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

296 Pages·2022·1.025 MB·English

by  John Michael Roberts

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