Introduction: The crisis of work in perspective

In writing about work, and the crisis of work, we must of course establish what we mean by ‘work’. In previous books, we offered a history of the varied sociological definitions of work, noted that there has been a long-term trend in the social sciences to equate work with paid employment – thus ignoring the enormous contribution that unpaid work makes to our socio-economic landscape – and pointed to how work and employment contribute to identities, both individual and collective (Bradley et al, 2000; Erickson et al, 2009; Williams et al, 2013). While the focus of this book is on paid work, involving jobs people undertake in return for wages or salaries, the importance of unpaid household and caring tasks, often carried out by women, should not be overlooked. Perhaps most importantly, there are notable connections between unpaid domestic work and paid employment. People in part-time jobs – primarily women – often value the opportunity to combine paid work with unpaid household responsibilities, not just childcare tasks but also caring for older family members (Rubery et al, 2016). Another complicating factor is that work which is unpaid household labour when undertaken by a family member – domestic cleaning for example – becomes paid employment when a cleaner is hired from outside the family and rewarded with a wage. In distinguishing between paid and unpaid work, then, it is the social relations that structure the work and how it is undertaken, rather than the specific nature of the work tasks themselves, that are important (Budd, 2011).

In capitalist societies, paid work fulfils some important economic functions. The employment relationship, in which a worker takes up employment with an employer in return for a wage or salary, provides the employer with a resource which, managed appropriately, can be used to realize added value from the tasks undertaken. Paid employment of this kind also provides workers with an income, necessary for their subsistence. Importantly, though, work matters, not just on account of its economic value – both for employers and workers, in different ways – but also for myriad other social and psychological reasons, including identity formation and the development of citizenship (Budd, 2011). Paid work can be a source of dignity – giving people a stake in society and a sense they are engaged in something intrinsically worthy – and not just a source of economic reward in the form of a wage or salary (Cruddas, 2021).

Unsurprisingly, given work’s importance – to people, economies and societies – it has long been the subject of considerable attention. Indeed, there is a longstanding tradition of historical and sociological studies which – implicitly or explicitly – communicate the idea of work being in crisis. During the early 19th century, for example, the process of industrialization in England, particularly the development of new production methods which threatened the jobs and livelihoods of the existing (largely male) workforce, was accompanied by major disruption in the form of protests, riots and machine breaking (Thompson, 1968). By the first decades of the 20th century, the principal manifestation of crisis, particularly for elites, came from the development of a mass organized labour movement which threatened to advance working people’s interests through disruptive strikes on a large scale in major industries such as coal mining and transport (Clegg et al, 1964). The 1930s saw the crisis of work take the form of a period of mass unemployment in the period known as the ‘Great Depression’, particularly in the US (Garraty, 1976).

While the Second World War and post-war economic recovery mitigated the unemployment crisis, at least temporarily, during the 1970s the focus of attention turned to the degradation of industrial work under full employment conditions (see Braverman, 1974; Nichols and Beynon, 1977; Pollert, 1981). A crisis of work was manifest not so much in the lack of opportunities for paid employment but more in the alienating nature of many jobs themselves, and their effects, a theme which is also apparent in more recent accounts of factory work in parts of the Global South, particularly China (Chan et al, 2020).

In the Global North, the return of mass unemployment in the 1980s and ongoing processes of employment liberalization and flexibilization during the 1980s and 1990s, linked to emergent globalization, generated a new sense of work being in crisis, one manifest in greater employment insecurity (Elliott and Atkinson, 1999; Heery and Salmon, 2000). Declining trade union membership, an outcome of government efforts to weaken the power of organized labour, gave employers much greater control over work and employment relations and diminished protections for workers (Baccaro and Howell, 2017) – leading to a rise in work pressures (Schor, 1993; Green, 2001). The first book we were jointly involved in – Myths at Work (2000) – explores these and other issues relating to work and employment at the end of the 20th century, a period when the implications of globalization had started to attract more interest (Bradley et al, 2000).

Contemporary crises of work

Work, then, often seems to have been in crisis, of one kind or another. Since the 2010s, though, two apparent crises have become especially prominent. First, for some the principal contemporary crisis of work is that of greater automation, particularly the increasing use of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic ‘platform’ technologies. This is claimed to have the potential to displace existing jobs on a mass scale (Ford, 2015). There is a long tradition of writing concerned with the supposedly diminished standing of paid work, linked to the greater role of non-work activities as sources of social identification, meaning and action (Gorz, 1994). However, claims about the ‘end’ of work and the necessity of adapting to a ‘post-work’ environment have become more prevalent given the potentially profound consequences of automation for employment, including predictions of mass unemployment and underemployment. The desirability of a guaranteed income of some kind, to be supplied by the state, has been canvassed as a key policy response to the likely diminished role of paid work as a source of subsistence (Srnicek and Williams, 2015; Susskind, 2020).

Clearly, the implications of greater automation for work must be taken seriously. Yet much mainstream, and even some critical, writing on this topic is marked by a ‘vague futurism’ which fetishizes technology and assumes automation is an unproblematic process (Pettinger, 2019: 146). Predictions of the diminished relevance of work, or more accurately paid employment, arising from new technology have been made many times before without coming to fruition, not least because technological innovation creates new jobs or complements, and changes, existing roles. There were very few software engineers in the 1960s and 1970s, for example. This time, however, things are purportedly different because more and more tasks can now be undertaken by machines, creating a ‘world with less work’ (Susskind, 2020: 127). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to use online services to a greater degree, with significant effects on the occupational structure (fewer high street retail jobs and more van drivers, for example).

