The past weeks and months have seen several speeches by Labour Party leader Keir Starmer setting out the opposition’s policies on the future of work and industrial strategy. Following the party’s conference in Liverpool, the most notable of these presented what is an increasingly coherent narrative to two very different audiences: the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry. To each, the Leader of the Opposition pitched Labour as the only party that could take forward the apparent spirit of social partnership represented in the furlough scheme, a ‘tripartite deal for troubled times’ collectively agreed between the government, TUC and the CBI at the onset of the pandemic.
The overarching argument was that ‘Britain needs a new business model’ based on something like the ‘modern supply-side economics’ promoted by the Biden presidency in the US. This would stimulate social partnership between business, unions and government in pursuit of growth and productivity across the regions, rather than redistributing a shrinking surplus to patch up inequalities after the fact. Whereas ‘all around the world, business is waking up to the fact we live in a new era for labour’ with a small ‘l’, Britain’s ‘low-wage model is holding us back’, Starmer argued.
The Labour leader suggested that the party is taking inspiration from European economies where wages have better kept up with the cost of living owing to ‘stronger collective bargaining’ and ‘stronger worker rights’ that present not a ‘barrier to growth and higher productivity’ but rather its foundation. This will entail, Starmer signalled, steps to bolster ‘the role of trade unions in our society’ through the creation of new and durable institutions that embed worker voice and power in the management of the economy—such as an Industrial Strategy Council convening unions, businesses, universities and government to direct long-term planning, R&D spending, patient finance and protection of critical infrastructure and supply chains. At the level of the workplace, meanwhile, Fair Pay Agreements will focus on lifting standards and setting minimum floors on pay and conditions in key sectors. By creating a table around key economic areas, a Labour administration would bring employers and unions together to negotiate these new standards.
These appeals to employees and employers alike are organised around a concept of security, presented as a foundation for workers and businesses to survive, thrive and put behind them a failing economic model based on uncertainty, precariousness and lack of protection. Where workers will be guaranteed security through reforms of worker rights and bargaining power, businesses will be supported with investment in risky new industries, techniques and technologies through the National Sovereign Wealth Fund. State provision of this environment of trust and confidence for workers and businesses will rest on a new social contract whereby firms are expected to start investing in skills, training and new technology so as to upgrade rather than degrade pay and working conditions.
At a time of geopolitical fractures, Starmer couched this agenda in the language of national competitiveness, with investment in new technology lagging in the UK against comparator countries less dependent on low-wage, insecure service industries. Granting firms greater adaptability to reskill and upskill workforces through reform of the apprenticeship levy, Starmer suggested that a Labour government would use the climate crisis and contemporary geopolitical ruptures to retool the British economy around independence in green industries and renewable energy.
The Tories having long abandoned their own industrial strategy, Labour is proposing to put another in its place, this time with work and workers at its centre. Starmer presented this policy agenda as a way of showing ‘respect’ to the workers who, staffing the frontline of essential services and industries in the pandemic, have since sought to translate claps into pay claims to keep pace with spiralling inflation. Care workers, for instance, would be the first to benefit from the rollout of Fair Pay Agreements. However, Starmer also sought to address criticisms of his reticence to allow Shadow Cabinet members to join striking workers on the picket line in recent months, suggesting that ‘when it comes to delivering for working people’, the Labour Party and the labour movement ‘have different jobs’ based on winning different kinds of power in tandem—one in parliament and the other in the workplace.
These two speeches suggest that some big moves are being made in Labour’s messaging on the future of work and industrial strategy. These are best understood in the context of a set of unfolding political and economic conditions and the sometimes competing material and moral imperatives that spring from them.
Anticipation and hardship
Even the most sceptical observers of Labour’s development over the course of Starmer’s leadership would find it hard to deny that the party’s policy offer has come on leaps and bounds as far as the politics of work is concerned. The TUC and CBI speeches presented a consistent message across two constituencies traditionally bearing competing interests but increasingly thrown together by an emerging consensus formed in the shadow of conflict and crisis. In this respect, they marked the culmination of a long phase of political reflection and policymaking around the topic of work over the past three years.
