Mike Hayes

Equality at Work

Discrimination in the labour market is a longstanding problem. It exists because employers make recruitment, training and promotion decisions on grounds which are irrelevant from the point of view of the economic performance of the labour concerned. Their decisions should be based on characteristics such as price and productiveness, but instead they are guided by ones to which they should be indifferent such as gender, race, age, and able-bodiedness. The specific labour involved — the people subject to discrimination — is devalued. Under the pure model of market forces, this devaluation should not exist, in reality it does, and has existed for a very long time.

Democracy and the Public Sector

We ended our theoretical section by pointing out the significance of the local state as the set of specific institutions that employ state social workers. This must mean that the experience, practice and policy of social work represents a small part of what is known as ‘politics’, and the same is true of the trade unionism that it has constructed. Working for the public sector in general, and for social work in particular, any understanding of what can or cannot be achieved is inevitably ‘political’.

The Training Gap

By the end of the 1980s it was universally agreed that there was a national training problem. A serious gap existed between the level and extent of the training which was being carried out and the training which was needed for a labour force in a dynamic, successful economy.

Education, Training and Industry

This book’s main concern is to demonstrate the complexity of the social relationships of the labour market. And yet, even given that complexity, we are also committed to exploring the simplistic way in which various Government policies have simulated an understanding of that labour market. We are demonstrating that within the labour market, and within the lives and morality of the people that make up that market, it is not possible to assume that human activity can be turned into labour in an unproblematic way. People cannot be made into the commodity labour in the straightforward way steel can be shaped into cars and blank paper shaped into forms or letters.

Political and Social Policies for Valued Labour

The problems of Britain’s labour markets, the skill shortages, recruitment difficulties, the discrimination, have deep roots in history. Tracing these roots has led further and further into the social relations of Britain, and into the evolution of cultural conditions. At first sight these essentially economic problems seemed bad enough, but looked at economically they could be seen as small ripples on the calm surface of orthodox labour market theory. As their fuller nature was theoretically brought to light they suggested that the social economy of Britain is confronted by a contradiction which can only be developed through social and political action.

Why Don’t People Want to Work?

The labour market in Britain is in crisis and, at its heart, the crisis is one coming out of the cultural nature of labour. It is this issue that we will raise in this first chapter, where we demonstrate the interaction between the economic and the social sides of labour.

An Assessment of the Cultural Conditions of Labour Today

In the previous chapter we distinguished the processes which labour takes part in. These were production, simple circulation, political and social distribution, social consumption, and the whole network of social relations. Through these processes, people make things and consume them. Philosophically speaking they express themselves through their labour, indeed externalise themselves through their labour, and then their products return to them as objects of consumption, whether as products or services. This consumption takes place in the wider society.

The Cultural Revolution in Production

In the 1970s and 80s, whilst social democracy was succumbing (in Britain) to the New Right’s laissez-faire ideology and political practice, the economic system appeared equally to be undergoing radical and rapid change Much, but not all, of the economic change was involved with technological changes. Thus, in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, management in private manufacturing plants and nationalised industries introduced microelectronics into production processes, affecting the work of many manual workers. Computerisation of previously ‘manual’ systems and the introduction of word processors on a massive scale likewise reshaped the work of many non-manual workers during the 1980s (Daniel, 1987). This applied to all areas of the economy, including services such as banking, high street retailing by multiple stores, and the operations of civil servants working for central government.

The Reform of the Unions

If employers and the state have undervalued labour, at least trade unions have tried to oppose this process. They have done this through the traditional methods of collective bargaining and political lobbying and agitation. In recent years these efforts have continued, but in the face of three major challenges to the trade union movment. Firstly, the state has passed laws which have been put forward as reforming the unions, but which were aimed principally at weakening the movement’s ability to use strikes and other actions to achieve wage advances and other economic objectives, but also at increasing the individual rights of trade unionists with respect to union discipline. Secondly, mass unemployment, which produced a major drop in membership, compelled the movement to contemplate reforming itself, and led to anxious internal debates about the direction of reform (the ‘new realism’ debate). Thirdly, the trade union movement, in the 1970s as well as in the 1980s, found itself challenged by sections of its own membership as being based on sectarianism — this charge was made especially by women and ethnic minorities.

Welfare and Social Security — The Construction and Reconstruction of the Labour Market

Given the importance of wages and salaries as a major component of the world of work, it is necessary to understand the relevance of other forms of payment in society. Within a pure market model the simple logic is this. If people only go to work for money and if they can get that money from another source, then it is inevitable that they will not go to work. Whilst such a simple logic would not be followed by anyone, there has been a significant and prolonged impact of its rationale on a broad range of policies and culture.