Yet the claim that automation is likely to make human labour redundant (see, for example, Susskind, 2020) should be treated with skepticism. Prophecies of the ‘end of work’ have a long pedigree and should be treated cautiously and engaged with critically (Granter, 2009). Such claims pay little heed to the issues, challenges and obstacles that characterize technological innovation in practice and the complex ways it affects work, workers and the relationship between workers and employers (Pettinger, 2019). One particular problem concerns the tendency of ‘end of work’ conjecturing to neglect the interests and actions of those most affected by change at work – workers themselves (Strangleman, 2007). In some cases, automation has diminished in significance because it is cheaper for employers to use human labour, particularly in environments where workers have few employment rights and protections and thus are highly vulnerable. The rise of hand car washes is perhaps the most notable example of this (Clark and Colling, 2018). Much of the work carried out in the platform or ‘gig’ economy – think about parcel deliveries and driving services – would have been possible without the development of online labour platforms, and the smartphone apps used to access them, but not so efficiently or on such a large scale.

The example of the platform economy illustrates how the key issue is not so much that automation displaces jobs but rather that technological innovation degrades work and contributes to the greater commodification of labour. What do we mean by the concept of ‘commodification’? It is generally recognized that in attempting to secure productive effort from workers, employers cannot treat labour purely as a ‘commodity’, something that can be straightforwardly and unproblematically bought and sold in the labour market. This is because labour is embodied in human beings – workers who have their own agency (Polanyi, 1957) and have expectations of how they should be treated – with fairness, dignity and respect for example. Yet the experience of the platform economy demonstrates how new technology has been used to facilitate an approach to work where people are contracted, and remunerated, for undertaking one-off tasks, determined by automated systems, and lack employment rights and protections as a consequence. The term ‘labour commodification’ thus refers to the tendency of organizations, in pursuit of greater efficiency and flexibility, to operate more transactional, market-based forms of work and employment relationships, leaving workers disempowered and subjugated.

Platforms use algorithms to monitor the activities of platform workers constantly, for the purpose of exercising strict control over their work (Prassl, 2018). Algorithmic management techniques have expanded beyond the platform economy and have become more widely used by employers in general as a means of intensifying managerial control over workers (Delfanti, 2020; Kellogg et al, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic led to a dramatic rise in telework, which allows greater surveillance of individual workers (Hern, 2020). When it comes to automation, then, the key problem for work is not job displacement on a mass scale but rather the implications for job quality in environments where employers enjoy considerable power to direct and manage the activities of workers without challenge. The rise of generative forms of AI, of which ChatGPT is the most well known, has rekindled concerns about the potentially job-destroying effects of automation, especially for sales and administrative roles. Yet by stimulating productivity improvements, AI could generate new jobs and increase wages – assuming that workers are organized sufficiently strongly to benefit. Perhaps the biggest concern with technologies such as ChatGPT, though, is the extent to which they can be used to advance labour commodification, with automation deployed not as a means of replacing workers but as a way of degrading their employment and devaluing what they do (Greenhouse, 2023a).

This is relevant to the second kind of crisis relating to work, namely the seemingly growing paucity of ‘good’ (or ‘decent’) jobs, a crisis which the 2007–8 financial crisis and subsequent economic recession seem to have intensified (Blanchflower, 2019). One prominent manifestation of this theme concerns the claim that too much contemporary work lacks meaningfulness. This is central to Graeber’s (2018) ‘bullshit jobs’ thesis, with a ‘bullshit job’ defined as a ‘form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or even pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’ (Graeber, 2018: 9–10). The growing prevalence of ‘bullshit jobs’ can be attributed to the tendency for organizations to use productivity improvements as a means of funding unnecessary administrative and management roles (Graeber, 2018: 176–7). While a clearly provocative and radical approach, the ‘bullshit jobs’ thesis is rather unconvincing. The data on which it is based are of dubious validity; and, anyway, the proportion of workers who perceive their jobs as not being useful has been declining. Perhaps the key problem with the ‘bullshit jobs’ approach, though, is its focus on job tasks, and some individuals’ subjective perception of those tasks, rather than the relationship that exists between workers and their employers and how this relationship is managed (Soffia et al, 2022).

While the ‘bullshit jobs’ thesis is flawed, it does nevertheless speak to a concern that something is badly wrong with contemporary work and employment, in particular a claimed dearth of ‘good’ (or ‘decent’) jobs (Srnicek and Williams, 2015; Blanchflower, 2019). Economies in the Global North have failed to generate sufficient numbers of jobs which are secure, well paid and provide opportunities for progression, particularly since the 2007–8 global financial crisis. The consequences include a proliferation of underemployment, excessive employment insecurity and precarity and ongoing wage stagnation (Kalleberg, 2018; Blanchflower, 2019). The shortage of good jobs is particularly evident in the Global South, in a context of rapid population growth and a young age profile, where informal work – that which is undertaken in an unregulated manner, often ad hoc, without a formal employment contract, in poor conditions and without employment or social protection, generally for extremely low pay – predominates. Informal employment accounts for 85.8 per cent of all employment in Africa (ILO, 2018c; Hammer and Ness, 2021).