This should be seen as part and parcel of Labour’s struggle to reckon with the political upheavals of the post-Brexit period. A vast political science literature has sprung up since 2016 to explain the links between two apparent moral panics. On one hand, the realignment of conventional electoral politics as deindustrialised working-class communities have opted for populists at the ballot box. And, on the other, the transformation of working life by a unique combination of new technologies centred on the prospect of widespread automation of routine work. In a low-wage service economy that disincentivises investment in productivity-raising technologies, the impact of many of these innovations is confined to specific groups of employees, whether relatively privileged beneficiaries of trends like remote working or ruthlessly surveilled and exploited platform workers. Nonetheless, a single important insight arises from the many studies of the relationship between these two processes.
This says that, where working-class voters, however comfortably off, fear for their future, a pervasive sense of anxiety and insecurity about anticipated hardship manifests in a revolt against the political centre. This realignment is guided by the search for a political platform that is ultimately cultural and emotional in character, and which promises to shore up the status and prestige of at-risk routine jobs, traditional industries and the communities constructed around them. Narrowly rationalistic or economistic responses, whether based on technocratic social democracy or liberal self-interest, do not strike the right chord. Where fears for the future are realised, however, and direct economic hardship sets in, there is some evidence that those same voters search instead for a more traditional array of ameliorative material measures such as those offered by parties of the centre-left. The story of the post-2008 period has been a constant switching of emphasis between these two forms of anticipatory politics—one with culture as its driver, and the other with economics as its engine.
Particularly touched by these dynamics are working-age non-graduates, a crucial section of the voting public that the Labour Party needs to win back the support of in order to win an election. Characterised by social conservatism and economic insecurity, there is growing evidence that whereas their voting behaviour during the Brexit years was driven by the former owing to anxiety about social status, the translation of economic threat into reality has switched the emphasis to the latter.
Keeping abreast of these contingent shifts has been one of the primary challenges confronting the Labour Party as it has regrouped following the 2019 General Election. Against the backdrop of economic chaos sparked by the Conservative mini-budget, Labour’s recent annual conference in Liverpool showcased the new politics of work—and, importantly, politics of production—the party leadership has developed in an attempt to address these electoral dynamics and the broader political and economic context within which they sit.
Today, rather than presenting voters with a programme of radical transformation and national withdrawal from the global economy, the Labour Party seeks stabilisation in the face of economic crisis and geopolitical challenges shared in common with allies. Work, and its future, is weaved through this new perspective.
Policies and stories
The challenge for Labour is to ensure its policy agenda can seem greater than its individual parts, conveying an overarching narrative that can communicate to the voters Labour lost a convincing story about where the country is, how it got there, and where it is going next.. As frontline essential staff and desk-based homeworkers experienced realities that were increasingly distant from one another, the pandemic saw work become as much a divider as a unifier. The task confronting Labour, then, has been to articulate across those cultural and economic cleavages an account of everyday working life that spoke to the sometimes divergent ways in which British capitalism was failing to meet people’s needs and aspirations.
Epitomised in his 2021 conference speech, and supported by a long pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Starmer’s initial instinct coming out of the pandemic was to arrange such an appeal around a cultural politics of work. Seemingly inspired by a recent book by Jon Cruddas for which he provided back cover blurb, Starmer related the granular policy detail of Labour’s New Deal for Working People to a broader vision of the values widely seen as attached to work: dignity, pride in skill, social meaning and a sense of belonging. Based on his own working-class background as the son of a skilled tradesman, the language used clearly sought to muscle in on the electoral terrain occupied by the Tories in so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats by rhetorically shoring up the status and prestige of routine work.
