The end of work has been announced many times. About as many times as the great technological waves that replaced large swathes of workers. And so many times it has been refuted by the fact that the total volume of workers has not decreased but increased. Just consider the uproar over Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Not-So-Distant 1995 End of Work, and how his predictions about the effects of automation were disproved.
What happened was that there was a decrease in employment in areas such as manufacturing and a large increase in employment in what we commonly call “services”. Indeed, in many manufacturing sectors, the gradual introduction of automation and – from a point on – robotic technologies has resulted in a significant reduction in the need for labour. It hasn’t happened across all industries, the garment industry has found it very difficult to build robots that can sew clothes with the care and speed that low-wage workers mainly in developing economies do, but there has been a general trend . After all, the introduction of such technologies combined with the relocation of manufacturing processes outside the developed economies, explains the low participation rates of manufacturing in the total labor force in the countries of the “North” and the retreat of the figure of the industrial worker.
Automation and the Changes it Caused
But as Jason E. Smith observes in his book Smart Machines and Service Work. Automation in an Age of Stagnation [Smart machines and service work. Automation in an Age of Stagnation], (Reaktion Books, 2020), in fact automation has failed to answer the “productivity paradox” and has been coupled with a decline in real investment and economic dynamism. The jobs lost to automation in manufacturing are mostly converted to more precarious service jobs, many of which involve skills that can hardly be taken over by automated systems, in work processes in which there cannot be large cuts to productivity. That is why the recovery after the 2008 crisis did not have the dynamism of corresponding previous periods “coming out of the crisis”.
Nor is it a coincidence that cuts in the measurable productivity of major economies are still not recorded, or that it was mainly changes in the financial sphere rather than technological restructuring that kept profits high for several business sectors worldwide. There are certainly questions about how productivity is measured, or how we define the cuts in productivity brought about (and the extent to which they are brought about) by the technological developments of what we tentatively call the Metaverse, if we consider the enormous valuations that companies operating in this, but so far we have not escaped the limits of a movement that sees jobs being lost in manufacturing, expanding those in transport and the sphere of traffic, and at the same time pushing a large part of the surplus potential into the sphere of services. A move that is mainly combined with a degradation of the job position.
The end of the work is still very late. But the work degradation is here
And that is the essential. The end of the work is still very late. But the work degradation is here. Despite an image that overall prosperity is increasing, the position of many workers is worsening. Opportunities for “upward mobility” are limited, time and effort to meet basic needs increases, goods such as housing become more and more expensive, working conditions themselves become more stressful, pressure for standardization intensifies, and so does permanent undermining forms of collective assertion. Even the very recent hymns to the “essential workers” of the pandemic era seem to have been forgotten.
This modern state of work meets earlier dystopias. As Matthew Ball reminds us in his book The Metaverse. How it will Revolutionize Everything [To Metaverse. How it will revolutionize everything] (Liveright, 2022), the word Metaverse itself comes from a dystopian novel by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash. This book was published in 1992 and describes a world somewhere in the early 21st century where after an economic collapse fragmented and privatized societies emerge and the people’s refuge to be able to withstand the hardships of their real life is the virtual world of the Metaverse , of a virtual reality environment offered to them – somewhat reminiscent of online games with very large numbers of players that will appear much later – and where players’ avatars can live more exciting lives than the real ones.
The persistent claim
The persistence of labor, in spite of the declarations of its imminent end, is also reflected in another dimension: the appearance of resistances and claims in a spectrum that starts from the increased demands during “individual negotiation”, to even partial victories that they have succeeded in unionizing efforts within giants such as Amazon, which have devoted enormous resources to not having unions in their facilities.