Crises at work and the crisis of work

Despite its importance, the paucity of ‘good’ jobs, while making a notable contribution, is not on its own sufficient to constitute the contemporary crisis of work, given its magnitude. Instead, our approach highlights the ways in which three crises which are at work – the consequences of intensified neoliberalization, the challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of the climate emergency – have contributed to a profound contemporary crisis of work. Our conceptualization is based on Colin Hay’s (1999: 324) distinction between ‘failure’ and ‘crisis’: while the former can be viewed as an ‘accumulation or condensation of contradictions’, the latter refers to a ‘moment of decisive intervention during which these contradictions are identified’. The term ‘crisis’, then, can be applied to situations where ‘failure is identified and widely perceived, a condition in which systemic failure has become politically and ideationally mediated’ (Hay, 1999: 324).

A ‘crisis’ is therefore not just a time of disruption, nor ‘merely a moment of rupture’, but, more significantly, ‘a moment of decisive intervention’ in response to perceived failure (Hay, 1999: 336). What we take from this is the imperative to understand ‘crisis’, when applied to the field of work, as involving a ‘moment of thorough-going transformation’ (Hay, 1999: 323) – the crisis explored in this book applies to more than just the problems of contemporary work, their ill-effects and their contradictions, profound and important as they are, and instead focuses upon the imperatives for a ‘decisive intervention’ that have arisen, the conditions which have influenced this ‘intervention’ and their consequences.

As an economic system, capitalism is structurally prone to periodic crises. The ‘moment of decisive intervention’ we identify, though, one that constitutes the current crisis of work, concerns the antagonism that has arisen between the degradation, in the sense of a process of worsening, of work and employment under conditions of intensified neoliberal capitalism – in the context of both the COVID-19 pandemic and escalating climate emergency – and workers’ aspirations for decent work and to have their labour valued. The legitimacy of work and employment has thus diminished as a consequence, particularly in societies where people’s values and identities are increasingly shaped by other activities, for example in consumption relations, where individuals enjoy greater apparent sovereignty.

For Edwards (1986: 58), work and employment relationships, not necessarily just under capitalism, are founded upon a ‘structured antagonism’, not only because of their indeterminacy but also due to the tension between the imperative for cooperation and the potential for conflict that exists. We use the concept of ‘antagonism’ in a broader sense, though, one that recognizes the dynamics of the labour process while also extending beyond the workplace to incorporate a concern with state, economy and society. While acknowledging the project of neoliberal capitalism as an integral dimension of the crisis of work, particularly in the aftermath of the 2007–8 global financial crisis, we also appreciate the importance of efforts by state and societal actors – governments, trade unions and non-governmental organizations for example – to restrain, or even challenge, a neoliberal-inspired process of commodification and flexibilization, efforts which have become more pronounced.

COVID-19 has both illuminated and amplified this antagonism not only by exposing and exacerbating the process of degradation but also by reinforcing existing pressures to re-regulate work and employment relationships, whether because of the activities of organized labour, through a process of institution building or from a more interventionist role on the part of the state. Moreover, the escalating climate emergency both reflects and exposes the failings of neoliberal capitalism, and the degraded model of work and employment which it has produced; it demands a focus, broadly conceived, on sustainability, for the purpose of reconciling a decent work agenda with sustainable economic development, as an effective response to the climate crisis. This, however, will challenge existing consumption relations in their increased centrality, creating new antagonisms and conflicts.

Implicit in all this, and often explicit too, is an apparent crisis of neoliberal globalization. We covered the importance of globalization, as a process of greater worldwide interconnectedness and as a neoliberal project, based on advancing the power of corporations, promoting greater employment flexibility and weakening organized labour, in a previous book – Globalization and Work (Williams et al, 2013). In doing so, we highlighted the complex ways in which work and employment were affected by globalization and also the important challenges to neoliberal globalization that influenced the dynamics of work and employment relations in a more globalized setting. As will become clear throughout this book, the contemporary crisis of work is, to a large extent, a consequence of the intensified neoliberalization associated with the project of globalization. At the same time, though, this crisis is also an expression of the growing challenges to neo-liberal globalization, as the antagonisms it has generated have been accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and also because of the imperative for a more sustainable model of work and employment given the mounting climate emergency. For example, the stark necessity of reducing carbon emissions poses a threat to the ubiquity of air travel – for moving commodities and people, for both leisure and business purposes.

Our approach offers a response to the objection that there is insufficient justification for claiming that work is in crisis, given the evidence that most people are satisfied with their jobs: indeed, they generally like and often value their jobs – given how much time people spend engaged in paid work, it would be odd if they did not – while also ‘feeling burdened and oppressed by them’ (Simms, 2019: 10). Likewise, ‘having a bad job doesn’t mean you don’t value work’ (Cruddas, 2021: 100). Work, and people’s experience of work, their engagement with work and their relationship with work, are complex and even contradictory. Social relations at work, including the quality and style of management, have a notable influence on people’s working lives and how they are experienced (Pass, 2017). It is precisely for these reasons that the crisis of work we explore in this book is so important.

The crisis of intensified neoliberalization

One key element of our approach concerns the intensified process of neoliberalization, especially evident since the 2007–8 global financial crisis and subsequent ‘Great Recession’, and its implications for work and employment. Neoliberalism has been defined as a ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005: 2). Since the 1970s, neoliberal ideology has underpinned efforts by governments and global institutions to advance marketization and deregulation, often by exploiting natural crises and disasters and using them as a pretext for economic reforms that would otherwise have been rejected (Klein, 2008). As this implies, integral to neoliberalism is the role that strong states play in advancing market relations and suppressing challenges to marketization, for the purpose of transforming society by normalizing the primacy of markets, competition and enterprise (Davies, 2018).

