ebook img

Digital, Class, Work: Before and During COVID-19 PDF

296 Pages·2022·1.025 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Digital, Class, Work: Before and During COVID-19

DIGITAL, CLASS, WORK DIGITAL, CLASS, WORK Before and During COVID- 19 John Michael Roberts Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © John Michael Roberts, 2022 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13pt Sabon LT Pro by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 0293 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0295 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0296 2 (epub) The right of John Michael Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi 1 Introduction: Digital, Class and Work Before and During COVID- 19 1 2 Digital Prosumer Labour: Two Schools of Thought 17 3 Alienated Labour and Class Relations 36 4 Neoliberalism, Financialisation and Class Relations Before and During COVID- 19 66 5 Productive Digital Work Before and During COVID- 19 107 6 Unproductive Digital Work Before and During COVID- 19 131 7 Creative Industries and Creative Classes Before and During COVID- 19 152 8 Digital Labour in the Gig Economy Before and During COVID- 19 168 9 Digital Work in the State and Public Sector Before and During COVID- 19 192 10 Conclusions: Towards a Post- Covid- 19 Politics of Class Struggle 216 Bibliography 236 Index 286 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my mother, Jenny, sister, Tina, and Lucy and Isla for all their love and support while I’ve been writing this book. Lucy in particular has seen the start and finish of the writing process, and she has been a rock for me throughout, and I will always be grateful to her for this alone. Many thanks and much love to you. Isla has often wandered into the room where I write to give me excellent reasons why I should not be working but, instead, should be playing lots of games with her. She is always right, which is not bad for someone so young. This book is therefore dedicated to Isla with lots of love. vi Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: DIGITAL, CLASS AND WORK BEFORE AND DURING COVID- 19 INTRODUCTION In late December 2019, reports started to circulate about a new virus in China that was spreading among people at an alarming rate. By the end of January, the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed that the virus, now called COVID- 19, or coronavirus, was a global threat. Over the next few months, COVID- 19 spread throughout the world, infecting more and more people, and causing countless deaths. COVID- 19 was soon categorised as a global pandemic. Different to more recent viruses like SARS and MERS, suggests Mike Davis (2020: 13–14), coronavirus is a unique infection in three main ways. First, COVID-1 9 spreads in flu- like ways so that a person can have the virus without showing any clear signs or symptoms. Secondly, it has the potential to affect and damage heart tissue. Finally, early tests have shown that coronavirus has a hard and protective shell that allows it to survive longer in saliva, other body fluids and enjoy high resistance to outside conditions. But it is also clear now that the pandemic has altered and fundamen- tally changed many social practices in society. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the relationship between digital technology, labour and work. In the United Kingdom, for example, one survey in April 2020 found that 46.6 per cent of people in employment did some work at home. And of those who did work at home, 86 per cent gave coro- navirus as the reason for doing so (ONS 2020a). By June 2020, 49 per cent of the UK population said they had either exclusively worked at home or had worked from home while travelling to work (ONS 2020b). In America, a similar story of homeworking is evident. One study of a nationally representative sample of the US population found that, between 1–5 April 2020 to 2–8 May 2020, of those employed in the pre- COVID- 19 times, nearly half were now working from home, with 1 2 DIGITAL, WORK, CLASS 35.2 per cent switching to working from home since the onset of the pandemic (Brynjolfsson et al. 2020). For some, working at home has many positives. A UK consulting firm found in their survey that 57 per cent of 200 respondents said they have been ‘significantly’ or ‘somewhat’ more productive while working from home (Redfield & Wilton 2020). For others, though, working from home can elicit higher levels of work intensity and work- related stress. One survey in July 2020, and drawing on de- identified, aggre- gated meeting and email meta- data from 3,143,270 users, discovered that those now working from home in the United States, Europe and the Middle East had on average increased their daily working day by 48.5 minutes, or by an extra four hours per week. Meetings had also grown on average by 13 per cent, and there had been a rise in email activity (DeFilippis et al. 2020). There are socio- economic factors at play here too. Research from YouGov shows that noticeable class effects are evident in and around homeworking. Among middle- class respondents, 53 per cent said they were now working from home, while only 23 per cent of working-c lass respondents said the same (Smith 2020). Another UK- based survey, this time of 2,000 office workers, suggests that working at home will become a permanent feature for many who would normally commute five days a week to their office workplace. Once the pandemic has subsided, about 62 per cent of senior office workers and 58 per cent of trainees still plan to split their working week between the office and home (BCO 2020). It is doubtful that this will be a choice afforded to those in working- class occupations. Felstead and Reuschke, for example, similarly discov- ered that in the first two months of lockdown in the United Kingdom, those who reported working at home tended to be from managerial, professional, administrative and secretarial occupations, while ‘workers operating in lower skilled occupations continued to exclusively use the factory or office as their workplace both before and during the lock- down’ (Felstead and Reuschke 2020: 9). Geographically, the authors also note that greater levels of homeworking were recorded in the more prosperous London regions and South East of the United Kingdom than in other regions. Looking at nationwide data for mid-A pril 