Reminiscent of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’, Starmer attempted to provide a reassuring and empowering narrative of how successive generations of skilled workers had wielded power and control over new technologies in the workplace. However, in the absence of the institutional frameworks that enabled workers to share in the gains of modernisation in the sixties, this ran the risk of presenting as a done deal technological transformations that are either remote from the experience of many workers, or the source of profound uncertainties. Nonetheless, the mantra of ‘security, prosperity, respect’, applied to the politics of work, did show the beginnings of a Labour response to the cultural anxieties that underpinned the populist upheavals of recent years.
This agenda became even more relevant following the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. We were told, emerging from the pandemic, that a technologically-enabled ‘roaring twenties’ of jobs and growth lay in wait. But the consequences of Putin’s imperialist invasion saw several deep-seated issues in the UK economy start to unspool, with soaring inflation and supply chain issues sparking a cost-of-living crisis. Economic hardship passed from a future possibility feared by voters to a clear and present fact of life. Polling suggested that voters were shifting their order of priorities away from the kind of cultural anxieties that drove the electoral coalition behind Brexit and Boris Johnson, and towards direct material and economic concerns. As workers responded to rising inflation by entering into industrial disputes with employers in pursuit of higher pay, Labour was forced to adapt its approach at quicker speed, responding to a perceived need to demonstrate not only a moral but a material case for workers to share in the proceeds of growth.
Vying claims on value
Simultaneously with these shifts, then, Labour has developed a quietly substantial programme of reforms to workers’ rights and employment regulation. ‘Tilting the balance of power back in workers’ favour’, as Lisa Nandy put it in Liverpool, in the first hundred days of a Labour government the party will end fire and rehire and repeal the anti-trade union legislation introduced by the Tories in 2016. The sharpening economic situation has meant that reforms initially posed in the name of dignity, voice and power have required reframing around material security by means of a series of policies on pay.
The Shadow Chancellor’s speech at conference gave Labour’s clearest statement yet of the steps it will take in government—and not purely symbolically by putting party figures on picket lines—to support the principle of wages that can better keep pace with inflation and the rising cost of living. Whereas Tory trickle-down economics sees wage claims as something to be stymied in the name of belt-tightening, for Labour an economy driven by higher wages is seen as a strong, growing one. To manage upwards wage pressure in a systematic rather than purely symbolic fashion, a Labour government will instruct the Low Pay Commission to set the minimum wage according to the real cost of living—presented as a genuine ‘living’ wage worthy of the name.
The ongoing period of strike action highlights the incapacity of the UK economy to support the vying claims of these employees and their employers to a greater slice of the proverbial ‘pie’ at a time of spiralling inflation and rising costs of living. Long-term declines in real wages finally reached a point where they were intolerable for workers at precisely the time that employers were seeking to modernise in pursuit of their own profit margins.
Labour has used the period of turmoil to advance its own developing policy offer. In a series of speeches the Labour leader and Shadow Chancellor have increasingly focused on what might be called a ‘politics of production’ as an underlying principle of the party’s plans for government, moving away from the party’s comfort zone of remedying economic contradictions through redistribution. This is based in a recognition that declining productivity leaves a dwindling surplus for the state to share out in order to compensate those on the losing end of a failing economy. This demands a new role for the state, the party leadership suggests, convening social partnerships and intervening in industrial strategy in order to support economic growth.
In Liverpool, Labour laid claim to the interventionist centreground on which at least part of the 2019 Conservative mandate once stood, as the Tories were rapidly vacating it. Having installed her longstanding ideological comrade Kwasi Kwarteng in Number 11, Truss returned to the libertarian programme of cuts to tax (and, eventually, spending), confrontation with workers and trickle-down economics set out in her 2012 pamphlet Britannia Unchained, which notoriously claimed that the UK’s ailing productivity owes to a lack of graft on the part of British workers.
When the economy crashed following the Conservatives mini-budget it revealed how far some in government would go to promote the principle of trickle-down economics—namely, that if you enable the rich to keep more of their wealth they will invest it in British industry, the funds improving productivity by helping firms upgrade techniques and technologies with all the dividends of growth this affords workers and communities. Its failure when put to the markets indicates that there is a broader consensus forming that the reproduction of capitalist social relations requires something different in the current climate.
