After nearly five years of Futures of Work, this editorial marks the point at which the current editors (Bales, Pitts and Thomas) step back for new colleagues (Beck, Gouzoulis and Pesterfield) to step forward. We founded Futures of Work to intervene in the utopian and dystopian arguments surrounding the future of work, which held a central underpinning assumption: technological change, and its implications for work, were marked by a kind inevitability. As we noted in our first editorial of Futures of Work, technological determinism leads to a politics that seeks to follow and respond to these developments rather than shape them into multiple and open futures. In closing our editorship we go back to the future of politics and the so-called ‘polycrisis’, of populism, climate catastrophe, pandemic, and war.
In our final editorial, we contend that the debate about the future of work should be reframed around the apparent ‘return’ of the state and its role in shaping the futures of work through legislative change and the implementation of industrial policies compelled by geopolitical considerations. This led us, in one of the last editions of our editorship, to coin the concept of ‘workplace geopolitics’, namely the intertwining of global conflicts with the organisation and regulation of the labour process, as a part of production.
Within the mainstream political sphere, some foresee the potential for these shifts to represent a ‘new developmentalism’ updating the export-oriented ‘developmental states’ of post-war ‘national reconstruction’ in the West and East Asian high-tech economies. In particular, the subsequent development of the Western war economies is seen by some as a positive example of the political ‘integration’ of the labour movement and the working-class more widely within the apparatus of the state. Whilst these voices push the ‘productivist’ impulse underpinning the new role of the state, more critical academics discuss instead a ‘disciplinary’ impulse. This is characterised as the emergence of a ‘new state capitalism’ whereby the state takes on a more visible role as the promoter, supervisor, regulator, and owner of capital.
The question, then, is whether this will lead to better or worse work. As the state has taken on a different role in economy and society, there are prospects for better work under the new constellation of interests generated from geopolitical rivalry, which may necessitate new forms of social partnership. However, rather than a new ‘golden age’ of labour, the future of work will be highly globally differentiated and contingent, depending on the state’s position in the international division of labour.
In this, our closing editorial for our tenure at the helm of Futures of Work, we outline this argument by first looking at the key fault lines of disruption associated with technological change and COVID-19. Positing that these trends are not decisive in determining the coming future of labour and employment relations, we then look at the new role being assumed by the state in the organisation and coordination of economic life and the implications therein for decent work. The differentiated and contingent domestic and global trends produced by the new state capitalism correspond to both the ‘productivist’ and ‘disciplinary’ impulses outlined above insofar as they potentiate both greater involvement in production arrangements alongside the stricter disciplining of social relations. Nonetheless, refocusing the future of work debate on the role of the state helps overcome a technological determinism that writes our capacity to resist these shifts out of the picture.
Pasts, presents and futures
Since the inception of industry, visions of technological futures of work have come and gone. The distinction of the ‘present futures’ before us now apparently rests in a unique combination of technologies that work in tandem to accomplish an autonomous capacity to improve and learn independent of human intervention. This has been widely predicted to have both augmenting and substituting tendencies, leading to a shift in the need for both unskilled and skilled workers.
Central to this debate is whether automation replaces individual tasks or whole jobs. The contemporary combination of technologies seems to offer the potential to displace not only ‘blue collar’, but ‘white collar’ work. Frey and Osborne suggest that 47 per cent of people were in occupations susceptible to replacement in the next 10-20 years. McKinsey propose that 51 per cent of jobs in the US are potentially replaceable. But divergent methodological emphases on the replacement of either tasks or jobs produce very different pictures of the future. By understanding jobs as a bundle of tasks, only some of which were substitutable in full, the likes of the OECD produce a much less bleak perspective. They suggest that only 9 per cent of employment in the 21 OECD countries has more than 70% of tasks susceptible to automation. When McKinsey broke it down by task, they found that only 5 per cent of jobs could be eliminated completely.
This statistical uncertainty is reflected in the substantial economic barriers to the realisation of some of the most drastic renditions of the ‘automation discourse’. A range of factors can incentivise or disincentivise firm investment in automating technologies. The price of the technology may be more or less expensive relative to the cost of labour, for instance where firms are making a margin on sweating low paid or precarious workers. Certain lines of work, notably in the service sector, are resistant to automation owing to the centrality of their human character. The dependence of many advanced and developing capitalist economies on low-cost labour of an embodied type has limited demand for the implementation of new, costly and risky technologies.
