Work and irregularity

I have what is likely to be an increasingly unusual job. Not because the job itself is strange - although it has its odd points - or because the conditions of work - the hours, the length of contract, the pay - is irregular. Ironically, the regularity of the job will make it irregular.

When we discuss jobs, we are generally talking about this: A full-time, permanent job with regular hours, regular pay, and defined benefits. A job like this is entered into by contract between employer and employee. It's dependable and above-the-board.

It's also becoming much less common, especially for young people. If you're my age, you've probably seen this: "working" often means temporary jobs or internships, juggling several part-time jobs, or frequently swapping jobs (or being fired early). It often means relying on your parents' health coverage (or going without), not saving much (let alone paying into a pension fund or retirement account), and occasionally subsisting on debt. We often do this sort of thing in the expectation that we are "gaining experience" or "building our resumes" - but towards what? The unspoken assumption is that a regular job is waiting for those who get through this thicket of irregularity.

That may not be a realistic example for increasing numbers of us. Two examples from the periphery and the center:

In many Third World countries, an increasing proportion of the population works in the informal or grey economy, the irregular sector. They are beyond the reach of employment law, trade unions, and many social protections. Half to three-quarters of non-agricultural employment in developing countries is irregular. (See for some more details.) It's tenuous work, done in marginal conditions, and it doesn't pay well. Irregular jobs are associated with other legal irregularities - for example, squatting and slum dwelling. (More on that later.)

Japan spent the 1990s in the grips of a "slo-mo depression" caused by a property boom and debt expansion followed by a collapse and a decade of waffling about how to deal with effectively insolvent banks. (Sound familiar? According to Paul Krugman it may soon.) Before this, Japan had a model of employment for life - workers would ally themselves with a company, and in return it would provide them with stability even in retirement. That model broke in the 1990s, but mass layoffs still didn't follow. Instead, the older generations largely kept their jobs, and many young workers ended up effectively trapped within endless "temp" jobs - with little of the advancement possibility or stability of the old system.

If this model of work is to be the future - and I believe that it is - what will it mean for us? The day-to-day implications are probably fairly clear - after all, precarious situations are no good for people, even if they're window-dressed as "flexibility". (I owe this distinction to some Argentine friends, who commented that the "flexibilizacion" of their economy in the 1990s was more accurately called a "precarizacion") Beyond that, I think that it should force us to fundamentally reconsider two things: the legal framework of employment, and the means for pursuing greater equality.

First, equality. A few weeks back, I read The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. It's a remarkable book - it collects and analyzes various health and social statistics from rich countries over a long period, and concludes that countries with higher inequality experience more crime, worse health, less social mobility, and less trust and social cohesion. More strikingly, inequality touches everybody in society, not just the poor.

The authors comment that if social conditions are making people unhappy, unwell, untrusting, and, frequently, untrustworthy, the solution is not "mass psychotherapy" designed to acclimatize the individual to those conditions. Instead, inequality should be reduced to make society more livable.

There are, of course, many policies that have led to low inequality. Some countries (and US states) have high levels of taxes and transfer payments; others have relatively equal pretax income due to more profit-sharing or stronger unions. The authors recommend one in particular: Greater employee participation in ownership and management of their business.

As state-run socialism failed in most respects, and the current version of capitalism resembles an abusive spouse - financial markets have periodic liquidity binges and crashes, then take it out on other people - a true "Third Way" is needed. As inequality increases over the last 3 decades have been tied (especially in the US) to stagnating hourly wages combined with upwardly spiraling pay for CEOs and top management, this would be a logical first step towards mitigating inequality. But it's not an unproblematic step.

Simply put, employee ownership-and-operation will only work on a grand scale if stable long-term employment is the norm. It can work locally, in special situations - co-ops are actually fairly widespread in the US, but you wouldn't know if from reading the financial press. But under such a scheme, what would happen to temp workers? Would they get a share of the business for the three months or a year they worked there? And if so, how would they transfer it upon leaving? (Selling company shares or trading them on open markets would presumably be disallowed, as that would tend to erode employee ownership.)

This seems to be the appropriate point to mention an advantage to flexible/precarious work: It makes the individual more mobile. If you've got a temp job, you can pick up and leave after a few months - and spend the money backpacking Europe or moving to the city of your dreams. You can swap jobs often, making it easy to get out of a bad one. (Of course, individual workers tend to have less power in such a workforce - they are battered by recessions and have little power to negotiate for wages.)