2020, the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC) likewise revealed that 87 per cent of those in the information and communication sector could work at home during the first lockdown period, while of those in the accommodation and food sector, which have a large number of low paid working-c lass jobs, only 14 per cent could work from home (Collinson 2020). This book is a critical exploration of digital labour and digital work both before and during the pandemic. It touches on some of the issues Introduction 3 briefly explored above, particularly those that relate to social class dynamics. Social class and its socio-e conomic and socio-p olitical effects, such as income and wealth inequalities, poverty levels, the clustering of certain groups based on race and ethnicity into different class occu- pations, and the appearance of different social classes in localities both within a nation and across the world, indicate that class analysis is a vital resource through which to understand crises. This is because social class acts as an important mediator for crises. As the examples above demonstrate, even working at home during the pandemic is mediated through class effects. More broadly, however, a crisis of the magnitude of COVID- 19 brings to the fore the deeply embedded nature of social class and its effects across and within society as a whole. Indeed, one can plausibly argue that solutions to overcome a crisis like COVID- 19 can only realistically materialise if they also include proposals on how to ameliorate, or better, eliminate, class relations and their negative effects. Writing in The Lancet, Richard Horton essentially makes this point when discussing the pandemic. He says that COVID- 19 should not only be analysed by governments and experts as being a singular biological disease, but should also be investigated by the way in which it com- bines with and impacts on non- communicable diseases (NCDs), such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Research shows that there are strong links between NCDs and poverty, insofar as poverty will increase or harm a person’s health outcomes. It is known that COVID-1 9 has differ- ent outcomes on people depending on which NCDs they have, or do not have, at the time of infection. Tackling NCDs, along with their associa- tion with socio- economic inequalities, must, Horton insists, therefore be part of a campaign to contain the spread of COVID- 19. In fact, Horton more strongly argues that it is crucial to underline the social, and, we can add, class, origins of COVID- 19 because, ‘no matter how effective a treatment or protective a vaccine, the pursuit of a purely biomedical solution to COVID-1 9 will fail. Unless governments devise policies and programmes to reverse profound disparities, our societies will never be truly COVID- 19 secure’ (Horton 2020: 874). This book also takes these issues seriously, and indeed traces the ‘social origins’ of the disparities Horton talks about to a number of structurally embedded, and contradictory, class relations. While the book therefore devotes some space and time to explaining and outlining these embedded class relations, it does so to provide a critical frame- work through which to explore the more concrete and specific relation- ship between social class, digital technology, and work both before and during the pandemic. Furthermore, the book places this relationship in a broader analysis of the changing nature of global capitalism and how 4 DIGITAL, WORK, CLASS global capitalism has shaped specific labour processes. Only then, in my view, can we begin to gain a comprehensive account of how the pan- demic has impacted on digital technology, labour and work. As far back as the 1970s, of course, many were heralding the rise of a ‘knowledge economy’ and, later on, a ‘network economy’. During this time, a belief quickly established itself among many influential social theorists, economists, media pundits, managerial theorists, and politi- cians that a ‘new economy’, founded on creativity, information, knowl- edge and global digital networks, was now seen to be the pivotal force for economic success and wealth. In the words of Castells: It took the 1980s for micro-e lectronics- based machinery to fully pene- trate manufacturing, and it was only in the 1990s that networked com- puters widely diffused throughout the information- processing activities at the core of the so- called services sector. By the mid- 1990s the new informational paradigm, associated with the emergence of the network enterprise, was well in place and set for its unfolding. (Castells 2000: 255) This basic idea, constantly spun in different narratives, which suggests we now live in ‘new’ digital times, also opens up a space to chastise, reprimand and ultimately reject claims made about society by critical theorists of the so- called industrial age (see also Boltanski and Chiapello 2003: 110). Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Karl Marx, who is consistently cast aside by many contemporary thinkers as being a thinker for industrial capitalism, but no longer a thinker for our present- day digital and networked capitalism (see Böhm and Land 2012; Castells 2016, 2017; Hardt and Negri 2000). Given his supposed outdated theo- retical framework, one might well therefore ask: how can Marx be used to make meaningful statements about contemporary digital networked capitalism, let alone a global pandemic that has materialised, indeed, has flourished, in a networked, mobile and globally connected world? But is it really the case that Marx’s insights on labour and work are no longer relevant or viable for our digital and pandemic times, or, at a minimum, only particular parts of Marx’s ideas are applicable to our current age and beyond, while the vast majority of his insights can be jettisoned for newer ideas? While we can all agree that working condi- tions have changed substantially, does it necessarily follow that the core of Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’ is also redundant? Naturally, it is plainly absurd to try to argue that Marx’s analysis in his opus, Capital, can simply be grafted on to our current digital age, but it will be part of my argument that Marx’s main ideas about class and exploitation can be both defended and then expanded and developed in order to provide

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.