In the field of work and employment relations, neoliberal ideology has influenced efforts by governments to weaken regulatory mechanisms, such as employment protection laws and collective bargaining arrangements, for the purpose of enhancing employers’ control over workers and facilitating greater flexibility (Baccaro and Howell, 2017). A clear trend of greater neoliberalization can be observed, characterized by increased employer discretion and the subjugation of organized labour, especially in Western Europe, albeit one that is uneven and far from uniform, with its trajectory varying from country to country (Thelen, 2014; Baccaro and Howell, 2017). Neoliberal globalization is dependent upon extended, cross-border supply chains that help to obscure poor labour conditions (LeBaron, 2020).

The 2007–8 global financial crisis, prompted by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US and resulting in the collapse of several major financial institutions, initially seemed to portend the end of the neoliberal era. The underlying causes of the crisis involved the unsustainable growth of market-based finance, characterized by opaque and complex financial instruments, on a global scale (Tooze, 2018). Yet in the aftermath of the crisis, and the resultant economic recession, neoliberalism not only survived but also prospered, as leading policy makers in governments and international institutions used the magnitude of the crisis as a pretext for intensifying neoliberalization (Crouch, 2011; Mirowski, 2013).

One aspect of this involved a predilection for fiscal austerity measures – tax rises and cuts in public expenditure – complemented by a monetary policy programme of quantitative easing, the consequence of which was to enrich generally wealthy asset holders while particularly disadvantaging users of public services, recipients of welfare support and public sector workers (Blyth, 2015; Baines and Cunningham, 2020). In the UK, this took the form of a package of economic policy measures named as ‘austerity’ by the then Conservative prime minister David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne. Far from stimulating a sustained economic recovery, the emphasis on austerity in the UK made a notable contribution to a prolonged period of low economic growth and wage stagnation (Wren-Lewis, 2018). The emphasis on austerity was not just restricted to the UK; many other European countries quickly discarded fiscal stimulus packages they had enacted in the immediate aftermath of the 2007–8 global financial crisis in favour of austerity measures (Heyes and Lewis, 2015).

A second key manifestation of the intensified neoliberalization of the 2010s concerned the greater emphasis accorded to promoting labour market deregulation and privileging employers’ flexibility (Meardi, 2014). The period following the 2007–8 global financial crisis also saw governments in Europe, including France, Italy, Spain and Greece, enact neoliberal labour market reforms, designed to advance flexibilization by weakening trade unions and collective bargaining and diluting workers’ rights and protections (Heyes and Lewis, 2015; Lehndorff, 2015).

Globally, increased labour market and employment flexibility is a prominent manifestation of marketization in employment relations (Greer and Doellgast, 2017). In the United States and other parts of the Global North, neoliberalization and marketization have propelled the greater use of short-term, temporary and other forms of flexible employment, where work is often low paid and precarious, with workers left in poor-quality and more insecure jobs (Kalleberg, 2011, 2018). Flexibilization has burgeoned elsewhere, too. In Asia, for example, increased flexibilization is associated with the more extensive use of workers on temporary, short-term contracts, who lack security and protection (Barnes, 2018; Chan et al, 2020; Kalleberg et al, 2021). The rapid growth of platform work arrangements, whereby workers are hired to undertake specific tasks, or ‘gigs’, accessed through smartphone apps, such as providing a ride or delivering food to someone’s home, has, in propagating increased flexibilization, engendered greater precarity and encouraged the commodification of labour (Prassl, 2018). In the Global South, the nature of platform work, its commodifying tendencies and the insecurity it produces exacerbates informalization (Sharma, 2022), given that workers lack access to formal employment protections.

Evidently, flexibilization in work and employment relations is a general, global trend. It reflects a dominant neoliberal ideology which privileges the interests of employers and their demands for efficiency and flexibility while emphasizing the importance of restricting the power and activities of trade unions and weakening employment rights and protections (Baccaro and Howell, 2017). At the same time, though, institutional differences between countries mean that neoliberalization, and the processes of flexibilization and commodification which accompany it, operate in varied ways and trajectories, according to the national setting. For example, coordinated market economies like Germany operate stronger regulatory arrangements and systems of worker protection than liberal market economies such as the UK and US (OECD, 2020a), moderating processes of flexibilization and commodification in some important ways.

One integral dimension of neoliberalism in general is the predominance of finance capital. The intensified neoliberalization of the 2010s in the UK was a function of the emphasis placed on restoring the financialized growth model, fuelled largely by expanding private debt, which had briefly been jeopardized in the aftermath of the global financial crisis (Lavery, 2019). A general process of financialization can be observed, based on the increased prominence of, and privilege accorded to, finance capital, particularly in liberal market economies such as the UK and US (Applebaum and Batt, 2014). Pressure from financial investors for short-term returns means that firms come to focus on generating value by means of corporate restructuring initiatives and ‘financial engineering’ – mergers, acquisitions, asset disposal, murky accounting practices – rather than by product innovation or improvements in service quality (Thompson, 2013; Batt, 2018). Labour is treated as a commodity, the cost of which should be minimized for the purpose of realizing short-term value by means of measures designed to secure efficiency savings, such as lay-offs and outsourcing initiatives (Batt, 2018).

There are some important consequences of the rise of ‘investor capitalism’ and the emphasis accorded to minimizing labour costs. One is the greater pressure managers come under to exercise close control over workers and their performance standards (Dundon and Rafferty, 2018). Another concerns the impact on working conditions. In the UK’s highly financialized residential care sector, for example, the imperative to cut labour costs bears particularly heavily on low-paid staff, mainly women, often from minoritized ethnic communities, whose terms and conditions of employment have deteriorated because of cost-cutting measures (Horton, 2022).