Indeed, one of the consequences of technological change over the period following the Great Recession has not been a utopian or dystopian end of work but rather an expansion of the sphere of in-person services powered by new means of exploiting their precariousness. For example, the nascent platform economy saw new technology reshape rather than replace work, representing little more than a new way of sweating the same kind of labour. In the context of a pervasive underlying lack of profitability, existing industries that were formerly seen as susceptible to widespread automation, like logistics and warehousing have been revolutionised. What has become clear from these developments, is that the state’s role in regulating this work, and recognising new modes of labour, remains crucial in the context of technological developments which blur the traditional boundaries of employment status. At the same time, however, law’s failure to keep pace with changing formats of work poses a significant risk to workers’ rights throughout the globe.
From automation panic to pandemic
The apparent omnipresence of new technologies has failed to translate into the productivity gains capable of overcoming capitalism’s long downturn. However, it has long been assumed that the increasing affordability of autonomous systems technologies in particular would gradually overcome reservations based on cost, even where the price of labour was low owing to lack of regulation or the exploitation of precarious workers. The COVID-19 pandemic was the signal some needed that, this time really was different, from which would flow another ‘roaring twenties’. Declining revenues twinned with sticky wages; costly risk mitigation and public anxiety about human contact; the introduction of remote working in professional contexts; a longer-term strategic view on the part of investors: all were seen as inviting the kind of investment in robotics and other new technologies that had thus far been missing.
There were a number of reasons for this view. The pandemic accelerated a retreat from global supply chains and the reshoring of production, which was generally taken as implying that repatriated manufacturing jobs newly located in the Global North would cost far more than previously offshored labour in the Global South. There was some evidence that this was driving firms to seek to reduce dependence on human labour in manufacturing, whereas before these effects were concentrated in fields like logistics and services. In this context, there were growing signs that firms were increasing expenditure on automation – a trend forecast to continue over the next decade. As dexterity improved and prices dropped, robotics became a particular focus of this expenditure, reshaping processes like fruit picking where labour shortages had set in due to tighter migration regimes and pandemic precautions.
Meanwhile, whereas artificial intelligence was formerly more strongly associated with displacement of higher-paid, professional tasks, the pandemic seemed to pose a greater threat to lower-paid, entry-level posts that rested on human contact. The cost of health and safety provisions in the period of social distancing created more of an incentive to invest in innovations in areas of embodied or emotional labour previously unprofitable to automate. However, as was the case prior to the pandemic, the overall effect on labour markets was mitigated by the expansion of platforms and online shopping during the pandemic, which further reinforced the centrality of warehousing, logistics and delivery fulfilment to the contemporary economy. Counter to the so-called ‘lump of labour’ fallacy, the effect of technology is not only to replace jobs, but rather create them by means of new patterns of production and consumption that depend on new modes of exploitation of low-cost human labour.
As the post-pandemic inflationary spiral set in, and the social pull of the workplace and need for managerial oversight have sent workers back to the office, this has confounded any prediction of a ‘roaring twenties’. Ultimately, the popular focus on the technological reshaping of work amidst the pandemic, and the automation discourse that arose in the pre-pandemic period, pose the wrong questions about the relationship between material and technical shifts and wider social and political dynamics. Technology alone has proved indecisive in determining any tangibly unfolding ‘future of work’.
The state of things to come
Focusing on the impact of individual bundles of technology obscures the socio-organisational and wider political forces that mediate the struggle over the form and content of labour waged between employees, employers and governments worldwide. One of the issues with the contemporary future of work debate is its assumption of a firm-level economic rationality. The state’s role in determining the future of work has often been viewed as secondary to domestic or global capital (and certainly secondary to technology), as if the invisible hand of the market mattered more than the firm hand of the state.
This is not surprising considering the widespread assumption of the withdrawal of the state as guarantor and protector of labour rights and the emergence of regulatory or ‘governance gaps’. However, as Anthony Giles argued, ‘it is not a question of these constraints dropping from the sky onto unsuspecting governments and public policy makers; these governments and officials have been deeply implicated in their creation’. As the particular modalities through which the state is implicated shift according to the triple salvo of technological change, geopolitical conflict and the green revolution, the interface between industrial and international relations – what we have conceptualised in previous contributions as IR2, or ‘IR squared’ – is proving increasingly important in the unfolding of work futures. Without seeking to replace predictions resting on one point of determination with another, we might be able to learn something about the future of work.
