Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

249 Pages·2017·2.281 MB·English

by  Liam Connell (auth.)

PRECARIOUS LABOUR
AND THE
CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
Liam Connell
Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel
Liam Connell
Precarious Labour and
the Contemporary
Novel
Liam Connell
University of Brighton
Brighton, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-63927-7 ISBN 978-3-319-63928-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63928-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948276
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To Nicky, Malachy and Jonah
A
cknowledgements
This book has taken longer to write than I anticipated and that is prob-
ably merited by the result. Inevitably my thinking has been shaped by
many conversations not all of which can be properly remembered or
acknowledged. However a number of people deserve proper mention.
I’m grateful for the thoughts of friends including Mandy Bloomfield,
Peter Boxall, Shelley Cobb, Lidia Curti, Tutul Dasmahapatra, Neil
Ewen, Heiko Henkel, Stephanie Jones, Tina Lupton, Paul Sweetman
and Carole Sweeney. Thanks to colleagues at the University of
Winchester, most especially Jude Davies, Mick Jardine and Carol
Smith; colleagues at the University of Brighton, most especially Mark
Erickson, Patricia McManus, Deborah Phillips, Joel Roberts and John
Wrighton; and others including Arne De Boever, Paul Crosthwaite, Jodi
Dean, Diletta Di Cristofaro, Alison Gibbons, David Grausam, Ragini
T. Srinivasan, Andrew Tate and Imogen Tyler for suggestions along the
way. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewer from Palgrave.
Nothing that I write would be possible without the contribution of
Nicky Marsh whose patience in listening to my thoughts on these topics
and generosity in sharing her own work is only the beginning of the debt
that I owe her.
vii
c
ontents
1 Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel 1
Part I Work in the Age of Neoliberalism
2 Reading Coupland Backwards: Time, Generationality
and Work in Generation X, Microserfs and JPod 15
3 Precarity and Subjective Life: Matt Thorne’s Eight Minutes
Idle and David Szalay’s London and the South East 57
Part II The Work of Nations
4 Dying to Work: American Nationalism and the End
of Productive Labour 93
5 Working Women and the Welfare State: Jenny Turner’s
The Brainstorm 145
6 Indian Call Centres and the National Idea 189
ix
x CONTENTS
7 Conclusion 233
Index 241
CHAPTER 1
Precarious Labour
and the Contemporary Novel
The focus of this book is on the condition that I call precarious labour.
This term is intended not only to describe the conditions of work in
the contemporary economy but also to signal something about the way
that workers imagine their social relations in an era of endemic contin-
gency and risk. In choosing to explore how this condition is made visible
in contemporary fiction, I follow a growing trend in literary criticism,
which has seen an increasing return to materialism in recent years. In
the last decade, critics have demonstrated a renewed interest in litera-
ture as “an intervention” in the historical, political, and linguistic con-
junctures of the present (Lecercle 2010). Yet, if there is a newfound
wealth of economic and political literary-criticism, the question of work
has been relatively under-examined. There are recent studies on the his-
torical character of labour, especially in books on work and modernism
(Godden 1997; Shiach 2003; Wild 2006) as well as books that seek to
place contemporary labour-patterns within a historical context (Hapke
2001; Thompson 2003). Recently Michael Ross has examined the pres-
entation of advertising work in literature (Ross 2015) but his focus is
often on the craft of advertising or, in common with other criticism of
this kind, on the corporation (Clare 2014) rather than on the presen-
tation of work or workers. This rather small pool of critical writing is
perhaps surprising given the prominence that work has in many peo-
ple’s lives and in the political cultures of contemporary society. Over the
course of writing this book questions of work have frequently dominated
the news cycle in the UK. Since 2007 unemployment rose to levels not
© The Author(s) 2017 1
L. Connell, Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63928-4_1
2 L. CONNELL
seen since the recession of the 1980’s, and real wages have fallen even
as the labour market has recovered (OECD 2016; Office for National
Statistics 2016). The disparity between wage and price inflation has led
to campaigns for a “living wage” and to talk of a “cost-of-living cri-
sis”. Concerns about casualization, about the proliferation of unpaid
internships and of “zero-hours contracts” have all made headlines.
Paradoxically, a rise in part-time work has fuelled concerns about under-
employment while problems of childcare-provision and extended work-
ing hours has placed the “work-life balance” onto the political agenda.
Beneath all of this, the political vocabulary of “hard-working families”
has repeatedly served as a moral index, used to justify cuts to govern-
ment expenditure on services and welfare provisions.
Irrespective of any topical features, the immediate political context
for this book closely resembles the language about work that charac-
terises the decades of what is best described as an era of flexible labour.
Underpinning the present study, and justifying an attention to contempo-
rary literature, is the claim that the conditions of work have changed since
the late 1970s with significant implications for how work is understood.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the taste for state intervention, which
was the product of post-war Keynesianism, gave way to a new political
orthodoxy that saw government as the facilitator of private-sector actors,
who were best placed to improve productivity. When it came to work, the
role of government was no longer to stimulate the economy and man-
age monetary policy to achieve high employment. Instead governments
were to improve the efficiency of private employers by deregulating the
labour market so that companies could better manage labour costs by
more economically mapping employment onto demand. At the same time
substantial changes to the kinds of jobs that were available were begin-
ning to occur. The most obvious of these has been the clear growth in
the service-sector work since the late 1970’s. The story of the major
manufacturing economies of the Global North has been one of a sub-
stantial loss of manufacturing jobs. This was led by the twin processes of
automation and of globalization, with many jobs moved overseas to low-
income economies in the Global South. While this had immediate conse-
quences for unemployment, it also saw the service sector grow to exploit
the reserves of labour that these trends had produced. However, this
trend is not limited to the traditional centres of manufacturing power; it
is repeated in the new economic centres of the Global South. The World
Bank estimates a 10% increase in the proportion of GDP produced by