The phenomenon of financialization exemplifies neoliberalism’s predominance, particularly in liberal market economies such as the UK, which, during the 2010s, experienced a process of intensified neoliberalization. However, sustained economic growth in the aftermath of the 2007–8 global financial crisis and subsequent economic recession was notable for its absence. According to Blanchflower (2019: 79), the ‘UK’s recovery was the third slowest peacetime recovery in six hundred years’ and the most sluggish since 1720. Efforts to restore a financialized growth model stimulated asset-based inflation, not only increasing inequality but also by impeding economic growth and creating considerable political instability and turbulence (Lavery, 2019; Hopkin, 2020).

The process of intensified neoliberalization in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and subsequent economic recession had some profoundly adverse consequences for work and employment. One was the aforementioned paucity of ‘good’ jobs (Blanchflower, 2019). In much of Western Europe, this was manifest in high levels of unemployment, particularly youth unemployment (Vaughan-Whitehead, 2015). In the liberal market economies of the US and UK, the dearth of good jobs was evident not so much in the headline unemployment figures – during the 2010s, the official rate of UK unemployment fell to its lowest level since the 1970s – but in the phenomenon of ‘underemployment’ (Blanchflower, 2019; Baines and Cunningham, 2020). The UK saw the growing use of so-called ‘zero-hours contracts’, a casual form of employment that does not guarantee any minimum hours of work, with workers expected to be available for work and only paid for the hours that they do work (Koumenta and Williams, 2019) – see Chapter 3.

Casualization was also driven by the greater use of bogus self-employment arrangements – so-called ‘gig’ work – not only by new online platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo (Bloodworth, 2018; Prassl, 2018) but also more widely, in sectors such as parcel delivery, a notable manifestation of growing ‘uncertain work’ (Heyes et al, 2018; Moore and Newsome, 2018). One estimate from 2020 suggested that around 3.75 million workers in the UK were falsely self-employed – a majority of the 5.2 million total reported in self-employment (Harvey, 2020). The growth of more insecure and precarious forms of employment is an international phenomenon, especially in the advanced economies of the Global North, a function of greater neoliberalization and the promotion of more flexible labour markets (Kalleberg, 2018; Baines and Cunningham, 2020). This trend inspired Standing to develop the idea of the ‘precariat’, or, as he terms it, the ‘new dangerous class’. Standing describes the precariat as a worldwide phenomenon, constituted of people whose relation to employment is episodic, fragmented and insecure (Standing, 2011). While many former members of the old working classes have fallen into it through the loss of stable jobs, the precariat also includes highly skilled and qualified people, such as the army of casual university teachers.

The dearth of good jobs and the growing precarity and commodification arising from intensified neoliberalization have particularly affected workers who were already disadvantaged to a disproportionate extent, exacerbating inequality in employment (Baines and Cunningham, 2020; Horgan, 2021). Too many people in the UK, especially young workers, women workers, workers from minoritized ethnic communities and those from poorer backgrounds, find it extremely hard to progress out of low-paid, poor-quality work (SMC, 2019) because of a ‘class ceiling’ that impedes upward social mobility (Friedman and Laurison, 2020) – see Chapter 5. Work’s increased casualization and commodification is one factor that contributed to the prolonged period of wage stagnation that marked the 2010s (Blanchflower, 2019). Another was the diminished and ‘hollowed out’ (Tooze, 2021) position of organized labour, a reflection of the ‘breaking of union power’ (Holgate, 2021a: 10) that occurred during the 1980s, an integral feature of the neoliberal assault on the trade unions – see Chapter 6.

COVID-19: re-regulatory pressures and the crisis of work

During the early 2020s, the effects of one crisis at work – intensified neoliberalization – were exacerbated by another, the COVID-19 pandemic. In the UK, the impact of this epidemiological crisis exposed the fragile state of public services, especially health and social care, which a decade of austerity had left poorly prepared for the challenge of responding to the pandemic (Bettington, 2021; Calvert and Arbuthnott, 2021). COVID-19 aggravated the effects of intensified neoliberalization in a number of important respects, particularly by creating an environment in which precarity thrived, heightening pre-existing inequalities and exacerbating social divisions (Davies et al, 2022; Macartney et al, 2022). Key workers, such as frontline service workers who were required to attend their normal workplace, saw their health and safety compromised (James, 2021; Cai et al, 2022). Those obliged to work from home because of COVID-19 restrictions often experienced greater work pressures arising from employers’ expectations that workers be more assiduous at demonstrating their online presence (Hadjisolomou et al, 2022) and the greater spill-over of work activities into their home and family lives (Hodder, 2020).

As already mentioned, the current crisis of work is a consequence of the antagonism that has arisen between the degradation of work and employment relations under conditions of intensified neoliberalization and the aspirations of workers for decent work and to have their labour valued. Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic has both illuminated and amplified this antagonism, exacerbating pre-existing re-regulatory pressures, prompting the state to adopt a more interventionist role and stimulating greater labour activism. By the latter part of the 2010s – before COVID-19 arose – signs that the legitimacy of neoliberalization was becoming increasingly imperilled had become evident, a consequence of the growing imperative to tackle the profound, adverse consequences for work and employment, particularly concerns over job insecurity, low pay and in-work poverty (Brown and Wright, 2018; Taylor, 2019).

