The future of work

This evening I went to an event at the New Economics Foundation featuring a discussion between Ed Miliband (former leader of the Labour Party) and Nick Srnicek, co-author with Alex Williams of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a world without work, which I have read. I found the book and the discussion stimulating in a number of ways.

My policy interests centre on climate change and its economic implications and I am increasingly finding that the biggest challenge in dealing with it is political. Climate change is an intrinsically difficult political problem because the people who will suffer the worst consequences will be future generations and few people seem to think they have a personal interest or a moral imperative to help tackle it. Furthermore there are some rich and powerful people who have - and pursue vigorously - a vested interest in our not tackling it. This has parallels in other policy areas, including the one discussed in the book.

The central argument of the book concerns the spread of automation and its implications. The authors say that the left should embrace automation and aim to use it to allow people to work less or not at all, with a universal basic income making this possible.

This resonates with what I have thought for a long time about the future of work. If and when we get serious about tackling global warming, low-carbon technologies may not be developed and deployed fast enough to allow anything like our present pattern of production and consumption to continue; we may need to consume a lot less and produce a lot less, so reducing the demand for labour. This could be a boon; a greater quality of life arising from shorter working hours could more than compensate for the lower material living standards resulting from reduced production.

However, another future is possible. The universal basic income might not be adopted or it might be set at too low a level. In that case the reduced demand for labour might simply work through into lower wages but with people still working long hours, perhaps doing work which at present would be deemed uneconomic. Such a scenario might be what some of the rich and powerful would like to see. See, for instance, this report of what Jeremy Hunt said at the last Conservative Party conference.

Of course, work has benefits other than the income it generates. Purposeful work can be intrinsically satisfying. But, as someone said in this evening's discussion: "There is inequality between those who enjoy their work and those who don't." If universal basic income shifts the balance of power from employers towards workers, it gives more scope for people to find enjoyable work or to demand shorter hours or higher pay for work that is not enjoyable.

The early chapters of the book highlight the limitation of what the authors call "folk-politics". By this they mean actions, such as demonstrations, occupations etc. that occur in a specific place and which generally do not scale up to anything approaching effective political action. This also chimed with me. I'm all for action at a local level but this seems to be no substitute for the cultivation of a national and international consensus in favour of social and economic developments to promote general well-being for present and future generations. The book is an important contribution towards that consensus.

Nick Srnicek is by background a Marxist philosopher. I have revealed in an earlier post my lack of enthusiasm for Marxism and its preoccupation with moving beyond capitalism to, for want of a better term, non-capitalism, or post-capitalism as some prefer to call it. However, I found in reading the book that I could see beyond the Marxist assumptions and language to some ideas that warrant very serious examination.