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From the rise of fully automated factories to the creation of new migrant workforces, the world of work, employment and production is rapidly changing. By reshaping the global distribution of wealth, jobs and opportunities, these processes are unleashing profound social and environmental tensions, as well as new political movements. As a means to address these crucial themes, Global Labour Studies elaborates an innovative interdisciplinary framework that builds upon the concepts of power, networks, space and livelihoods. This approach is deployed to explore core topics including global production networks, labour market dynamics, formal and informal sectors, migration and forced labour, agriculture and environment, corporate social responsibility and new labour organizations. Written in a lively and engaging format that draws upon a diverse range of illustrative case studies, the book provides the reader with an accessible repertoire of analytical tools and offers an essential guide to the field. This makes it a uniquely rich text for undergraduate courses on global labour issues across the fields of geography, politics, sociology, labour studies and international development.
This book is a major study of the presentation of work and workers in contemporary novels from India, North America and the UK. Drawing on lively recent theories about work, it shows how the novel is a crucial form for helping us to understand what work means in contemporary society. It tackles some of the most urgent questions of contemporary life by examining the stories about work that novels produce. Including detailed readings of authors such as Douglas Coupland, David Foster Wallace, Joshua Ferris, Arivand Adiga, Chetan Bhagat and Monica Ali it explores how the presentation of fictional characters lays open the experience of insecure and precarious existence in the contemporary era. This study illustrates that novels provide an essential tool for understanding what work is and how we feel when we do it.
Does work give our lives purpose, meaning and status? Or is it a tedious necessity that will soon be abolished by automation, leaving humans free to enjoy a life of leisure and basic income? In this erudite and highly readable book, Jon Cruddas MP argues that it is imperative that the Left rejects the siren call of technological determinism and roots it politics firmly in the workplace. Drawing from his experience of his own Dagenham and Rainham constituency, he examines the history of Marxist and social democratic thinking about work in order to critique the fatalism of both Blairism and radical left techno-utopianism, which, he contends, have more in common than either would like to admit. He argues that, especially in the context of COVID-19, socialists must embrace an ethical socialist politics based on the dignity and agency of the labour interest. This timely book is a brilliant intervention in the highly contentious debate on the future of work, as well as an ambitious account of how the left must rediscover its animating purpose or risk irrelevance.
A potent glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workplace control mechanisms which prevent workers from defending themselves from exploitation For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market. This book reveals the raw truth: The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this subterfuge: In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today’s “captains of industry” like the Walton family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos. In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle, which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that makes it possible – to a final end.
In his recent work, Guy Standing has identified a new class which has emerged from neo-liberal restructuring with, he argues, the revolutionary potential to change the world: the precariat. This, according to Standing, is ‘a class-in-the-making, internally divided into angry and bitter factions’ consisting of ‘a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth..., millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as "disabled" and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world. They are denizens; they have a more restricted range of social, cultural, political and economic rights than citizens around them’. This present book explores the nature, shape and context of precariat, evaluating the internal consistency and applications of the concept. Demonstrating the sheer breadth and depth of application, the chapters cover a wide-range of topics, from the relationships between precariat and authoritarianism, multitude (another concept to achieve popular consciousness), and place as well as the nature of precarious identities and subjectivities among those working in immaterial labour. The book concludes with a reply by Standing to reviews of Precariat. This book was published as a special issue of Global Discourse.
A new and essential history of the Labour new left from Tony Benn to Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn’s rapid ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party, driven by a groundswell of popular support particularly among the young, was met at the time by a baffled media. Just where did Jeremy Corbyn come from? In Searching for Socialism, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys argue that it is only by understanding Corbyn’s roots in the Bennite Labour New Left’s long struggle to transcend the limits of “parliamentary socialism” and democratise the party, as a precondition for democratising the state, can you understand his surge to become leader of the party. Closely analyzing the forces inside the party aligned against Corbyn’s leadership, Panitch and Leys explain what happened between the validation of the Corbyn project in the 2017 election, while advancing an ambitious programme of democratic socialist measures unmatched anywhere since the 1970s, and the electoral defeat amidst the Brexit conjuncture of 2019. They argue that while this defeat marked the farthest point to which the generation formed in the 1970s was able to carry the Labour new left project, it seems unlikely that the new generation of activists will quickly see any other way forward than continuing the struggle inside the Labour Party, so as to fundamentally change it. In the face of the contradictions being generated by twenty-first-century capitalism, and the need for discovering and developing new political forms adequate to addressing them, this book is required reading for democratic socialists, not just in Britain but everywhere.
Written at a critical juncture in the history of the Labour Party, Speak for Britain! is a thought-provoking and highly original interpretation of the party's evolution, from its trade union origins to its status as a national governing party. It charts Labour's rise to power by re-examining the impact of the First World War, the general strike of 1926, Labour's breakthrough at the 1945 general election, the influence of post-war affluence and consumerism on the fortunes and character of the party, and its revival after the defeats of the Thatcher era. Controversially, Pugh argues that Labour never entirely succeeded in becoming 'the party of the working class'; many of its influential recruits - from Oswald Mosley to Hugh Gaitskell to Tony Blair - were from middle and upper-class Conservative backgrounds and rather than converting the working class to socialism, Labour adapted itself to local and regional political cultures.