Whilst trickle-down economics may well have provided a limited response to the crisis of profitability Western capitalism experienced in the seventies, the catastrophic market reaction was a measure of the untenability of this principle in a present moment characterised by widespread recognition that state investment and intervention is a necessary precondition of contemporary growth and productivity. There is nothing in the past decade or so to suggest that wealth allowed to accumulate in the pockets of the already-rich will flow into productive investment, with few profitable routes through which to achieve a healthy return. Investment in the kinds of industries that may eventually serve to support some limited revitalisation of working-class jobs and conditions will not miraculously arrive from above like pennies from heaven.
Occupying the new centreground opened up by the disastrous mini-budget and short-lived Truss premiership, Labour’s agenda increasingly resembles the ‘high road’ to growth not taken in the seventies as a response to stagflation: a tripartite compact whereby the state brokers negotiated settlements between labour and capital that support strategies to share the outcomes of productivity gains in the shape of higher wages and better terms and conditions. Rather than expecting investment to trickle down from above, this would take the opposite approach of compelling it with pressure from below through industrial strategy and reforms to industrial relations.
The modern industrial strategy
A post-2008 period riven with crises—populism, Brexit, the pandemic, the Russian war on Ukraine and the wider West, and now dire stagflation— has demanded from governments a ‘crisis corporatism’ (or ‘COVID corporatism’) in order to render liberal democracies secure against the threats arranged against them. In this sense, geopolitical upheaval has consequences for workers, along the lines of the ‘workplace geopolitics’ explored in previous editions of Futures of Work. As the TUC has argued, a stronger institutionalisation of collective bargaining represents an effective policy response to crises past and present, in this case also making possible the propulsion of productivity from below as workers bargain for higher wages and induce employer upgrading of processes and techniques.
In a similar spirit, Labour’s ‘modern industrial strategy’ seems to accept the need to renew the economy from the shopfloor upwards as a condition of national competitiveness. Unveiled at Labour’s conference in Liverpool by Jonathan Reynolds, the policy document echoes the work of academics like Diane Coyle and Mariana Mazzucato. It furnishes Labour with a conceptual language to capture the foundational character of the country’s industrial base, with its focus on improving wages and conditions in the so-called ‘everyday economy’ that supports and sustains many aspects of daily life in the UK.
Labour present these reforms not as radically antagonistic to business, but rather in line with the desire of industry for the long-term confidence to invest, grow and become more productive. The party’s plans propose that the state acts as a partner to business, brokering more harmonious mediated relationships with unions and workers. Where the Conservatives lack the goodwill to do so having revelled in ‘fuck business’ divisiveness for the past decade, Labour would seem to be drawing upon its history of using the state to convene social and industrial compromises in the context of previous periods of conflict, crisis and geopolitical contestation. The modern industrial strategy eulogises the economic strength that comes from partnership between ‘public and private sectors’, between ‘state and market, business and worker’ and between ‘business, civil society and trade unions’. One focal point of this partnership, we are told, will be industrial revitalisation of factories, ports and steelworks through new green technologies and industries.
This undoubtedly rests on technocratic tweaks and innovation ecologies that can sometimes seem divorced from the bread-and-butter issues of work and employment, and do not rest simply on a nostalgic rediscovery of industries of the past. As argued in recent speeches by Starmer, bolstering manufacturing capacity does not imply undoing the considerable strengths the UK has built up in knowledge-intensive sectors like creative industries and higher education. Greater investment in R&D spending to foster regional clusters and collaborations between government, business and universities will help align and augment these sectors with new sources of strategic and competitive advantage in digital and defence-adjacent domains like cybersecurity. This is also seen as helping level up regional inequalities in accessing the skills, finance streams and markets associated with success in such sectors.
