this important book, Ulrich Beck - one of the leading social thinkers in Europe today - examines how work has become unstable in the modern world and presents a new vision for the future. Beck begins by describing how the traditional work society, with its life-long job paths, is giving way to a much less stable world in which skills can be suddenly devalued, jobs obliterated, welfare cover reduced or eliminated. The West would appear to be heading towards a social structure of ambiguity and multiple activity that has hitherto been more characteristic of the developing world. But what appears to be the end of traditional working practices can also be seen as an opportunity to develop new ideas and models for work in the twenty-first century.

Beck's alternative vision is centred on the concept of active citizens democratically organized in local, and increasingly also regional or transnational, networks. Against the threat of social exclusion, everyone can and must have a right to be included in a new definition and distribution of work. This will involve constant movement between formal employment (with a major reduction in working hours) and forms of self-organized artistic, cultural and political 'civil labour', providing equal access to comprehensive social protection. The aim must be to turn insecurity around, so that it becomes a positive and enriching discontinuity of life.

Drawing on his earlier work on risk and reflexive modernization, The Brave New World of Work is also closely linked to his studies on globalization and individualization. These processes are part of the same challenge upon which a politics of modernity must now base itself. Not only the future of work, but also the very survival of democracy and the welfare state will depend on the development of a newly committed and 'multi-active' transnational citizenship.

This book will be of great interest to second- and third-year students in sociology, politics, geography and the social sciences generally. It will also appeal to a broader audience interested in the issues and debates surrounding the changing nature of work.

1
The Brazilianization of the West
Two Scenarios, One Introduction

The unintended consequence of the neoliberal free-market utopia is a Brazilianization of the West. For trends already visible in world society – high unemployment in the countries of Europe, the so-called jobs miracle in the United States, the transition from a work society to a knowledge society – do not involve a change only in the content of work. Equally remarkable is the new similarity in how paid work itself is shaping up in the so-called first world and the so-called third world; the spread of temporary and insecure employment, discontinuity and loose informality into Western societies that have hitherto been the bastions of full employment. The social structure in the heartlands of the West is thus coming to resemble the patchwork quilt of the South, characterized by diversity, unclarity and insecurity in people's work and life.

The political economy of insecurity

In a semi-industrialized country such as Brazil, those who depend upon a wage or salary in full-time work represent only a minority of the economically active population; the majority earn their living in more precarious conditions. People are travelling vendors, small retailers or craftworkers, offer all kinds of personal service, or shuttle back and forth between different fields of activity, forms of employment and training. As new developments show in the so-called highly developed economies, this nomadic ‘multi-activity’ – until now mainly a feature of female labour in the West – is not a premodern relic but a rapidly spreading variant in the late work-societies, where attractive, highly skilled and well-paid full-time employment is on its way out.

Trends in Germany may stand here for those in other Western societies. In the 1960s only a tenth of employees belonged to this precarious group; by the 1970s the figure had risen to a quarter, and in the late 1990s it is a third. If change continues at this speed – and there is much to suggest that it will – in another ten years only a half of employees will hold a full-time job for a long period of their lives, and the other half will, so to speak, work à la brésilienne.

Here we can see the outlines of what a political economy of insecurity, or a political economy of world risk society, needs to analyse and theorize in greater detail.

