Precariat: Interview with Guy Standing

Kevin Doogan has argued that apparent transformations in the labour market are not changes to the fundamentals, merely an ideological and psychological effect of neoliberalism.  What do you think about this?

Basically, anybody who says there haven’t been major changes in the labour market hasn’t been doing their research.  In a series of books, I’ve documented how there’s been the growth of insecurity of different types, in labour markets not just in this country but across the world.  Mainly this reflects a deliberate policy of labour market flexibility which has been adopted as policy since the advent of globalisation in the early 1980s.  And basically this flexibility means to employers: “we want to reduce our labour costs because we’ve got to become more competitive with the emerging market economies.”  Nothing very profound in that, of course – this has been widely accepted for decades since the beginning of liberal labour markets.

If you treble the world’s labour supply, as was done in the 1980s, with all these people available to work for a fraction of the price of people in the rich countries, then obviously that puts downward pressure on wages and working conditions.  So government’s opted for what they euphemistically call “labour market flexibility”, which meant rolling back employment security, giving management more control over job structures; it meant driving wages downwards, and most importantly chipping away at access to enterprise benefits for this growing precariat.

One of the ideas that often comes up is that precariousness has always been the existential condition of the working class under capitalism.  The post-War period is the exception, it is argued, and precariousness has been the rule for the working class throughout history.  How do you respond to that?

Don’t forget, the industrial capitalism that developed in the 19^th century, basically transferred workers from a rural to an urban setting.  We did not have a vast pool of urban workers before that.  That was something that was forged in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  So it was a new phenomenon, anyhow.  And in that period, many of the emerging people who went to the mills or the mines or the factories, still had one leg in the rural areas.  In the working class, there was huge suffering that went with the development of a proletariat, but that was the consequence of a situation that was also unique.  So to say that this is the traditional way of the working class, you’ve only got a hundred years you are comparing it with, whereas before that you’ve got perhaps two thousand years.  So anything could be seen as unique.

Basically, at the beginning of the twentieth century, your emerging proletariat was coming into industrial capitalism.  The managers of capitalism wanted a disciplined, proletarianised workforce that took the accepted regimentation of the clock adopted by supervisors, by direct managers, and they subordinated labour.  Now, that period went on into the 1940s.  And then you have the emergence of the welfare state, trusts, and labour regulations.

I worked for the International Labor Organisation (ILO), which was set up after the First World War essentially to give labourers decent working conditions.  From 1919 onwards, you have all these conventions to give labour security to the proletariat.  And your welfare state was geared to that proletariat.

The trouble was that it was always sexist, it was always labourist – in the sense that it was looking after only that core working class of labourists.  And the deal was, essentially, and the unions accepted it, that in return for giving us labour security we are going to accept subordination in the workplace.  And profits will continue flowing and so on.

That was an aberration, in many ways, because women were always treated as second class citizens – essentially, as a labour reserve – and it was not a model that was going to last if we had an open economic system.  It could only work if there was closed economies for a certain period.  Because labour costs were taken out of international trade.  Once you liberalised, that model couldn’t possibly work.  That model was doomed.  In any case, it’s not a model I regard as progressive.  It was always sexist, it always accepted subordination, and it accepted management’s right to manage.  It was very limited and of its time.

But now we have a completely different ballpark.  What makes it much more exciting, if you are an egalitarian, is that you say: now, you have this huge crisis, where the old labourist model has failed.  It was very progressive for its time, we don’t want to dismiss that.  But now, we’re looking to a new form of progressive politics.  And that’s what I think is very exciting.  Because we now know that the old social democratic  model is not appropriate to the 21^st century.  We know that the neoliberal model will inevitably lead to extreme inequalities and extreme insecurities.  So you’ve got two failures, and here we are discussing what’s the options now.

The story moves forward if we consider this in terms of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.  I’m very pleased, because his daughter has endorsed my books.  Even though I’m very critical of his somewhat teleological conception of the great transformation, the tools that he produced I have found very useful for analysing today.

Do you mean to say the we are moving, in cyclical fashion, towards new rounds of regulation?

No, I don’t think that’s feasible.  I think it’s a fool’s paradise, to try and return to closed economies.  The cat is already out of the bag.  The situation we have now is that we have created this precariat.  The precariat consists of all these people who have insecure labour, insecure lives, lack of any access to all the state benefits and enterprise benefits that were built up in the 20^th century, and there’s no chance that you can go back to full time jobs.  Nor should we try to.  That’s not what we as progressives should be about.  We should be liberating ourselves from labour, rather than subordinating ourselves to return to a state of full-time jobs.  It’s the wrong agenda.  We should be thinking much more of giving workers – and everybody is a worker, remember – a sense of security in which they can develop their labour and their work.