The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated pressures for re-regulation, so that workers’ interests can be better served. The greater focus on the prospects for a four-day working week exemplifies the increasing importance being attached to ways of improving the quality of people’s working lives, with the pandemic, and its effects, having played a major part in stimulating ideas of how work could be better (Coote et al, 2020). Some are sceptical about the prospects for a four-day work week, especially given productivity concerns (CIPD, 2022). However, trials undertaken among UK firms suggest that reducing the working week can improve workers’ well-being without compromising business efficiency (Stewart, 2023).

All this implies there is greater potential for a more activist state and an interventionist government approach, focused on enhancing labour standards and protecting workers’ interests rather than privileging employers’ flexibility. As has long been recognized, neoliberal projects are rarely laissez-faire in orientation but instead rely on the coercive power of states to enforce marketization, privatization and liberalization, particularly when it comes to subjugating organized labour (Gamble, 1988; Howell, 2005; Šumonja, 2021). Businesses are frequently the recipients of generous amounts of state largesse in the form of tax benefits, subsidies and other rewards which, taken together, can be understood as ‘corporate welfare’ regimes (Farnsworth, 2012). State intervention can help to facilitate greater neoliberalization by mitigating some of its adverse consequences for the purpose of enhancing employers’ flexibility and keeping organized labour in check (Howell, 2016).

Nevertheless, as well as advancing measures designed to facilitate capital accumulation, state actors must also be concerned with moderating the adverse effects of the inevitable instabilities that arise, through appropriate legitimation strategies (Jessop, 2014; Lavery, 2019). Quite evidently, intensified neoliberalization generated considerable instability and disruption, particularly in the labour market, work and employment; importantly, though, the ‘interventionist turn’ that developed towards the end of the 2010s, and was amplified by the experience of COVID-19, implies more of a concern not with facilitating greater liberalization, by mitigating some of its adverse consequences (Howell, 2016), but rather signalling a possible retreat from it. This shift in approach can be attributed to growing demands for a more active and interventionist government role in tackling the problems caused by excessive neoliberalization, not least the adverse consequences of austerity, and providing working people with greater protection (Richards, 2018; Lavery, 2019).

Indeed, since early 2020 the necessity of responding effectively to COVID-19 has required massive state intervention, often on a scale unprecedented in peacetime circumstances, to organize test and trace arrangements, vaccination programmes and job/income support schemes for those not able to work because of the pandemic, among other things (Šumonja, 2021). Governments around the world intervened to protect the jobs and incomes of people unable to work because of restrictions imposed on the economy to restrict the spread of infection. In some countries, such as Germany, this involved using and updating existing support mechanisms. Elsewhere, governments had to design and implement job retention arrangements from scratch (OECD, 2020b). While the UK’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme was only a temporary measure, the significance of this ‘furlough’ arrangement was that, as a manifestation of state intervention, it contravened the market-based approach to restructuring, one emphasizing redundancies, that has long prevailed in the UK (Stuart et al, 2021) – see Chapter 4. There has clearly been a shift in political positioning, one that preceded the COVID-19 pandemic but was accentuated by it, away from market liberalism and towards a more interventionist role for the state, not least because the effects of intensified neoliberalization and neoliberal austerity have stimulated greater demands for labour market support and protection at work.

The challenge to neoliberalization extends beyond the state and the interventionist role played by governments. When thinking about re-regulatory pressures, it is important to recognize that the most important mechanism for ensuring that workers’ aspirations for decent work are realized and that their labour is valued is the trade union movement. As we have seen, neoliberalization is associated with the weakening, indeed breaking, of organized labour; and some employers used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext for further challenges to unions, especially in the US. Importantly, though, trade unions have been engaged in a process of renewal, one that involves greater efforts to organize and mobilize workers (see Chapters 6 and 8), including those in the platform economy, challenging the kind of commodification and casualization of employment all too common under conditions of intensified neoliberalization (Cant, 2020; Holgate, 2021a). Moreover, the experience of COVID-19 galvanized union activism, especially in the US. During 2021 and 2022, a major wave of labour strikes over wages, working conditions and workplace health and safety occurred, with unions making advances in firms such as Amazon and Starbucks (Sainato, 2022).

The climate emergency and the crisis of work

While we were writing this book in 2023, news broke that July 2023 was expected to be the hottest ever month experienced on earth, a testament to the effect of global warming and a stark manifestation of the escalating climate emergency (Thompson, 2023). The ruinous environmental impact of an economic growth model which is highly dependent upon intensive agricultural production and mass industrial production methods, powered by hydrocarbons extracted from the earth – fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum and gas – has become increasingly difficult to ignore, especially the polluting and global warming effects. While the global warming phenomenon had long been understood by scientists, it was only during the late 1980s that the concept of climate change, and its adverse consequences, attracted the attention of policy makers (Klein, 2014).

As a manifestation of environmental crisis, the concept of climate change, or rather the ‘climate emergency’ as it is increasingly labelled, refers to the rapid warming of the planet caused by the excessive growth of carbon in the atmosphere. The effects of the climate emergency are already being felt: for example, the erosion of the Antarctic ice shelves and the melting of glaciers; rising sea levels, posing an existential risk to low-lying parts of the world, such as some Pacific islands; more extreme weather events; and the increased prevalence of wildfires in places such as California on the West Coast of the US and parts of Australia. In 2023, Canada was afflicted by hundreds of wildfires, the number and intensity of which were aggravated by the climate emergency, resulting in very poor air quality and harmful particle pollution throughout large parts of North America (Milman et al, 2023). The same year saw major fires erupt around the Mediterranean, including in Greece and Italy, sparked by exceptionally high summer temperatures linked to planetary warming.