1. In the political economy of insecurity, the new power game and the new power differential are acted out between territorially fixed political players (governments, parliaments, trade unions) and non-territorially fixed economic players (capital, finance and commerce).
2. This creates a well-founded impression that the room for manoeuvre of individual states is limited to the following dilemma: either pay with higher unemployment for levels of poverty that do no more than steadily increase (as in most European countries), or accept spectacular poverty in exchange for a little less unemployment (as in the United States).
3. This is bound up with the fact that the work society is coming to an end, as more and more people are ousted by smart technologies. ‘To our counterparts at the end of the 21st century today's struggles over jobs will seem like a fight over deckchairs on the Titanic.’¹ The ‘job for life’ has disappeared. Thus, rising unemployment can no longer be explained in terms of cyclical economic crises; it is due rather to the successes of technologically advanced capitalism. The old arsenal of economic policies cannot deliver results, and all paid work is subject to the threat of replacement.
4. The political economy of insecurity therefore has to deal with a domino effect. Those factors which in good times used to complement and reinforce one another – full employment, guaranteed pensions, high tax revenue, leeway in public policy – are now facing knock-on dangers. Paid employment is becoming precarious; the foundations of the social-welfare state are collapsing; normal life-stories are breaking up into fragments; old age poverty is programmed in advance; and the growing demands on welfare protection cannot be met from the empty coffers of local authorities.
5. ‘Labour market flexibility’ has become a political mantra. The orthodox defensive strategies, then, are themselves thrown onto the defensive. Calls are made everywhere for greater ‘flexibility’ – or, in other words, that employers should be able to fire employees with less difficulty. Flexibility also means a redistribution of risks away from the state and the economy towards the individual. The jobs on offer become short-term and easily terminable (i.e. ‘renewable’). And finally, flexibility means: ‘Cheer up, your skills and knowledge are obsolete, and no one can say what you must learn in order to be needed in the future.’

The upshot is that the more work relations are ‘deregulated’ and ‘flexibilized’, the faster work society changes into a risk society incalculable both in terms of individual lives and at the level of the state and politics, and the more important it becomes to grasp the political economy of risk in its contradictory consequences for economics, politics and society.² Anyway, one future trend is clear. For a majority of people, even in the apparently prosperous middle layers, their basic existence and lifeworld will be marked by endemic insecurity. More and more individuals are encouraged to perform as a ‘Me & Co.’, selling themselves on the marketplace.

The picture of society thus changes dramatically under the influence of a political economy of insecurity. Extremes of clarity appear in small zones at the very top as well as the very bottom, so low down that it is no longer really a bottom but an outside. But in between, ambivalence is the rule in a welter of jumbled forms. More and more people today live, so to speak, between the categories of poor and rich.

It is quite possible, however, to define or reconstruct these inter-categorial existences within a ‘social structure of ambivalence’. To this extent, we may therefore speak of a clear-cut ambivalence. In contrast to class society, divided between proletariat and bourgeoisie, the political economy of ambivalence produces not a Neither-Nor but a Both-And culture. This means, first of all, that top and bottom are no longer clearly defined poles, but overlap and fuse in new ways into a kind of wealth-aspect/poverty-aspect or into fixed-term wealth with its corresponding forms of existence. Consequently, insecurity prevails in nearly all positions within society. In accordance with relative weight in knowledge and capital, this leads to splits in societies and perhaps even to the collective decline of whole groups of countries. At first this may be symbolically covered over – discursively ‘sweetened’, as it were – by the rhetoric of ‘independent entrepreneurial individualism’. But it cannot be concealed for long that the bases of the much-praised welfare state and a lively everyday democracy, together with the whole self-image of a worker-citizen society based on ‘institutionalized class compromise’, are falling apart.³

The euro currency experiment is thus beginning at a time when, with the irrevocable loss of full employment in the classical sense, Europe's postwar project and its understanding of itself are in a state of suspense. As global capitalism, in the countries of the West, dissolves the core values of the work society, a historical bond is broken between capitalism, welfare state and democracy. Let there be no mistake. A property-owning capitalism that aims at nothing other than profit, excluding from consideration employees, welfare state and democracy, is a capitalism that surrenders its own legitimacy. The neoliberal utopia is a kind of democratic illiteracy. For the market is not its own justification; it is an economic form viable only in interplay with material security, social rights and democracy, and hence with the democratic state. To gamble everything on the free market is to destroy, along with democracy, that whole economic mode. The turmoil on the international finance markets of Asia, Russia and South America in the autumn of 1998 gives only a foretaste of what lies down that road.

