Post-Work

Stanley Aronowitz, Jonathan Cutler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135207359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

In Post-Work, Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler have collected essays from a variety of scholars to discuss the dreary future of work. The introduction, The Post-Work Manifesto, provides the framework for a radical reappraisal of work and suggests an alternative organization of labor. The provocative essays that follow focus on specific issues that are key to our reconceptualization of the notion and practice of work, with coverage of the fight for shorter hours, the relationship between school and work, and the role of welfare, among others. Armed with an interdisciplinary approach, Post-Work looks beyond the rancorous debates around welfare politics and lays out the real sources of anxiety in the modern workplace. The result is an offering of hope for the future--an alternative path for a cybernation, where the possibility of less work for a better standard of living is possible.

1	The Post-Work Manifesto

Stanley Aronowitz, Dawn Esposito,

William DiFazio, and Margaret Yard

Introduction

The bottom is falling out and with it our sense of well-being. For two centuries, despite depressions and wars, America was the “golden door” behind which beckoned the call of the Good Life. Yet, as the twenty-first century approaches, the United States is more accurately characterized as the home of downsizing jobs and lost security, of disappointed hopes and expectations. For many, recent economic and political developments point to the withering away of comfortable full-time jobs “with a future.” With jobless futures have also come deteriorating and lost benefits, from quality health care to assurances like social security that were once guaranteed—if only minimally in the United States—by the employment contract.

If the current situation is allowed to continue on its present course, only the few will be able to enjoy life without the constant stress of economic worries. The rest of us will be so buried in work without end, anxious about procuring or simply sustaining our livelihoods, that even the freedom to imagine a different kind of life will seem more and more like a luxury. It has become increasingly difficult to find the time just to reflect, to write, to feel—to change. Ours is a moment when private and public employers regularly demand “give-backs,” from health benefits to pensions and holidays. It is anxiety—certainly not the economy—which becomes democratized as the quest for secure paid labor consumes more and more of our time, uniting people in divergent job and class strata from blue-collar to middle and upper managements as perhaps not for centuries before. For no one is immune as these distinctions themselves commence to collapse, and are rendered increasingly meaningless by the immensity of socioeconomic transformations emblematic of our age.

Most people are likely to understand that industrial workers suffer an ever-present threat of runaway shops and technological change. Thirty years ago many working people fought against employers’ efforts to get more work out of them for the same or less money and less free time. But at the end of the twentieth century, fearful of losing jobs, this group of working people now silently suffers more speedup, compulsory overtime and work accidents (lest the boss pull up stakes and leave). Even as statistics show economic growth, legal factory jobs continue to shrink while illegal factory labor has grown. Moreover, in the past decade, we have seen the return of what we thought had been banished forever: the sweatshop. Many people are working “off the books” in the underground economy, translating into ten-and twelve-hour days at wages below legal minimums. In these sweatshops, which make more of our clothing and toys than ever, child labor has reappeared. Children work next to their parents or alone and are often beaten by the bosses, chained to machines and locked in poorly ventilated rooms.

It is not just industrial or blue-collar workers who have been profoundly affected. Doctors are working for salaries in health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and in the relentless drive for cost-cutting are losing control over their own work. In the new world of the HMOs the manager, not the doctor, decides who is sick and who is not, who deserves treatment and who doesn't. And many other professionals are being subordinated to the steady drumbeat of downsizing. For example, as a group, academics are freer than most people in the sense of having time to do one's own work and to speak one's mind in a classroom. Yet tenure itself is no longer secure: as a form of guaranteed income, a kind of entitlement, it is not surprising to find this—like any little security offered most of us is—beginning to be threatened. And just at the moment when a college education seems to be a ticket to a better chance for steady work, tuition at public and private colleges has skyrocketed. Many students can no longer afford to go to school, for pleasure or to pursue careers more instrumentally oriented, because student aid is also rapidly disappearing. Tuition costs in public institutions have increased so rapidly that working-class students, many of whom are minorities, need to work at one or more part-time or full-time jobs while having little time to study. Colleges are once more becoming the province of the privileged.