Employee ownership may not make sense under the common irregular working conditions. Furthermore, without an easy way to transfer ownership rights or retain them when moving between jobs, many people might experience it as a barrier to mobility. As a recommendation, it relies on an outdated idea of work that dates from what we might call the "Fordist" period from 1945 to the 1970s, in which capitalism relied on stable employment and consistent institutional settings. The world has changed since then, and capitalist enterprise now thrives on irregularity, eclectic production, and geographically and temporally fragmented value chains - what David Harvey calls "flexible accumulation".

Second, legality. French jurist Alain Supiot, the author of a 1999 report entitled Beyond Employment, echoed Pickett and Wilkinson's point above, noting that:

European institutions did not take up the simple idea [the report] embodied: that there is no wealth other than human beings, and that an economy which ill-treats them has no future. The new conceptual frameworks we outlined with regard to professional status or to ‘social drawing rights’ all flowed from this basic idea. But of course this ran directly counter to the credo that holds sway in Brussels, according to which the problem is not that of adapting the economy to the needs of human beings, but rather the reverse—adapting human beings to the needs of markets, and especially to the needs of financial markets, which supposedly create harmony by making self-interest the basis for all human activity. ["Possible Europes", NLR 57]

Supiot notes that existing legal structures - and derivatives of them such as the employee ownership model - increasingly fail to respond to social realities. Consider unemployment insurance and health care in the US - the rules were thought up in the "Fordist" period (and modified by the neoliberals, of course). You can collect unemployment for a limited period if you are fired without cause from a permanent, full-time job. But you're not eligible if a temp contract runs out and you can't find more work. No less jobless, of course, but you slip through the cracks. Similarly, healthcare is tied to certain types of permanent jobs.

Supiot advocates an overhaul of employment law designed to preserve the flexibility of the new system while not allowing individuals to go unprotected due to the irregularity of their work. The new system would be founded on the principles of " freedom versus flexibility, capability versus employability, labour-force membership status versus human capital."

In Beyond Employment our response was to propose that this new pact—unlike its predecessor—be founded on the freedom and responsibility of human beings, not on their subordination or their ‘programming’. We emphasized the idea of a ‘labour-force membership status’ which would allow people to exercise real freedom of choice throughout their lives: to move from one work situation to another and to reconcile their personal with their professional life. Approaching the question in these terms led to a fresh reading of the old concept of ‘juridical capacity’, expanded to include individual and collective capabilities.

... In one case, the starting point is human creativity, and there follows an attempt to construct a system of laws and an economy that will allow people to express themselves and satisfy their needs; in the other, the starting point is the supposed infallibility of the market, and the aim is to provide businesses with a human ‘resource’ that will respond to their needs. ["Possible Europes", NLR 57]

Accomplishing this will be partly a work of rebuilding old protections (e.g. minimum wages that keep pace with inflation, the 40-hour work-week) and partly of designing new ones. The process starts by expanding the definition of work beyond permanent, full-time employment with contractual benefits - to encompass the irregular and temporary. That in turn allows us to recognize that (in the US for example), we need healthcare that doesn't depend upon employment status, and some form of minimum income independent of our situation. More widely accessible education is also absolutely necessary.

It's difficult enough to do that in the rich countries, of course. In the OECD, we have abundant wealth, and grapple over its distribution. The Third World, by contrast, must allocate in conditions of poverty. As I alluded to earlier, the problems of irregular work are much more savage in the global South. And employment is central to a burgeoning social problem - slum growth. Cities are growing rapidly in the Third World - the biggest construction boom of the last decade may have been in shantytowns, not American exurbs.

In brief, we can think of slums in terms of irregularity: They happen when a large mass of people is displaced from its traditional means of subsistence and social networks in the country, and move to the city where they cannot find stable, well-paying work. They are comprised of (or comprise) an irregular space that does not conform to our expectations of a planned city. Materials and street plans are irregular. And they break traditional paradigms of war and insurgency, forcing invading armies into asymmetric or irregular battles. (Israel's army turned at one point to postmodern theory to try to come to terms with Palestine's subterranean mazes.) Irregular work, irregular space, irregular war.