The state is shaping the relationship between capital and labour in new ways through the assertive stance it has adopted domestically and internationally in the context of the ‘polycrisis’. Climate change calls for states to strategically reorient economies towards net zero alternatives. This in turn is buttressed by the greater protectionism embraced by states in the wake of the national-populist upheavals of recent years, which COVID-19 accelerated. Most significantly, perhaps, the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine and Chinese intimidation of Taiwan has brought to a head a long-brewing geopolitical rupture between the Western liberal democracies of the US and Europe and the authoritarian alliance emerging between China, Russia and their dependents – a ‘new cold war’ that will call upon the state to adopt a more strategic relationship with industry and economy.
The ‘return’ of the state really came into focus with the COVID-19 pandemic. States introduced forms of social protection and stimulus support at the inception of the lockdown that tended to remain in place well past the point of the most severe crisis. Through innovations in so-called ‘crisis corporatism’, COVID-19 showed glimpses of a new concord between organised labour and government, reinvigorating social partnership between government, business and workers. Tripartite negotiations produced national furlough schemes, and companies were seemingly increasingly interested in ways of encouraging and institutionalising worker voice. In some cases, collective bargaining has provided the basis for investment in productivity-raising technologies in a more consensual, negotiated fashion. All this was seen as potentiating a new ‘golden age for labour’.
Bringing (geo)politics back in
In many countries any notion of a ‘golden age for labour’ has been problematised by a backdrop of industrial strife over spiralling inflation among the precise occupational groups lauded as ‘essential’ during the pandemic. However, in some cases the changing geopolitical situation has strengthened the hand of the state, with potential implications for the pursuit of decent work. This is epitomised in the US Inflation Reduction Act. On one hand, this represents the key to economic recovery from the pandemic, aided by stimulus and infrastructure spending. But it is also a salvo in the emergent systemic competition with China, and a supporting pillar for broader economic and national security in the context of Western support for Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression. Compelled by circumstance, the Inflation Reduction Act is synonymous with the return of active industrial policy among liberal democracies locked in competition with rival states bearing much longer recent track records of intervening in and coordinating the economy for certain political and economic outcomes.
Western governments today are playing catch up with the likes of China by investing in R&D, strategic industries, dual-use military-civilian technologies and driving productive investment in skills and productivity, as well as efforts to (re)localise aspects of supply chains specifically in the domain of strategic resources, minerals and materials. This push for greater national productivity, innovation and competitiveness on world markets will, proponents suggest, help create high-skilled, well-paid, secure jobs. This shift is often justified by the requirement to become more self-sufficient in products and technologies (e.g. production of e-vehicles and batteries, mining of minerals) tied to net zero objectives. This new approach to social and economic policy, whilst often compelled by external causes, is proposed to promote well-paid, union-protected jobs in skilled industries as a part of a more general industrial rebalancing.
Across these interventions, technology in particular is tightly lodged at the intersection of economic, security, military and political concerns. Contemporary geopolitical conflicts and competitions are characterised by a much greater interconnectedness of technology and trade than that of the twentieth-century Cold War. In the Cold War period there was little economic entanglement between the West and the Soviet Union, maintaining a separation between trade policy, security concerns and military posture. Unlike the Soviet Union, however, China presents the West with the prospect of a serious commercial rival and economic challenger. This means that any new Cold War combines geopolitical and geoeconomic dimensions to a much more substantial degree than the first.
Following an era in which globalisation, global supply chains and transnational companies seemed the indisputable cornerstones of capitalist political economy, the nation-state was increasingly seen as being constrained between the rock and hard place of international competition and capital mobility. Across the manifold challenges that confront humanity today, the springing back of the state from this apparent condition of constraint is one of the defining global trends of our time. As states seek to support domestic producers and global governance is contested and in some cases weakened, work futures will not remain immune. These shifts in the balance of state, capital and labour, nationally and globally, will compel changes, both quick and slow, in the structure and character of the labour process, organisational life and everyday political economy – what we call ‘workplace geopolitics’.
Decent work and workplace geopolitics
The capacity of this trend to successfully integrate the working-class, or the ‘labour interest’, into the state remains unclear. The decline of organised labour has in recent decades ceded space to the state to shape industrial relations. Whilst this has typically not been used to advance a decent work agenda, there are signs that state policy is being used to strengthen associational power in some contexts, whether the EU’s minimum wage directive and commitment to extending collective bargaining coverage, to the Fair Pay Agreements being implemented in New Zealand and potentially imported into the UK via the Labour Party’s plan for government.
