Socialist Strategy in the
Age of Precarity
The coronavirus crisis has brought to head a set of contradictions that have been corroding the rights and conditions of the global working class for decades – contradictions to do with work, and related concepts such as worker, workplace and working time. These concepts have been taken for granted by socialists as stable and unifying categories of organisation, but they are being strategically undermined by capital as part of its latest ‘fix’ for the most recent crisis of accumulation in 2008.
Across the world, we are seeing a dramatic shrinkage in the proportion of people employed in full-time ‘standard’ work. According to the International Labour Organisation, as of 2019 just 53 per cent of the world’s employed population are waged, salaried workers – and of this group, 40 per cent rely on informal income streams to compensate for inadequate wages. In turn, more than 470 million people are underutilised, meaning they remain precariously tethered to the world of employment: they are not classified as ‘unemployed’, yet their access to paid work is unpredictable and insufficient to sustain themselves and their families.
Global underutilisation vastly outweighs global unemployment in terms of scale – the former affects twice as many as the latter. Indeed, many countries in the global South have both the highest employment-to-population and the highest underutilisation ratios in the world – meaning that the global workforce is disproportionately concentrated in the global South, where the quality and stability of work access are worst. So the employment/unemployment dichotomy on which much of our public discourse on ‘the economy’ relies is no longer the best indicator of whether or not people are able to maintain a materially decent life.
This rise in underutilisation – which is mediated through geographic and sociological divisions of power – comes down to what Gargi Bhattacharyya describes as ‘the endless innovation of precarious activities that may or may not constitute “work”’. Capital once promised global integration into the industrial workforce. Instead, it has manoeuvred its way out of the pesky predicament of workforce costs: of providing workers with a reliable salary, sick pay, pensions and the basic means of life. These manoeuvres – which range from legal to cultural to political – combine to undermine and destabilise the figure of the ‘worker’ as a political subjectivity and an analytical category.
The socio-economic implications of this division between ‘the worker’ and the ‘not quite’ or ‘sometimes’ worker could not have been starker than in Rishi Sunak’s coronavirus rescue package. While covering 80 per cent of employees’ wages, the initial package did not even make reference to those who work but are not employed. Eventually, following immense pressure from smaller unions, such as the IWGB (Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain), and then Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Sunak finally outlined his plan for those who fall outside the traditional employee model. It was a plan shockingly out of touch with the material realities of these workers’ lives. Not only did it leave workers who overwhelmingly live hand to mouth without wages for nearly three months, but it constructed a series of complex bureaucratic hoops through which anxious workers were expected to jump; it also excluded the many workers who build their wages piecemeal from employed and non-employed work. It seems a considerable proportion of Britain’s workforce – not, incidentally, comprised predominantly of working-class migrants – simply did not figure in the calculations of policy makers responsible for the economic response to the crisis.
So who are the workers falling through the cracks of employment protections – both during and beyond the crisis? The ‘platformisation’ of work by the digital gig economy – with its constitutive elements of ‘taskification’, worker (mis)classification and outsourcing, has been a key mechanism by which capital has accelerated and intensified the underutilisation of swaths of the workforce. These mechanisms are glossed over by the cultural story platforms tell about themselves: they offer ‘worker flexibility’, and the opportunity to be an ‘entrepreneur’. In reality, platform workers are subject to the worst of both worlds: they are not considered employees, and yet are subject to a level of control and discipline by monopoly platform companies that often exceeds that imposed by traditional employers. With no centralised workplace they are dispersed and therefore find it more difficult to connect with one another and conceive of themselves as part of a broader workforce. Indeed, they are encouraged to see themselves not as workers, but as their ‘own boss’. The temporal and spatial boundaries between work and non-work are blurred, yet work is broken down into tasks, some of which are compensated and others not.
The composition of the workforces being undermined by platformisation is not incidental. Platform workers are overwhelmingly migrant and/or racially minoritised, and tend to work in key urban and social infrastructural sectors. They are the minicab drivers, couriers, cleaners, carers and sex workers: in other words, the invisibilised backbone of our cities. Excluded from formal workforces, they are pushed into urban centres, where they experience intense forms of structural violence, often racialised and mediated through housing, policing and immigration enforcement.
