Jon Cruddas - The Dignity of Labour

Whilst the march of the machines has renewed interest in work, so too have more pragmatic political concerns about insecure jobs and our enduring economic weaknesses. Famously, outside 10 Downing Street on 13 July 2016, on becoming prime minister Theresa May talked of ‘fighting against the burning injustices … If you’re from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realize. You have a job, but you don’t always have job security … The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours.’

This was widely recognized as a significant shift, at least rhetorically, towards ‘blue-collar’ conservatism with a focus on ‘ordinary working people’ reflecting the influence of ‘Red Tory’ or ‘post-liberal’ elements at the top of the party. It suggested a reorientation away from labour market deregulation of the Thatcher era and a renewed interest in work quality. In October 2016, May commissioned Matthew Taylor to report on how employment practices could change to keep pace with modern business models. 23

The 2017 Conservative Election Manifesto announced: ‘we do not believe in untrammelled free markets’ and ‘we reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality’ and suggested an overhaul of labour market policy and embrace of industrial democracy by putting workers on the boards. On 11 July 2017, Taylor’s review was unveiled and drew a scathing response from across the trade union movement. Since publication, there has been little evidence of actual policy follow-through.

This shift wasn’t really about policy. In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the Conservative Party were seeking to focus on workplace issues given the shifting class alignments amongst the electorate. Driven by the European question, the party was on walkabout in search of a policy agenda to consolidate working-class support, a move that foreshadowed their 2019 election victory in ‘Red Wall’ seats and appeals to ‘Workington Man’.

Renewed political interest for workplace issues also aligned with expert policy concerns with the UK productivity ‘puzzle’ – the appalling domestic productivity performance since the 2008 financial crash. What is striking is the contrast between the noise of rupture – the language of epochal technological change and end of work – alongside record jobs levels and ‘puzzling’ productivity numbers. Sometime soon we might expect the structural unemployment to show up or the productive lift derived by automation to arrive.

Without doubt UK productivity continues to underperform in terms of long-term domestic trends and compared to other major economies. It also underperforms compared to what followed the two previous major recessions of 1979–80 and 1990–1. There are no agreed answers as to why. Is it the product of an enduring economic shock, or changing patterns of labour, or simply a lack of demand? 24

The Bank of England cannot account for this ‘puzzle’. The then governor comically stated in 2015, ‘It has been worse than we had expected and worse than we had expected for the last several years. We have been successively disappointed’.

Then our lives were threatened, and work stopped. In the US, 20 million jobs were lost in April 2020 alone, 8.6 million in leisure and hospitality. In the UK for the same month the ONS calculated an unemployment rise of 856,000 to 2.1 million, the biggest monthly increase since modern records began. On 15 April, the Universal Credit director general briefed that 1.4 million people had signed up for Universal Credit in the preceding four weeks. That same month the number of people on PAYE fell by 457,000. The immediate economic outlook would have been much bleaker if not for the government’s furlough scheme, the biggest labour market intervention in history. Many companies did not lay off staff straight away because for six months the Treasury picked up the tab for 80 per cent of monthly pay up to a limit of £2,500. Yet this package suspended rather than resolved the employment effects of the virus. Without the wage subsidies covering 8 million jobs, the UK would have faced an unemployment rate approaching 20 per cent in early 2020. Yet the country continues to face an epic work challenge.

Some sectors were disproportionately affected immediately by the pandemic; the accommodation and food services sector, the arts, entertainment and recreation sectors had the largest number of firms decreasing staff working hours. Around 15 per cent of employees were working in a sector that was immediately, largely or entirely shut down during the initial period of lockdown. From the outset the virus proved to be unequal. Some workers were disproportionally impacted. Low-paid workers were more likely to work in shut-down sectors and less likely to be able to work from home, as were the young. One-third of employees in the bottom 10 per cent of earners worked in shut-down sectors, and less than 10 per cent of the bottom half of earners could work from home.

The pandemic and the prospect of death forced us to reassess what we value in our own lives and the lives of others. We applauded health and care workers. We re-evaluated the work of hairdressers, delivery drivers and a range of public servants, social workers, supermarket operatives and an array of tradespeople. We were forced to rethink how we value and reward the contribution of millions of front-line workers. Will the economy that emerges after the pandemic honour and respect the dignity of this work?

The following pages weave together these theoretical and practical topics by rethinking work. We will rehabilitate certain intellectual and political traditions in the understanding of human labour and the regulation of employment and in so doing criticize a lot of fashionable thinking. The book is divided into two parts. The first discusses the economics of labour and demarcates post-war politics in terms of competing narratives regarding employment regulation; the second looks at labour from an ethical orientation referenced through competing theories of justice.

We begin in chapter 2with the post-war industrial relations diagnosis of the so-called ‘British disease’, the rise of the corporatist state and pluralist attempts to embed the organized working class into a regulated polity and economy. Such an approach echoed earlier concerns with the division of labour and the distribution of just rewards contained within nineteenth-century Classical Political Economy.

In chapter 3we look at the emergence of the British New Right and the Thatcherite supply-side revolution, which its advocates asserted had achieved by the early 1990s a UK productivity ‘miracle’. We study the way the right sought to politically operationalize Neo-Classical Economics. We discuss how assumptions of predetermined human labour and the rational personal trade-off between work and leisure succeeded in decoupling work and politics.

Chapter 4looks at labour regulation under New Labour, the effects of the 2008 economic crash and our bewildering modern productivity ‘puzzle’. We inspect how competing approaches to labour regulation sought influence after 1997 and how Blair eventually succumbed to a form of technological determinism that continues to blight the modern left.

We complete Part Iby engaging with modern-day arguments regarding postcapitalism and utopian assumptions of a workless future. This in-vogue literature inherits a deterministic reading of value theory and misunderstands Marx’s approach to human labour under capitalism with damaging political consequences for the left today, at times cruelly exposed in ‘Corbynism’.