Among Labour’s ‘first hundred days’ pledges is a Green Prosperity Plan pitched as a grand social and industrial partnership between government, business and unions to create jobs for skilled tradespeople. There is a crucial bargain or compact underpinning such forms of social partnership. State intervention and a more protectionist procurement policy will help secure strategic industries and sovereign capabilities, send signals to investors in risky new ventures, support firms with reshoring of supply chains, and safeguard the critical and digital infrastructure so as to create an environment of trust and confidence within which businesses can trade. In exchange for the security this grants business, business will be expected to grant security to workers as a condition of receiving any public assistance. Minimum floors for wages and standards will be introduced, Labour proposes, to prevent bad employers doing business on the cheap and undercutting competitors who invest in their workforce in order to innovate.
A lack of levers
However, undoing an economy that is organised around the intensified exploitation of low-cost labour will present the party with an uphill struggle, and there are substantial legislative hurdles any Labour government will confront. Lacking the levers of employment and economic regulation available to Labour governments in earlier periods, the party needs to locate other levers capable of effecting the new economy it wants to create. If these cannot be compelled from above, then they will be compelled from below. Unfortunately this cannot be as straightforward as a simple return to labour movement militancy driving modernisation, with trade union density and power having declined. Labour’s Employment Rights Green Paper is correct to call for a restoration of collective bargaining and worker voice at the level of the firm, but this is neither a one-size-fits-all response to the specificities of a highly fissured economy nor a short-term overnight solution.
Resurrecting sectoral collective bargaining would emulate the institutional foundations for the productivity and wellbeing associated with the UK’s continental competitors, but the creation of new rules and norms to bring both the worker-side and the employer-side to the table would wend a painful parliamentary path that could outlast a government. Moreover, whilst current industrial disputes have focused attention on the section of the workforce that is most unionised and able to benefit from collective bargaining, in reality this represents only the tip of the iceberg in terms of discontent. Largely forgotten by the media narrative, there are many more millions of workers for whom union membership is impractical or undesirable, and who want better pay and conditions but lack the ability to collectively negotiate pay and conditions backed up by the plausible threat of strike action.
Although sometimes conflated with sectoral bargaining, Labour’s policy of Fair Pay Agreements follows the example of New Zealand’s social democratic government in providing a more flexible way to achieve some of the same outcomes as more conventional collective bargaining arrangements. Whilst they would not depend on union recognition to be established, the agreements once signed would enable unions access to unrepresented workforces within a given industry. They would, in effect, guarantee un-unionised workers the means to prevent a race to the bottom on pay and conditions in a specific sector—starting from particularly acute cases like social care and scaling up from there. They would also enable unions a platform to recruit and organise workers in greenfield firms and industries.
In line with the modern industrial strategy, using Fair Pay Agreements to set minimum floors could help hold firms’ hands to the fire in encouraging upgrading, upskilling and investment in better, more secure work, growth and productivity. Crucially in a coming period where government budgets will be squeezed to clear up the mess the Tories will leave behind, the policy proposes that this can be done without relying on the weakened capacity of the state alone to ensure these outcomes.
The dash for growth
The Tories talk a great deal about growing the economic pie, but years of chaos capped off with their reckless ‘dash for growth’ under Truss have comprehensively destabilised the economy. This has led even representatives of the business world to suggest that it is only the Labour Party that has a plausible plan for addressing the fundamental issues of economic design responsible for Britain’s long decline.
The use of redistributive measures to temporarily resolve social and economic contradictions and shore up the declining status of those cast adrift by industrial and technological change is today ruled out by the rapidly shrinking fiscal room that results from stagnating growth. As such, Labour’s plans to grow the economy propose to begin from production itself, both in terms of what is produced and how. These plans intend to rebalance the country’s industrial base in pursuit of what they call ‘national resilience’, whilst rebalancing inequalities of power and pay that have opened up in the workplace in recent decades.