But an alternative direction to the one in which we are now headed is also possible. This other road would lead to shorter working hours, higher wages, and best of all, our ability to control much more of our own time. In such a different and improved world, we would still produce the goods and services that society needs but we would spend less time doing it. There's plenty to produce: we need millions of homes at rents people can afford. Our environment needs to be cleaned, improved and maintained; depleted drinking water supplies need to be restored and pollution levels reduced. There's also plenty to do: kids need child-care and recreation activities. Ordinary people might run television channels and, together with independent film and video makers, become more genuinely involved with contemporary media. Neighborhoods would have their theaters, concert halls, sports facilities, and collective meeting spaces. Libraries would become full-time again. And people would have time to use them. And, as in much of Europe, many of these services would be free or offered at small prices. The seemingly impossible dream of shorter hours may lead to a life where we are relatively freed from the oppressiveness of time as we now commonly experience it.

Are we headed for freedom or hell? Are current trends towards corporate, government and educational “downsizing” a natural event or are they produced by real people for specific purposes? Can we afford the “free” market which puts two million people on the street without shelter, produces poverty for more than a quarter of Americans, and puts a million more children under the poverty line each year? Do we want an economy which depresses wages for about 80 percent of the working population and continues to ship jobs to low-wage countries? Whose market is it anyway? The middle class does not really benefit when the poor lose with the ending of “welfare as we know it” and the looming privatization of Medicare and Social Security. Those employees shed by the welfare state simply flood the labor market, undermining the bargaining leverage of middle-class workers in the private sector. Only the multimillion dollar salaries and stock options of corporate executives remain in place—and then, not even for these men all that securely—as the rest of our jobs are cut or cut back.

What's going on? What does the overused term “globalization” mean for the average working person? When President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, his administration promised that more U.S. workers would get jobs than those which were lost to Mexico. But the reverse has occurred. In 1995, American workers lost more than 40,000 jobs to Mexico, and less than 10,000 new jobs for U.S. workers were created by the NAFTA treaty. The Big Three auto companies have outsourced auto parts to border plants where workers are paid $80 a week compared to $400–$500 paid to workers doing comparable jobs in the U.S. Much work keeps flowing out of the country, replaced by temporary, part-time and contingent work, which the statisticians optimistically call “jobs.”

Moreover, the consequences of the application of numerical controls, robotics and laser technology to the manufacturing workplace have been devastating for many production workers in the U.S. Organizational changes such as the merger of large corporations and the gobbling up of littler ones by the giants have thinned the ranks of middle managers and many professionals. Computers are now a staple of virtually every office. Voice mail eliminates secretaries; new software packages have dramatically reduced the need for accountants and bookkeepers.

And, for tens of thousands of clerical and technical workers, computers now mean taking work back home. After nearly a century when homework was regarded as a wage-busting tool, computers have made it easier for employers to revive this practice. With pagers, cellphones, and laptop computers, all time becomes work time. Moreover, today the word processor, the editor, telemarketer, even the programmer often loses her steady job but characteristically returns as a “contractor” who works part-time on a contingent and benefit-free basis. It is rare for such contractors to enjoy basic health insurance, vacations, holidays and pension benefits. Are such persons entrepreneurs or simply benefit-free temporary workers also negatively affected by the huge loss of jobs and by growing economic insecurity?

Economic growth doesn't necessarily mean real job growth anymore, even if temporary bursts of contingent job creation do occur. Everyone knows the joke: “Millions of jobs created . . . and I've got four of them.” Yet, the bare fact is that technological change can now be used to displace all categories of workers, including managers and professionals. A few examples may better illustrate the point. Computer programmers invented Computer-Aided Design (CAD) to relieve engineers of time-consuming tasks like drafting so that these engineers could spend more time in design work. Today, the drafting profession is all but a memory: ironically, CAD soon began to relieve many engineers of their jobs.