Racially segmented labour markets have always been critical to Britain’s urban development. The most famous example is of course the Windrush generation, where workers from former colonies were recruited into the ‘mother country’ to rebuild its post-war infrastructure for low wages, and in humiliating working conditions. The displacement of these workers from manufacturing and industrial sectors into unstable, precarious forms of ‘self-employment’ was exacerbated by the racialised fallout from deindustrialisation in the 1970s. As nations – particularly in the global North – shifted towards a financialised economy, it was black and brown workers who were the first to be shut out from the dwindling landscape of formal full-time work. Today, hostile environment policies manage inclusion and exclusion from the formal labour market by strategically and unevenly distributing precarity through different migrant populations. Once again, race and migration are central to how the state and capital collectively create boundaries not only between the deserving and undeserving poor, but also the deserving and undeserving worker. As has historically been the case, the hierarchical systems that classify human beings into races and workers into strategically defined categories, speak through and alongside one another.
This poses a challenge to socialists, who have often relied on cohesive and clear conceptions of work, worker and workplace in order to organise and mobilise. Big unions are struggling to integrate into their traditional unionising models the growing number of ‘not-quite’ and ‘sometimes’ workers, who are transient, politically disenfranchised and spatially dispersed. As the gap increases between the number of available jobs and the number of people needing work, the right is funnelling scarcity anxiety into a culture war between the ‘metropolitan elite’ and the ‘traditional working class’, effacing the particular brutality of being working class in urban centres. Following the spectacular failure of mainstream financial and governmental institutions to protect people’s livelihoods in the lead-up to the 2008 crisis, the carefully curated image of Silicon Valley capitalists as irreverent and innovative, along with the appeal of ‘being your own boss’ rather than tied to unreliable institutions, allowed platforms to frame themselves as engines of economic populism. Under what some call the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ of post-2008 neoliberalism, capital has shifted from trying to break worker power to trying to abolish the formal category of worker altogether.
The future of socialist organising must fully confront the fact that the historical materialist trajectory, in which we all ascend into a unified industrial working class, has not happened and will not happen. Capital is strategically undermining conceptual, spatial and temporal boundaries around worker identity, what is considered ‘work’ or ‘not work’ and what the workplace is. How do we conduct workplace organising when there is no clear workplace? How do we defend and build worker power when so many have an erratic and partial relationship to this category? We cannot afford to dismiss these questions as anomalous, when this working model is being rolled out across workforces.
Luckily, we are not starting from scratch. Feminist scholars and activists have engaged with the implications of not having one’s work recognised as work – despite its being central to capital accumulation. Campaigns such as Wages for Housework have grappled with the contradictions and difficulties of organising workers who are not considered, and may not even consider themselves, to be workers. Sex worker unions have had to organise in similarly informalised conditions – indeed, some sex workers conceptualise themselves as ‘the original gig economy workers’. These campaigns have directly confronted the challenges that come with trying to carve out a cohesive logic of work, worker and workplace, where these categories are not formalised. In turn, there is a long history of ‘organising the unorganised/unorganisable’ in the global South and among immigrant workers in metropolitan centres for whom precarity and informality have long been the norm. In critical disability studies and disability activism, the profound implications of being constructed as ‘unproductive’ under capital have been fleshed out and resisted. These models are now central to understanding labour in the twenty-first century, and must be revisited, re-evaluated and reconstructed as part of socialist strategy. Indeed, the imagined norm of the standard, full-time, permanent job was only ever a reality for a tiny portion of the world’s workforce – yet it is this assumed model that underpins our conception of ‘the working class’.
As twentieth-century concepts of ‘work’ and ‘worker’ shift and splinter, the question ‘Where next for socialists?’ is an open one. Perhaps we attempt to recover and generalise these definitions; or perhaps we marshal the next crisis of capital into fighting for a post-work future. Most likely, we will have to find some way of reconciling the two. Moreover, as the coronavirus crisis has made clear, the principle of universalism must be revived and centred in everything we do. Capitalism has a funny way of making us feel insurmountably different and distant from one another, while secretly making us more connected and dependent than ever before. Times of crisis reveal the brutal unevenness in how capital is experienced – unevenness that is laid bare in who gets to live and who is left to die. The implications of falling outside the categories that confer safety and dignity, such as ‘citizen’ or ‘employee’, and the racialised, gendered and ableist processes that police these categories become stark to those who have taken them for granted.
We must not internalise these processes of differentiation. In the context of climate breakdown, we must make clear that the underlying principle of how society is organised in the next phase of history will be totally oppositional to that which has historically underpinned capitalism: universal access to the means of life. For labour organisers, this does not mean abandoning the category of worker as a revolutionary agent. However, it does mean reconfiguring our relationship to the category of worker, as it becomes more and more inaccessible to the most dispossessed of our world.