The Tories, too, have sought to distance their approach from the redistributive remedies favoured by previous governments, proposing to grow the proverbial economic pie instead as a means of overcoming the sharp conflicts breaking out over who gets a slice. However, in practice, it is only Labour that has really made an erstwhile attempt, however tentative and incomplete, to engage with a politics of production rather than one of distribution alone.
As Starmer pointed out at the party conference, it is the Tories that remain moored to a narrow distributive politics of slicing and dicing, distributing upwards through tax cuts and placing downwards pressure for wage restraint on workers. In her brief and disastrous spell at the helm Truss went even further, folding her economic message into the creation of a new front in the party’s ongoing culture war, condemning an ‘anti-growth coalition’ comprising deserving private sector wealth creators on one side and undeserving public sector wealth extractors on the other. There are signs that Rishi Sunak might attempt the same.
Devoting its intellectual resources to this truncated critique of largely imaginary individuals and groups leaves the Conservative Party trapped in an argument that sees the long-term underpinning weaknesses expressed in the UK’s post-2008 economic trajectory and recent market turbulence as the result of the global reverberations of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Aswell as providing dangerous ammo to those on left and right who would rather the West reduce its support for the Ukrainian war effort in defence of a narrow ‘national interest’, this precludes an accurate analysis of the material situation impacting the economy and the development of a suitable political response.
At its conference in Liverpool, meanwhile, Labour offered both an analysis and response, through which the Ukrainian fight against Russian imperialism ran like the lettering through a stick of rock. Wisely avoiding the insinuation that our current energy and economic crises rest on Putin’s war alone, both Starmer and Reeves showed increasing signs of a reckoning with the deep causes of our contemporary malaise, which do nothing to detract from the absolute necessity of defeating Russia. Making the link between conflicts and struggles at home and abroad, a broad concept of ‘security’ represents the underlying principle of this new politics of production.
A swinging pendulum
Labour cannot rest easy in the knowledge that their policy offer on jobs, skills and growth bests that of a Conservative Party in a state of disarray. Rather, the party will need a set of positions, principles and perspectives that can remain agile in the face of the fickleness of election cycles and economic booms and busts. However positively the electoral runes read for Labour right now, the bitter experience of the last few years teaches us that politics is finely poised and can quickly pivot. But in its current appeals to the concept of security, Labour have at their command a calling card which helpfully straddles both the emotional and material anxieties associated with the cultural and economic factors that characterise contemporary politics.
It would be complacent to imagine that a period of economic crisis and industrial strife will inevitably play in Labour’s favour by returning politics to a space of material wants and needs satisfied simply by state intervention. Voter behaviour is not materially and economically determined and crises are quite capable of unleashing unpredictable expressions of discontent that do not fit a neatly rational relationship between policy supply and demand. The danger is that, having reacted to the economic stresses of the present period with a policy agenda based on technocratic institution-building, the Labour Party loses sight of the need for a language and philosophy capable of addressing the possible ways in which material changes may be mediated emotionally and culturally in the years to come.
The party’s messaging over the past few months has presented economic stability based on sound money, and national security based on resilience, as foundations for the realisation of social, cultural and emotional aspects of working life that go beyond material satisfaction alone: power, belonging, dignity. In this way, appeals to economic good sense in the context of sharpening hardship appear as the basis for a broader vision of the common good and the good life on the horizon of a more secure future. ‘Security’, in this sense, bridges both the cultural and the economic, the emotional and the material, in a way that holds the potential to enable Labour to adapt to the pendulum swings of political sentiment that have permeated our age.
The party’s emerging pitch would appear to imply that these apparently distinct dimensions are in fact two sides of the same coin, insofar as the pursuit of better and more secure pay and conditions does not solely concern the satisfaction of material needs and wants but rather also the recognition of one’s moral worth and human dignity. This speaks to the need to offer a politics addressed to the emotional and cultural reverberations of our age of anxiety, whilst guaranteeing a material and economic response to the increasingly immediate reality of hardship for many workers and families.