Importantly, environmental degradation in general, and anthropocentric (human-generated) global warming in particular, are products of capitalism, and the imperative to commodify, and thus extract value from, the natural world, in a similar way to how it treats workers (Saltmarsh, 2021). Neoliberalism, and the primacy accorded to ‘market fundamentalism’ which characterizes it, may not have caused the climate emergency, but, as a dominant ideology, one that privileges the interests of corporations, it has certainly contributed to it and stymied the actions required to tackle it effectively (Klein, 2014; Saltmarsh, 2021; Buller, 2022b).

There are clearly important connections between environmental crisis, especially the climate emergency, and the crisis of work. According to Horgan (2021: 113), work ‘is a central institution through which capitalism is lived. It is the site and process of value extraction, and this process leaves its mark in the natural world just as much as it does on individual people.’ Neoliberalism, especially in its intensified form, exploits and degrades the environment, damaging the climate, for the purpose of value extraction, just as it exploits and degrades human labour (Klein, 2019; Saltmarsh, 2021). Work, as it is currently arranged, contributes to the climate crisis: we work too much, often in energy-inefficient or polluting industries and organizations. Too many jobs are organized and undertaken in ways that are both environmentally and socially unsustainable (Klein, 2019). The climate emergency has exposed and illuminated the degrading effects of neoliberal capitalism, not just in respect of the environment but also with regard to work and employment. A focus on greater sustainability demands effective action to tackle the climate crisis, something which involves an emphasis on creating good jobs and promoting decent work. In addition, environmental degradation is linked to epidemiological crisis: diminished biodiversity through deforestation provides animals such as bats, which host diseases that can be harmful to humans, with greater opportunities to thrive, increasing the risk of future pandemics (Tollefson, 2020).

Destruction of the environment and decreasing biodiversity is heightened by the breakout of armed conflicts, such as those in Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Palestine which also lead to displacement of populations deprived of the economic means of survival and seeking work elsewhere: wars involving advanced missile technology and heavy tank and artillery use are highly destructive of agricultural infrastructure and wildlife and involve intensive use of fossil fuels, limiting the impacts of international actions to curb environmental pollution. US military activity, given its global scale and complexity, makes a major contribution to increasing carbon emissions (Belcher et al, 2020).

International efforts to address the climate emergency are coordinated by the United Nations. Established in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides expert and authoritative scientific information about climate change and its impacts. The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change took effect in 1994; 198 countries had ratified the Convention by 2022. It oversees annual ‘Conferences of the Parties’ (CoPs) which seek to negotiate international agreements on securing progress towards decarbonization and reducing the pace of global warming. The 2015 Paris Agreement, for example, included an objective to keep the global average temperature rise to below 2°C, though even a 1.5°C rise is potentially catastrophic. Individual governments agree to action consistent with what they signed up to in the CoPs. For example, the UK government’s ‘Net Zero Strategy’ is based on the target of ensuring that, by 2050, the amount of carbon emissions added to the atmosphere is the same as, or less than, the amount being removed (HM Government, 2021).

Government and intergovernmental efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, are generally rather weak and limited. The 2015 Paris Agreement, for example, does not compel countries to take meaningful action to limit emissions. Too much of an emphasis is placed on voluntary and market-based solutions to global warming – such as the use of carbon trading schemes and offsetting arrangements – which, while comfortable for corporations, do little to address the underlying causes of the climate emergency and may indeed make things worse (Klein, 2014; Saltmarsh, 2021; Buller, 2022b). Growing climate activism, exemplified by the activities of the Extinction Rebellion movement, which was established in 2018, is a consequence of the frustration many people feel with sluggish and limited official efforts to respond to global warming – see Chapter 8.

Clearly, a more radical and transformative approach is needed to tackle climate change, one with profound implications for work. The concept of the Green New Deal (GND) originated in the US but has since influenced the approach of many in the UK (Pettifor, 2019). It incorporates a concern with promoting wide-ranging social and economic, as well as environmental, changes in order to deal with the climate emergency effectively. These include greater public ownership, investment in sustainable housing and transport and the democratization of decision making so that people are empowered to take appropriate action in their communities. Central to the GND is the concept of ‘justice’ – not only that the process of decarbonization, and the economic restructuring it portends, should ensure that workers are treated fairly and have their issues and concerns addressed but also, more importantly, that workers themselves should be actively involved in efforts to develop a new, sustainable economic model and the good, ‘green’ jobs that are integral to it (Klein, 2019). For Saltmarsh (2021: 100), there needs to be a ‘powerful trade union movement leading the struggle for a Green New Deal so that workers are the protagonists, not victims, of economic transition’.

A ‘just transition’ to a new economic model is required, one that not only privileges environmental and climate sustainability but also emphasizes the centrality of good jobs to securing sustainability and the importance of involving workers themselves, and upholding their interests, in the process of change (Saltmarsh, 2021). According to Klein (2019: 167), an ‘alternative’ economic model is required, comprising ‘integrated solutions’ which can ‘radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy’. This is a crucial issue: currently, attempts to switch to greener and cleaner sources of energy production in the UK have raised opposition from some trade unions, concerned at the loss of numerous existing jobs (see Chapter 6). Changes of this kind are tricky and challenging and may require a more interventionist state approach, as discussed in previous sections.

