Why Working Life Has Changed

In an age of austerity, high unemployment, and street protests that focus on the harsh economic realities of the present day, there’s a sense that the world of secure employment and jobs with good benefits are a thing of the past.

Marco Werman talks to Andrew Ross, professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, about how, why and where the world of work has been changing.

Ross is the author of “Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times”.

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Marco Werman: Whether it’s in Spain or here, the job market isn’t what it used to be. Global forces are reshaping what it takes to land and keep a good job. Andrew Ross is professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He’s also the author “Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.”

Andrew Ross: The upshot is really that no one, not even in the traditional professions can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of their lifetime. The temp has increasingly become the preferred form of employment in really all of the growth sectors of the economy, and what economists call “non standard” work has been on a force march from you know, low wage sectors, which is where temping first was initiated; it’s been on a force march up now into high wage sectors and into the professions.

Werman: So what’s driving these changes?

Ross: Well, privatization is certainly a big factor. Trade liberalization, another one. It’s pretty obvious that for the last two or three decades the result has been a redistribution of wealth upwards and an erosion of the middle class. You know, the middle class is largely built on the basis of these fairly secure livelihoods — high wage, union wage employment in the post war period — and that highly packaged economic arrangement seems to have been eroded quite drastically in the course of the last three decades. The definition of a job is slowly reverting to its original etymological derivation, I often say, which was a lump of work that exists only for the duration of its fulfillment. The historical norm has been self employment, intermittent work and isolation from any type of social insurance of the sort that we were familiar with in the post war period.

Werman: Well, we’re certainly experiencing this in many ways in the United States. Where else in the world are these kinds of changes quite apparent?

Ross: This is a good question because probably the best example is in China, where the transition from the so-called iron rice bowl, which was employment and welfare from cradle to grave, the transition from the iron rice bowl to the new flexible capitalist landscape of work in China has been more rapid than anywhere else. Within a generation workers went from a very safe and secure world of employment to an environment where everyone has to look out for themselves.

Werman: And contrast that with what’s happening with developing countries in Europe right now, you know, where we’ve seen some incredible rates of unemployment. What are the forces that are coming to bear on the situation in Europe?

Ross: Well, the longterm picture has certainly to do with the internationalization of production and manufacturing to begin with, and now increasingly services. The biggest single factor really were the entry of China and India into the world trade organization, because this basically doubled the labor force available to employers and speculators, and nothing like this has really happened in history. Overnight the global labor force has doubled, and so employers simply don’t want to recruit workers from the high wage countries and that’s a huge challenge.

Werman: I mean internationalization of production can often be summed up just by the word outsourcing. And outsourcing to places like India and China, I mean it’s impacted work patterns obviously here in the US and Europe. What about the impact it’s having in the places where the work actually goes?

Ross: That’s a good question because you know, I think the American public, the European public tend not to know that in a place like China, China has lost many more millions of jobs in the last decade and a half than the US, whether from the closure of state owed enterprises or the restructuring of them, or from the pressure of WTO requirements on farmers. And Chinese job loss is just as much the result of the regulation as US job loss. In addition, in China there’s a floating, a so-called floating population of between 150 and 2 million peasants who pose the same kind of threat to Chinese who are trying to hold on to their jobs as the threat of corporate off-shoring does to US bread winners. So there’s a kind of umbilical link that connects the prospects of employees in these countries at either ends of the earth and at either ends of the offshore outsourcing chain.

Werman: Andrew Ross, professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, thank you very much.

Ross: You’re welcome, my pleasure.

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