The Tory right have proven capable, in previous elections, of profiting from the contentious politics of pride and status fears of the future unleashed by stoking a briefly successful culture war. However, as demonstrated with the disastrous post-Johnson period, the Conservatives have proved ideologically and temperamentally incapable of generating an accompanying politics of work and economic life that can capture the changing character of these anxieties when confronted with the realisation of fears for the future in the form of direct hardship today.
The crumbling Tory prospects of piecing back together the electoral coalition they constructed under Johnson creates an opportunity for Labour. The party is putting into place policy frameworks and plans for institutional and industrial change that they can plausibly present as providing moral and material recognition in the shape of better and more secure wages and conditions. The task is to communicate these policies in a language that articulates across both the complex cultural and economic dimensions of these issues aswell as the contemporary divisions around work and employment that opened up both before and after the pandemic.
The aim of the party’s continuing intellectual and ideological renewal cannot simply be to cut and slice policy offers according to sectional interests in order to scrape over the line in a coming election—not least because retail politics of the kind pioneered by social democrats in the nineties is no longer viable in the absence of the economic growth required to satisfy competing demands simultaneously. To overcome this impasse and command a majority to implement its agenda, Labour needs to win and wield power convincingly. In this spirit, the party appears to be looking beyond the immediate cost-of-living crisis for ways to stimulate long-term growth as a platform for lasting social-democratic government based on a durable electoral coalition.
Nostalgia: not what it used to be?
As Starmer and Reeves argued in a series of speeches prior to conference, whilst stabilisation is the name of their game in the context of the present state of chaos, in time this will entail a fundamental redesign of work, industry and economy along the lines of the modernisation championed by reforming Labour governments from 1945 to 1997. This proposes to win state power in order to devolve it to workers and communities, equipping each with the means to lay claim to a greater share of what they produce in advance of, rather than via, distribution.
In pursuit of such moments of transformation, the traditional reflex of the ‘modernising’ wing of the party has been to advocate a relentlessly future-positive message averse to any kind of declinism or nostalgic recuperation of the past. On the basis of the specific political and economic conditions that underpinned its successes, it is often argued that Labour has done best when it presents voters with a positive vision of the future. However, translated onto the cultural terrain on which elections will still be won or lost, this can sometimes risk creating a coldly dispassionate politics that emphasises novelty and change at the expense of a broader historical and generational perspective capable of encapsulating the experiences and preferences of a broad array of voters, including most notably the older working-class electorate that Labour have struggled to convince in recent years.
In response, Labour seems keen to signpost continuities with the past in how it seeks change in the present. Nostalgia in response to a perceived sense of social, political and economic decline need not be seen as an obstacle to politics so much as a powerful principle underpinning how many people order their experiences and impressions of a changing world. It can represent a creative and potentially progressive retelling of the past rather than a conservative or reactionary attempt to preserve or return to it. Rather than approaching it as a fetter on modernisation, Labour should recognise that for many people the past offers elements of inspiration for how to do things better in the present in order to deal effectively with the future. Indeed, the notions of modernisation held dear by some in the party are often themselves a distant echo of lost futures first envisioned in the glory days of the past—the white heat of the sixties remaining just as unrealised as the high-skill, high-growth knowledge economy of the nineties, for instance.
There is plenty of evidence that nostalgia is one of the expressions of the anxiety, precariousness and pessimism produced by industrial and technological changes and their impact on the world of work. By engaging with nostalgia as a creative intervention that reclaims or recuperates the unrealised potential of the past, Labour can help contest a terrain from which the populist right has been the principal beneficiary in recent years. Whilst there is undoubtedly a strong and positive vision of the future in Labour’s modern industrial strategy based on ‘social partnership’ and so on, it also represents an echo of institutional frameworks for coordination and negotiation that saw Britain through past periods of crisis and conflict. In this sense, it is not a simple replication of past glories so much as their reinvention for new times.
