Ursula Huws

Between a rock and a hard place : the shaping of employment in a global economy

ABSTRACT Introducing this volume, this article discusses how employment practices are shaped in a global economy, asking to what extent national policies and institutions still play a role and the importance of other social, economic, political and cultural factors in determining how work is organised and the pay, conditions and job security of workers. Whilst it is clear that there are general tendencies of erosion of labour standards, fragmentation of labour and intensification of working time, it is also clear that workers in some occupations, industries and countries are better able to resist these tendencies than others. The papers in this issue present a range of theoretical and empirical research from across Europe that seek to explain these differences, with results that are also relevant for audiences in other parts of the world.

iCapitalism and the Cybertariat Contradictions of the Digital Economy

We have now entered a period…when new waves of commodification set in motion in earlier periods are reaching maturity. The new commodities have been generated by drawing into the market even more aspects of life that were previously outside the money economy, or at least that part of it that generates a profit for capitalists. Several such fields of accumulation have now emerged, each with a different method of commodity genesis, forming the basis of new economic sectors and exerting distinctive impacts on daily life, including labor and consumption. They include biology, art and culture, public services, and sociality.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Fixed, Footloose, or Fractured: Work, Identity, and the Spatial Division of Labor in the Twenty-First Century City

The combination of technological change and globalization is bringing about fundamental changes in who does what work where, when, and how. This has implications which are profoundly contradictory for the nature of jobs, for the people who carry them out, and hence for the nature of citiesThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Where Did Online Platforms Come From? The Virtualization of Work Organization and the New Policy Challenges it Raises

This chapter argues that the use of online platforms for managing work, although it appears to have emerged suddenly, in fact represents the evolution of several pre-existing trends. The convergence of these trends, now reaching critical mass, has introduced not just quantitative changes in terms of the numbers of people working in digitally enabled ‘just-in-time’ labor markets but also qualitative changes in work organization, with far-reaching implications for skills, career development, occupational safety and health, and the sustainability of work in the long term. It concludes by summarizing the implications of these changes for public policy.

Online, on call: the spread of digitally organised just-in-time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non‐standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT‐related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.

When Adam blogs: cultural work and the gender division of labour in Utopia

Taking as its starting point the current resurgence of interest in Utopian alternatives to capitalist forms of production, including those based on cultural co-production, this chapter takes a critical look at Utopias, from Thomas More to the present day, which propose idealized future societies in which people are emancipated from exploitative labour relations. It examines the ways in which these Utopias have envisaged cultural labour – whether as specialist artistic occupations or as a general creative dimension of all labour – and relates this to the gender divisions of labour envisaged for these idealized societies. It concludes that most Utopias fail to imagine future changes in the social division between paid and unpaid work. Where these have gone beyond a model of small self-sufficient agrarian communities, even if they have envisaged changes in the technical division of labour, they have reproduced existing gender divisions of labour, excluding unpaid reproductive work from their visions of emancipation and work-sharing. In so doing, they have constructed cultural labour as something which is supported invisibly by the reproductive labour of others.

Saints and sinners : lessons about work from daytime TV

Introduction This article looks at the messages given by factual TV programmes to audiences about work, and, in particular, the models of working behaviour that have been presented to them during the period following the 2007‐8 financial crisis. It focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on daytime TV, which has an audience made up disproportionately of people who have low incomes and are poorly educated: an audience that, it can be argued, is not only more likely than average to be dependent on welfare benefits and vulnerable to their withdrawal but also more likely to be coerced into entering low‐paid insecure and casual employment.