Central to understanding this global reorganisation (alongside the forms of domestic reorganisation covered already) is the recognition that, even beyond its borders, the state is not passive or powerless in the face of global capital. The most flighty of capital must come to ground somewhere, and in every somewhere there is always the state. The state must balance the tension between democracy and markets and between securing greater capital accumulation (e.g., through a cheap workforce and cheap land) and demands for more equal redistribution (e.g. union organisation or electoral politics). The use of extra-economic force by states in supporting capital accumulation is one ‘measure’ of the role of the state. However, the state’s role might not necessarily be as direct or visible. Whilst the neoliberal age has been mistakenly associated with a withdrawal of the state from markets, in reality the state has maintained a consistent presence in legislating for liberalisation and the creating of ‘spaces of exception’ in which unregulated activities, sanctioned or conveniently overlooked, can persist. This is evident in the growing number of people who work ‘irregularly’, a state-structured category whereby labour regulations and protections do not reach those undertaking work, often under poor working conditions or due to structural circumstances that renders their labour ‘unfree’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of those performing irregular work derive from Global South countries and/or poor socio-economic backgrounds, reflecting a continuation of colonial hierarchies whereby Global South populations continue to be exploited, and their land appropriated, for the benefit of capital accumulation. Meanwhile, the devaluation of social reproduction looks set to continue as crises in care continue to envelop ageing Global North populations.
What this implies is that, alongside domestic shifts in industrial policy, the impacts of the new state capitalism, and new age of systemic competition more broadly, on decent work will be felt in a highly globally differentiated and contingent fashion. This does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all prediction or prescription of what is to come – in other words, it is necessary to avoid simply positing a political determinism to replace the technological determinism of many accounts.
The golden age ain’t what it used to be
The focus on technology as the arbiter of work futures both before and during the pandemic sometimes served to obscure a potentially more meaningful transformation brought into sharper focus by the (geo)political upheavals of recent years. Rather than on purely technological grounds, the question of whether this time is really different after all, and the future role of work and workers in capitalist society, will be settled at this (geo)political level.
So-called ‘productivist’ approaches to the new role of the state suggest that jobs, skills and industry will be central to a new Cold War waged, like the last, between two military-economic blocs vying for markets and power – one arranged around the US and Europe, the other around China and Russia. This is leading to sharp increases in defence expenditure and efforts to (re)localise aspects of supply chains or bring sectors into state control specifically in the domain of strategic resources, minerals and materials. On this basis, some see signs that greater political and ideological tension may lead to the sort of ‘Fordist compromise’ seen during the postwar ‘golden age’. There is an assumption here that the state acts as ‘model’ employer in many Western countries due to the high levels of job security, collective bargaining, an equality approach and trade union recognition. However, with reference to more critical analysis of the ‘new state capitalism’ that stresses the state’s ‘disciplinary’ rather than productivist ‘impulse’, the implications for decent work are much more globally differentiated and contingent and may not produce the new ‘golden age’ for labour that some desire.
Both domestically and globally, the best that can be hoped is that the increasing global trend towards a more involved role of the state in the economy will open up space for struggles in pursuit of decent work anchored in a ‘regulatory renaissance’. Whilst a ‘new cold war’ is unlikely to lead to a wholesale ‘reindustrialisation’ of advanced capitalist democracies, it may result in a global reallocation of some manufacturing and extractive work that, at a higher cost, could drive the development and implementation of new technologies to improve productivity by augmenting and substituting for human labour where the necessary training and skills have been underinvested in for decades. This meagre outcome will be no match for the challenges that confront workers the world over struggling for a better future of work. Whilst no panacea, what we have called ‘IR squared’, or the practical interface of industrial and international relations, will prove more important than the technologically determinist predictions of academics, policymakers and consultants in shaping a future of work underpinned by ‘workplace geopolitics’.
Harry Pitts is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Director of Business Engagement & Innovation at the University of Exeter. Huw Thomas is Assistant Professor of Employment Relations at the College of Business at University College Dublin. Katie Bales is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol.
This article adapts elements of a chapter forthcoming in The Elgar Companion to Decent Work and the Sustainable Development Goals, edited by Madelaine Moore, Marcel van der Linden, and Christoph Scherrer. A full copy is available here.
Image credit: Ioana Cristiana on Unsplash