Crises foretold, crises connected

Our three major crises are interlinked in terms of their effects upon one another but also in terms of their underlying causes: the operation of a capitalist – especially neoliberal capitalist – global economy is an additional feature that these three crises share. They have been foretold for many decades, have received considerable academic, public and political discussion and have a considerable societal presence in the form of cultural productions. Despite this, our three crises have elicited little or no preventative measures from state and other institutional actors for many decades. The crises of work we have outlined here have been part of a general public discourse regarding the degeneration of work and the future of work since at least the 1950s. Automation, alienation and meaningless polarization between skilled and unskilled workers, and between owners and employees, have been described in many academic accounts, notably Blauner (1964) and Braverman (1974), and have been a consistent trope in cultural productions since the 1950s – for example Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian novel Player Piano (Vonnegut, 1952). Bodies such as the World Health Organization had been warning of likely catastrophic pandemics since the early 2000s; indeed, we had two ‘dry runs’ for a global pandemic with the SARS outbreak of 2002–4 and then the MERS outbreak of 2012, neither of which prompted many governments to take significant precautions in the form of, say, stockpiling appropriate personal protective equipment. Finally, regarding the climate crisis, we can trace the dire warning of an impending climate emergency back to the 1957s, when no less a person than Edward Teller, often dubbed the ‘father of the hydrogen bomb’, told the American Chemical Society in 1957 that if we continue to burn coal and oil at the current rate the polar ice caps will melt (Bell, 2021: 261). By the 1980s, so much scientific evidence had been amassed, and so many briefings given to senior politicians and civil servants, that it is simply not credible to claim that world leaders, and fossil fuel companies, did not know what was happening. Given that, the question we need to ask is why these multiple, evidenced and credible warnings were ignored by those in power?

Critical social theory can help us here. Many commentators, from Karl Marx onwards, have noted that capitalism is an economic model that cannot be sustained indefinitely, and that capitalism contains the seeds of its own demise. Perhaps the most lucid and prescient contemporary commentator on ‘the end of capitalism’ is Wolfgang Streeck. Streeck’s melancholy realism is based on a recent historical analysis of capitalism which, he believes, is disintegrating from the inside: the ‘three apocalyptic horsemen of contemporary capitalism – stagnation, debt, inequality – are continuing to devastate the economic and political landscape’ (Streeck, 2016: 18). In short, capitalism has ceased to be an economic regime that can underwrite a stable society. The symptoms of this are legion, but Streeck focuses on the irrationality of the ‘senseless’ production of money to stimulate growth and the coming apart of the modern state system (Streeck, 2016: 35). For Streeck, these promote an increase of entropy in societies, and the consequences, for people living in democratic capitalist societies at least, are felt at the level of social life. Neoliberalism engenders, indeed promotes, individualism, and ‘social life in an age of entropy is by necessity individualistic’ (Streeck, 2016: 41). Streeck (2016: 45) argues that we are in a post-capitalist interregnum that is dependent upon individuals as consumers adhering to a culture of competitive hedonism. Streeck’s account of capitalism is a purely internal one which ignores the external increases in entropy in the form of nature ‘biting back’ through pandemics and climate change. However, his point is still valid regarding the failure and irrationality of continued capitalist production and economics.

As to what will emerge at the end of this interregnum, Streeck is by turns pessimistic and melancholic. The resolution of the crisis of democratic capitalism could be the Hayekian triumph of capitalism freed from any democratic control (capitalism without democracy) or it could be democracy without capitalism, where democratic institutions repair the damage wrought on the institutions of social justice that we are losing, or have lost (Streeck, 2017: 173–5). Unfortunately, it is the first path that Streeck considers the most likely. Either way, contemporary capitalism has entered a period of ‘deep indeterminacy’ (Streeck, 2016: 12), a period when unexpected things can happen at any time, and it is difficult to predict these or even agree what the outcome of events will be.

Conclusion

We have used this chapter to explain how the current crisis of work has been produced by three crises which are at work – intensified neoliberalization and its consequences, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the escalating climate emergency. The mutability of neoliberalism has been emphasized by some who highlight its capacity to evolve and exist in varied forms, particularly its adaptability to an era of greater political authoritarianism and state intervention (Peck and Theodore, 2019; Callison and Manfredi, 2020; Šumonja, 2021). For others, though, the era of neoliberalization seems to be on the wane, being supplanted by an emerging economic and political paradigm that privileges state intervention, economic protection and popular control over liberal markets, corporate interests and employers’ flexibility (Gerbaudo, 2021).

Notwithstanding these different interpretations, the important thing is that there is a rupture evident, even a potential ‘moment of thorough-going transformation’ (Hay, 1999: 323), one that is responsible for the contemporary crisis of work. It has found expression in the form of the antagonism that exists between the degradation of work due to intensified neoliberalization and workers’ aspirations for good jobs and for their labour to be valued. This antagonism has been aggravated by the epidemiological crisis and the escalating climate crisis respectively. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed, and exacerbated, the difficulties many workers experience, such as excessively precarious employment, while also contributing to greater government activism and boosting re-regulatory pressures concerned with protecting workers. Tackling the climate emergency effectively demands a ‘just transition’, one which privileges good jobs and sustainable work, upholds workers’ interests and actively involves workers themselves in the process. The rest of this book examines key aspects of the contemporary crisis of work in greater detail, considers the implications of this crisis, assesses responses to the crisis and reflects on how the crisis can be surmounted.