Another example: the health care system is now dominated by managed care. In 1996, 60 percent of all insured people were in the system of managed care plans. Managed care corporations have advised mental health professionals to use drugs to replace therapy on penalty of not being paid for treatment. Whether drugs are better for patients than therapy, they are now prescribed because they are “cost-efficient.” But, in the process, this treatment can be used to wipe out hours and hours of high-paid professional work time.

Finally, mergers and acquisitions result in layoffs of headquarters and research and development staffs. After all, why duplicate the full array of managerial, technical, scientific, professional and clerical employees when one organization can replace two or three and communications technologies allow the same level of output? Today a fifty-year-old manager in a financial services or retail corporation is, like the spotted owl, an endangered species.

In an era when almost any company can merge with another and machines regularly replace people, can any working person honestly say that her or his job is safe? Are we heading for a future in which the good job rapidly becomes the subject of museum shows? It requires a leap of naivete to accept at face value many politicans’ and economists’ assurances that the Great American Job Machine is purring. Consumer confidence has never been higher. But worker insecurity is simultaneously invoked as the cause of restrained wage inflation.

This is what we know: even as statistics show a 5 percent unemployment rate, large corporations show no signs of reversing their drive toward the destruction of jobs. The mere threat of job destruction (and the vivid imagery of massive layoffs) keeps workers off balance and, consequently, overworked and underpaid. Even as politicians and the media claim that the economy is bouncing upward, more of U.S. have part-time, temporary and contingent jobs which are counted by statisticians as if they are full-time. Despite the “help wanted” signs in the windows of retail chains like McDonald's, wages continue to stagnate. According to a recent study by anthropologist Kathryn Newman, there are fourteen applicants for every McDonald's job in black and Latino neighborhoods. Even many professionals are forced to work as “consultants.” Translation: a new form of part-time work with no benefits and job security has emerged. Some may have confidence that the American job machine can spit out low-paying jobs like popcorn. But most will choke on the hard kernel of desperation at the heart of our economy.

We must look at the fact that of the millions of jobs created over the years of the Clinton presidency, at least half of them paid below the national average. Many were not real jobs at all but part-time, temporary or contingent work, the kind that does not even provide adequate health, vacation and pension benefits. For, even as the politicians tell us we have it better than ever, wages over the last twenty years have slipped 20 percent. As big corporations pay their executives an average 8 percent to 12 percent increase each year, most workers received raises of only 2.5 percent on average, a figure which has not even kept up with inflation. If the average American household income has not declined in this period, it is because the two-paycheck household has become the rule rather than the exception. In many cases, two or three incomes are needed to make as much as one person earned, in real terms, twenty years ago. A few million industrial workers are making more money than ever because many are putting in sixty- and seventy-hour weeks while the majority of industrial workers are scraping to keep their heads above water. Some auto workers pull in as much as $90,000 a year but have no time to enjoy it. Nor is there enough time to spend with family and friends, who are themselves likely to be caught in the same trap as well. The wages are great, but the work is too much. Labor strife in the auto industry today is caused by worker resistance to mandatory overtime and inadequate staffing levels. The auto workers’ demands are obviously unreasonable: they want to get a life. Are we doomed to accept lower wages and salaries, fewer benefits on the job and serious deterioration in public goods such as education and health? The strike by French truck drivers in the fall of 1996 for shorter hours and early retirement ended in a victory for the workers. The admirable determination of these workers provides an important illustration of how alternative paths to that of submission are possible for workers suffering the physical and spiritual hazards of endless work. Among other gains won by these workers was a ban on Sunday driving, full retirement benefits at age 55, a substantial pay increase, and smaller work loads. In contrast, American truck drivers and other workers are putting in longer hours, have won relatively small wage increases and have lost many of their benefits. Most of us can no longer afford to retire at age sixty-two or sixty-five; social security “reform” has already lifted the age for near-future retirees to sixty-seven, and there is talk of boosting it again to age seventy. Older workers may be useful in order to flood the market, but only after their sense of job security has been destroyed by a few layoffs and age-biased firings.

