Working in 2021

Lost in Work – Escaping Capitalism, by Amelia Horgan

ISBN: 9780745340913 (pbk.), London: Pluto Press, vii+166 pp., 2021.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer & Meg Young

Much has been written about the fact that millions of people have been wasting away while being at work. Amelia Horgan’s Lost in Work starts with ‘there is a comforting narrative of progress about work: the bad old days of horrible jobs – of children working in mines, of cotton mills, of workplace injuries, of cruel bosses – are over’ (p. 1). Indeed, the days of Blake’s ‘Satanic Mills’ (1804) are over in most OECD countries. But the fact remains that capitalism in the Global North has outsourced its Satanic Mills to the Global South. This does not make them vanish – except in corporate media, most of the time.

As neoliberalism relentlessly advances, ‘a polarisation of the labour market’ has taken place in which, ‘the middle has fallen out, with middling-paid occupations lost’ (p. 4). As the so-called free-market moves in, winners are separated from losers. The labour market is no exception. Worse, many have predicted that artificial intelligence will remove plenty of middle-class jobs by further segregating neoliberalism’s winners from those who are at the bottom. A hollowing out is taking place. In addition, this may hand over even more power to managers and bosses, just as Wood’s Despotism on Demand (2020) has outlined so pointedly.

Yet, ‘before the introduction of the legal apparatus defining the terms of employment, fought for and defended by trade unions, the arbitrary power of employers to hire and fire, to determine hours of work and so on, was immense’ (p. 5). This ‘and so on’ included violence, brutality, rape, the whip, and even killing (Thompson, 1963; 1967). Meanwhile, neoliberal politicians continue to work hard to return to those good old days of outright macho-management and workplace despotism.

In the UK for example, the introduction of so-called ‘zero-hours contract’ – an extremely asymmetrical ‘contract’ between worker and employer whereby, the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum number of working hours to an employee – has been a significant step into the direction of workplace despotism. So far, these contracts have affected ‘about 6 per cent of all contracts [while in] admin and support services, and accommodation and food, [it] rises to around 20 per cent’ (p. 6). This signifies non-standard forms of work.

Meanwhile, working life globally reflects more what is called non-standard work, i.e., not nine-to-five and not permanent. Globally, ‘most work is actually done outside [this] but also outside of the legal and taxation framework of the state’ (p. 6). All too often, it also means outside of state protection and health cover. At the same time, those outside of employment are exposed to ‘the pathologisation of the unemployed’ (p. 8) by right-wing politicians and tabloid-TV (Jones, 2011). They are also exposed to ‘the violence of the benefits system’ (p. 10) designed to humiliate and torment the poor.

For those in employment, the neoliberal polarisation means that, ‘in the event of job loss, over a third of households would be unable to pay the coming month’s rent’ (p. 11). This is in the UK. For the USA for example, things are even worse, as the US Federal Reserve Bank stated in 2019, ‘40 per cent of Americans don’t have $400 in the bank for emergency expenses’ (Youn, 2019). The coronavirus pandemic has made matters worse disproportionally for young workers as, ‘60 per cent of those who lost their job between June and August 2020…were between 18 and 24’ (p. 28).

Much of this contradicts Bill Gates’ hallucination of a ‘friction-free capitalism’ (p. 29). Worse, in Gates’ wonderland of friction-free capitalism, he and his good-doing elite have concocted (Klikauer & Link, 2021), ‘there are more people in slavery than at any other point in history’ (p. 31). Luckily, corporate media, schools, universities, etc. have made us believe that slavery is a thing of the past – it came and left (almost by itself).

Treated almost like slaves, Uber workers have recently made some progress when the UK ‘Supreme Court confirmed that drivers, contrary to Uber’s argument, are workers’ (p. 44) ending the managerial fantasy of self-employment. This has also been disguised under the ‘gig economy’ heading (Burtch et al., 2018). The gig economy enhances the everincreasing casualisation of employment. ‘In the 1980s, there were some 50,000 temps in the UK; by the mid-2010s, there were 270,000’ (p. 54), a trend seen in most, if not all, OECD countries and in many industries including universities.

In higher education, ‘two-thirds of UK universities now hire more administrative staff than they do academics. In the US, between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty [academics] grew about 10 per cent while the number of administrators grew 221 per cent’ (p. 56). The term ‘administrators’ is another word for managerialist and corporate apparatchiks. The fact that they outnumber academics is a clear trend under

managerialism. Managerialism is also ‘unleashing the power of business’ (p. 56) onto universities, academics and elsewhere.

It is getting worse. [Managerialism and] ‘neoliberalism create perverse incentives. Instead of doing the stated tasks of a job, more and more time is spent recording partially, or totally one-sided representations of that work’ (p. 58). At universities and in many other places, it is ‘no wonder so many of today’s workers are so miserable’ (p. 65).