As a new cold war recreates, on paper at least, some of the global and national conditions for a resurrection the exceptional gains of capitalism’s mid-century golden age, Labour’s rhetoric is becoming more confident in communicating these resemblances. Starmer laid claim to some of the terrain this in his most recent conference speech, beginning by addressing head-on the fear and anxiety that hamstrings any feeling that the country or the world has a positive future on the horizon. Resonating with the recent work of Marc Stears, he extolled the need to restore what he called the ‘ordinary hope’ that working-class people last felt, fleetingly, in the seventies, and which seems so remote today. Starmer associated this squarely with shifts in working life itself, whereby people are working ‘harder and harder’ without achieving the kind of security guaranteed, albeit it briefly and exceptionally in the history of capitalism, by the postwar social and industrial compromise.
Harking back to this history can help construct an intergenerational story about the politics of work that empowers people in the present through the example of the waves of workers who weathered, mastered and even pioneered new technologies and industries in the past, supported by those earlier institutional structures and social partnerships. The construction of an intergenerational continuity between the experiences of working-class people in the past and present marks an important response to the emergence of new political divides and electoral cleavages which strike some as being based partly in age. But looking at how skilled work enabled mastery of machines and processes in the past also helps recast contemporary changes as something that workers can control rather than be controlled by—should they have access to the skills required to do so, something potentially addressed in Labour’s new proposals to reform the apprenticeship levy.
(Re)constructing countervailing power
Labour’s conference in Liverpool showed that, whether the National Wealth Fund, the New Deal for Working People, or specific policies on defence or R&D spending, the opposition party are beginning to make some convincing connections between the geopolitical picture, the national economy and the individual experience of work and everyday life. Rebuilding trust across the political and economic divides that opened up around work in the period of populism and pandemic, Labour’s programme and messaging is also beginning to address the anxieties about an uncertain future that have powered recent electoral upheavals.
Appealing to a politics of work based on what is shared in common rather than populist dividing lines means avoiding setting up distinctions between productive and unproductive workers, or high-and-mighty judgments between good and bad jobs and the people that perform them. Labour has too often been seen to offer a doom-and-gloom missionary message on the doorstep that assumes all workers experience their employment first and foremost as a site of domination, oppression and exploitation, rather than sometimes also a source of pride, status and belonging. It is often both at of these at once, and there is great complexity and specificity to the way that people find meaning and reward in their work, often in the context of a coexistence of difficulty or drudgery with other social or financial benefits. In light of this, the aim should be to dignify and render more secure our labour by bolstering pay, protections and conditions for all workers—in other words, improving the form of the job as well as its content.
Labour’s national mission to promote prosperity, respect and security will promises to establish a new settlement of social partnership between workers, employers, and the state. On skills, productivity and levelling-up, growth needs to be something felt in places, not just done to them. In order to achieve these aims, any future government will need to devolve ‘countervailing power’ to workers and their unions in order to counterbalance the growing power of capital and the state. There must be a concerted effort to avoid the outcome sometimes associated with similar institution-building initiatives in the post-war period, whereby labour (small ‘l’) was effectively disciplined and constrained by an alienating bureaucracy. On paper, initiatives like Labour’s modern industrial strategy and New Deal for Working People promise to empower workers with the tools to improve wages and conditions as a means to incentivise investment in productivity-raising techniques and technologies from the bottom up. This new politics of production attempts to repurpose government to enable growth, ensure long-term policy goals and a support workers and communities to lay claim to value in the places they work and live. Replacing the kind of compensatory promises rendered impossible by an age of lagging growth with industrial strategy to create a broader, fairer playing field in advance of redistribution, the principle of countervailing power should play a central part in this new politics of production.
Frederick Harry Pitts is a Senior Lecturer in Work, Employment, Organisation & Public Policy at University of Bristol Business School and a co-editor of Futures of Work. Andrew Pakes is Deputy General Secretary and Research Director at Prospect Union. He writes in a personal capacity. This piece forms part of a programme of research on social democracy and the future of work funded by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Progressive Britain.