French, German and many other European workers are engaged in a determined struggle for shorter hours—in many French workplaces, this has succeeded in cutting the workweek to thirty-seven hours, in German workplaces to thirty-five, while it is common in both countries to find five-and six-week paid vacations. Meanwhile, few American workers have as much as even three weeks vacation and average U.S. working hours has been steadily climbing.

More than ever, we worry about work and are working longer hours; we are more than ever driven, nervous, seemingly trapped. At the very same time, and paradoxically, the twenty-first century bodes a time of post-work: of automation and work reorganization replacing people at faster and faster rates. But nothing good will come without a fight for this future. So what is to be done?

At a fundamental level, the first thing required is a change in ideas, in perceptions which by now are badly out of sync with our circumstances. Unless we begin to think differently about work itself—whether jobs will exist and can be made to exist, whether we want to work long hours at multiple jobs anyway (sometimes working ourselves to death), about the kind of life we can and deserve to have in the next century—collective anxieties are likely to steadily worsen. Unless we rethink our basic vision there will be little hope for people in the middle and working classes—or for those who are poor—in generations to come. Discontentment will be what unites us so long as dangled expectations continue to be disappointed.

In 1992, Bill Clinton rode to the presidency, if not to effective power, lambasting his conservative predecessors for ignoring the unmet needs of working Americans. He particularly derided conservatives’ apparent state of deep denial about the economy. As the recession of the early 1990s seemed to hang on beyond the predictions of forecasters, his campaign promised to lead the country into a new era of security and prosperity. Clinton promised to deliver some of the most important features the welfare state had failed to provide: a real universal health care program, job creation for the chronically unemployed, new boosts in education and job training. But none of this happened. And, clearly, as the economy recovered slightly from a five-year recession, Clinton and his key economic advisors did not conceive of unemployment as a structural problem. Rather, for Clinton and his advisors unemployment was merely the product of a mismatch between skills and the needs of a rapidly changing workplace. Four years later, after the Clinton administration abandoned all but its most modest proposals—a scaled down service corps, an only slightly raised minimum wage and, after a failed effort to win health care for all, only portable health benefits for laid-off workers—many Americans gave up hope that government would be able to solve the puzzle of an economy that creates millions of jobs at the same time it wipes out millions more.

Because the Democrats backed down on their own promises and expectations, it is not surprising that in 1994, Americans expressed disappointment by politically swinging back in the opposite direction—toward a Republican Congress headed by the conservative likes of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. Only to find, of course, disappointment again. For the Republican response didn't work either. To most Americans, the Republican Congress was itself too extreme in its drive to cut back hard-won social benefits like Medicare, or to throw poor children into orphanages (as Gingrich proposed early on, before he realized his mistake in going too far). Gingrich made us nervous yet again, contributing to a sense of no-win politics-as-usual. Yet there are alternative ways to conceive the world so that it no longer seems hopeless and set in stone. With this goal in mind, we have organized the manifesto as follows:

Part I opens with an analysis of the structural character of the socioeconomic transformations we have been describing. Once it has been shown that our problems are not superficial but deeply rooted in the structural character of a globalizing economy, Part II addresses why and how the “business as usual” answers now circulating in the cultural air cannot work in the longer run. In addition to showing the flaws in blithely accepted claims, this segment contains analyses of several other key and interrelated issues. First, the history of labor's reaction to job destruction; second, our belief that the state as we know it has become hollowed out, likely to be resuscitated only if conceived anew (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Quitting Time: An Introduction
• 1 The Post-Work Manifesto
• 2 Benefitting from Pragmatic Vision, Part I: The Case for Guaranteed Income in Principle
• 3 A Justification of the Right to Welfare
• 4 Why There is No Movement of the Poor
• 5 From Chaplin to Dilbert: The Origins of Computer Concepts
• 6 Schooling to Work
• 7 The Last Good Job in America
• 8 Unthinking Sex: Marx, Engels and the Scene of Writing
• 9 The Writer’s Voice: Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity
• Index
• Contributors Notes