And of course, ‘all of our jobs have significant effects on our health, on our relationships with ourselves and our relationship with others’ (p. 68). Not surprisingly, inside as well as outside of universities, ‘workload pressure is the single greatest cause of work-related illness’ (p. 69). Worse, many workers ‘spend an average of eight hours a week replying to work-related emails outside of work’ (p. 70). The emphasis is on ‘outside of work’; many will agree.

Meanwhile, ‘high-powered executives take off on multiple holidays, undergo digital detoxing and visit luxury spas to cope with stress’ (p. 73). Self-evidently, this is not for those Karry Hudson (2019) calls ‘Lowborn’. Applying more to the lowborn than to high-flying CEOs, ‘while work can be dangerous, exploitative or even just boring, all work under capitalism harms workers because of the coercion that pushes us into it, and the lack of control we face during it’ (p. 81).

And of course, the lack of control includes the relentless drive of management using performance management against workers. In this ‘we are measured…against standards we can’t meet because there is always, theoretically, more we could be doing [which] is a real source of pain and frustration’ (p. 82). This can very easily lead to burnout, an illness the World Health Organisation says, has three dimensions (p. 85): 1. Energy depletion or exhaustion. 2. Mental distance, feelings of negativity and cynicism; and finally, 3. A sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.

In a milder form, this creates ‘pseudo-busyness’ (p. 87) pretending to be busy all the time. That applies to many white-collar workers including academics. At universities, ‘the main source of university income is now from tuition fees: they receive money per student’ (p. 95). That means administering students has become more important than research – an unwarranted cost factor. As a consequence, marketing, accounting, operations management, etc. have become ever more relevant for universities.

Worse, ‘this creates a circular logic: grades are inflated to increase rankings; higher rankings mean more students apply and degrees are looked upon more fondly by employers. This doesn’t do anything to actual standards of teaching; it’s a bubble’ (p. 95). Sadly, the neoliberal university is not about standards of teaching nor is it about research. It is about revenue maximisation and creaming-off benefits for the corporate apparatchiks.

Of course, ‘as universities move away from teaching and research and towards student recruitment’ (p. 96), academics become ever less relevant and as a consequence, they are treated like assembly-line workers until they can be outsourced or automated away. Meanwhile, a student’s life is getting ghastlier moving from: university, a place where one once wanted to go, to a place to be endured. Today, students ‘take on student loans, debt from personal loans or overdrafts, work several part-time jobs, and at the end of it, the promise of a rewarding or less miserable job quickly evaporates’ (p. 96).

Perhaps even more severe is the fact that, ‘the salaries of professional jobs can decline, as has happened across the public sector (apart from at the level of senior management) where…pay for teachers, ambulance drivers, university staff, nurses and so on, has seen significant real-terms cut in the past decade’ (p. 106). Given all this, it is not surprising that ‘individual resistance’ (p. 115) has increased.

It is not at all surprising to find that ‘the average office worker spends fifty minutes of their working day avoiding work’ (p. 115). Yet, ‘the practice of individual resistance at work is to stave off the boredom that comes from repetitive tasks and the frustration that comes from the brazen stupidity of the workplace’ (p. 116). Someone once said the answer to the question, why is school and university so boring? is that it prepares you for work. Meanwhile, the increasingly recognisable ‘brazen stupidity’ (p. 116) of work is noticeable to some academics while others may not notice this at all. Those who don’t notice may even thrive in such workplaces. Some are even promoted from low- level academics to highpower corporate apparatchiks. And some people say ‘stupidity doesn’t pay’; in universities, it increasingly does.

In universities and elsewhere, ‘refusing to love your job, refusing to see it as the most important thing in your life can become a form of resistance’ (p. 120). This can also lead to dismissal, demotion or exclusion when it comes to promotions. Another form of resistance may well be ‘refusing to seriously engage with the most frustrating demands of the workplace’ (p. 121), e.g., not participating in endless work meetings – which are the true highlights of any halfway decent corporate apparatchik.

Even inside universities, ‘work is unable to hold people’s attention; it does not provide them with the meaning that they had been promised it would have’ (p. 124). Deceptively, ‘people still hold out hope (wrongly or rightly?) that their next job will be better, will finally offer them meaning and recognition, a nice boss, a better salary and so on’ (p. 125).

Instead of such false hopes, workers might be better off placing their hope in ‘unions [that] have two goals…the first of these is the immediate betterment of conditions in a given workplace…the second goal is the ever-expanding union, the bringing of more and more workers into unions’ (p. 130). Amelia Horgan closes her exquisite book with the words, ‘a