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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
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Working in 2021 Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer & Meg Young
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 vol. 64, no. 1, 2022