No one today questions capitalism. Who indeed would risk doing so? The only powerful opponent of capitalism is profit-only capitalism itself. Bad news on the labour market counts as a victory report on Wall Street, the simple calculation being that profits rise when labour costs fall.

What robs technologically advanced capitalism of its legitimacy is not that it tears down national barriers and produces ever more with ever less labour, but rather that it blocks political initiatives towards a new European social model and social contract. Anyone today who thinks about unemployment should not remain trapped in old disputes about the ‘second labour market’, ‘falling wage costs’ or ‘affirmative action’. The question that needs to be asked is how democracy will be possible after the full-employment society. What appears as a final collapse must instead be converted into a founding period for new ideas and models, a period that will open the way to the state, economy and society of the twenty-first century.

The right to breaks in lifetime economic activity

The ‘pessimistic optimist’ André Gorz argues that if no recipes are useful any more, the only option is to recognize the ‘crisis’ and to make it the basis of a new normality. ‘We are leaving behind the work society, without seeking the outlines of a new society,’ writes Gorz. And in the poverty of the present, he detects the outlines of an alternative way forward for society, which matches up anew security and liberty for all. ‘We know, feel and grasp that we are all potentially unemployed or underemployed, part-time or makeshift workers without any real job security. But what each of us knows individually has not yet become an awareness of our new common reality.’ Only after the oath of manifestation – which reads: ‘The free market utopia is not the solution but a major cause of the problem, and even new turbo-growth will not revive the good old full-employment society’ – is it possible to delineate a new social model and the paths towards it. André Gorz sketches out a change of perspective whereby lack of work becomes an abundance of time, and low growth an impetus to become self-active.⁴

I propose to go one crucial step further. The antithesis to the work society is a strengthening of the political society of individuals, of active civil society here and now, of a civil democracy in Europe that is at once local and transnational. This society of active citizens, which is no longer fixed within the container of the national state and whose activities are organized both locally and across frontiers, can find and develop answers to the challenges of the second modernity – namely, individualization, globalization, falling em-ployment and ecological crisis. For in this way communal demoracy and identity are given new life in projects such as ecological initiatives, Agenda 21, work with homeless people, local theatres, cultural centres and meeting-places for discussion.

In place of a society fixated on paid work, this vision offers the prospect of gradually gaining sovereignty over time and experiencing political freedom within self-organized activity networks. Nevertheless, it raises a number of thorny questions, which will be addressed later, in Chapters 8 and 9. To name but two: How can spontaneity be organized? Is all this not just an ideology which frees the state, especially the welfare state, from the responsibilities of public provision?

Civil society and direct democracy presuppose that citizens are able to find the energy for active involvement. But does this not exclude those who cannot participate in social and political life because they are under intense economic pressure or actually on the brink of ruin? Does the idea of a citizens' democracy not derive from a middle-class idyll? And will it not be actually counter-productive, by creating a cheap-wage sector that thins down regular paid labour?

Furthermore this vision of the future, which is opposed to false hopes in a return of full employment, must not lead either to a new class division between paid workers and civil workers or to the eviction of women from paid labour or the worsening of their dual burden of paid work and domestic labour. The animation of local democracy is thus bound up with the following assumptions about the division of labour in ‘multi-active’ society.

1. Working hours should be reduced for everyone in full-time work.
2. Every woman and every man should have one foot in paid employment if they so wish.
3. P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• 1: The Brazilianization of the West: Two Scenarios, One Introduction
• 2: The Antithesis to the Work Society
• 3: The Transition from the First to the Second Modernity: Five Challenges
• 4: The Future of Work and Its Scenarios: An Interim Balance-Sheet
• 5: The Risk Regime: How the Work Society is Becoming Risk Society
• 6: A Thousand Worlds of Insecure Work: Europe's Future Glimpsed in Brazil
• 7: The Great Example? Work and Democracy in the USA
• 8: Vision of the Future I: The Europe of Civil Labour
• 9: Vision of the Future II: Postnational Civil Society
• Select Bibliography
• Index