The Global Sociology Blog

This article from Business Week is a bit long but it is a definite must-read on the state of labor in the United States. In a way, there is no big surprise for those of us who have read Louis Uchitelle’s Disposable Americans and Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift. The labor trends outlined in both books were present before the current crisis.

The BW article is full of recent data that summarize the bad news for all sorts of workers.

The Disposable Worker – BusinessWeek via kwout

As the article notes, European employers make greater use of temp workers but this does not mean precarization as temps are covered by universal health care and social benefits and have to be compensated at the same level as permanent workers. Another reason why the current US health care system is a drag on the economy.

The article also notes the devastating mental effects of precarization on workers in terms of productivity and morale.

But what the article does not note is that Western societies’ social structure is organized around stable employment that affects other institutional spheres such as family, education, etc. How can a society based on stable wage-earning workforce survive with a perma-temp workforce with stagnating or declining incomes. I think we see the effects right now.

This precarized society may seem like a libertarian dream where the workforce is composed of free agents selling their labor autonomously to employers and moving from job to job as opportunities present themselves and regularly upgrading his skills but this is an imaginary construct (and now supposedly building social capital through social networking platforms such as LinkedIn).

First, as Richard Sennett demonstrated in The Corrosion of Character, the precarized experience is not a liberating one. It is an alienating experience. Also, workers are not mobile agents free to sell their labor when the economy does not generate jobs and there is really nothing to stop automation and outsourcing. The thinking in the 1980s was that only blue collar jobs were to be automated or outsourced (translation: these were dumb jobs that a machine or a non-white Third World uneducated worker can do) with the added benefit of breaking unions. As the BW articles notes, automation and outsourcing have gone mainstream and no labor field is exempt. And, of course, unskilled workers (or workers just entering the workforce after college) at the bottom of the social distribution are in no bargaining position even to obtain the minimum wage.

This may be the culmination of Thatcher’s formulation that there is no such thing as a society as a fully precarized economy is anti-social in that it recognizes (and needs) no forms of social solidarity, national loyalty and where the only duty is a fiduciary one based on short-term shareholder value.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, go read the whole thing.