About ten years ago, it is arguable that the prospects look more promising for a precarious workers movement, in terms of things like the World Social Forum and the Euromayday marches.  Some might argue that recently the question of precarious workers has gone off the political agenda rather than onto it.  What would you say to that?

I think the Euromayday movement is growing, not shrinking.  And I think all the demonstrations this year in the squares – in Syntagma, in Madrid, in Milan, and now the occupy movement – I think these are still the activities of what historians call primitive rebels, in the sense that a lot of people know what they are against, but not what we should be doing as an alternative.  But I think that’s changing quite rapidly.  I think a vision is emerging, of all these groups.

It helps, actually, that there’s a vacuum on both sides of the political spectrum in the mainstream, because social democrats know they have no clothes, they have no strategy, they are losing like mad in all the elections…The Right has only gone more right, and now they have austerity and this utilitarian ethos they are putting up, where all the conformist middle class crap is matched by harsh measures against those who are non-conformist down at the bottom.  You can see the logic of that is leading to more and more punitive measures against those at the lower ends of the labour market, criminalising huge numbers of people, and so on.  You’ve got all of that leading to an impasse, because they can’t go on forever in that direction, while social democrats are floundering in the back.

That actually helps, because now the debate is going to be much more progressive.  People on the Left – the thinkers, the activists, the groups – are actually starting to say: “we can’t go back; we don’t want the Right to win; so we have to be proactive.”

Do you think we can go round traditional trade union questions of collective bargaining and so on?  Can we just argue for the abolition of labour through political movements, is that your point?

No, not that.  Labour will always continue.  What we’ve got to realise is that we should treat labour instrumentally.  We need to labour, society needs to labour…

Does society need “wage” labour though?

Yes, as I understand.  The point is, we need to stop thinking we are going to find our happiness in “jobs” – that’s a fool’s paradise, all of these people who talk about getting people into jobs, because jobs make you happy…90 percent of people who take jobs hate them, they don’t take them because they need them, because they need the income, and they get on with them the best they can.  Now, of course, we need better working conditions, and we should continue collective bargaining and the rest of it.  But I think it’s wrong to think, if you are an egalitarian – and I am – that you are going to get rapid diminution of inequality through collective bargaining.  I believe in collective bargaining, don’t get me wrong.  I just don’t think we’ll achieve much if we rely on it, because the logic of global capitalism is that if we push up real wages, jobs will move, and profits will shift somewhere else.  So let’s accept that.

But, you’ve got to remember, coming back to Polanyi, that we are at a crisis point, and we’re going to see a global transformation.  This means that we are now going to see a period of progressive politics where we can pull back the economic system into society, where we can “re-embed”, as Polanyi would put it.  Every forward march in history, has a) been different, and b) has been about the interests of the emerging mass class.  It has never been the same mass class.  The mass class that is approaching now is what I call the precariat.

How do you define the “precariat” against previous definitions of the working class?

The precariat consists of people who are expected to be providers of flexible, adaptable labour, but also to do a lot of “work for labour” outside of the labour relation.  Your old proletariat was exploited “in” the workplace.  Your precariat today is increasingly exploited outside the workplace.  That is a fundamental difference, a huge change.  The proletariat was expected to be disciplined by the clock, by the management, to work eight hours a day or ten hours a day, whatever it was.  But was expected only to be a stable, full-time labour supply.  Whereas, the precariat is expected to be adaptable, insecure, to move around, and to concentrate on constantly updating their labour power.  We are told by all these gurus and consultants that everybody should spend 15 percent of your time every year updating your skills – at your expense, of course.  So, basically, we are meant to be flexible.

You are not expected to have a secure sense of occupation, whereas in the old days you were a mason, you were an engineer, whatever it was.  You got your training in the early part of your adult life, and that would keep you for the rest of your life.  Those who had craft skills kept them throughout their life and gradually accumulated more seniority.  Today, the precariat doesn’t have that privilege.  The problem with the precariat is that it has no trajectory of moving into a proletarian existence.  It isn’t a proto-proletariat, in the Marxian sense.  It’s meant to be flexible, it’s meant to be insecure, it’s mainstream.  It’s not a lumpen category, it’s not an underclass.  The precariat is not an underclass – it is wanted by global capitalism, it is central to its production system.

But also, an important thing when you are thinking about class analysis, is to think about consciousness.  If you talk to, particularly young people, in the precariat, they don’t have the same set of objectives that the old working class would have.  In fact, you find that in many meetings they reject many of the old labourist traditions.

Is the paradigmatic precariat worker in the flexible end of the service sector – call centres, cleaners, bars, supermarkets – or is it, as in some definitions, a pool of underpaid but educated cultural and artistic workers who have been forced down into the lower ranks of labour?

My take on this is that, at the moment, and we reached a similar stage in the emergence of the industrial proletariat, the precariat is internally divided into different varieties.  There are people who are coming in from the old working class communities, and from old working class jobs, who are drifting into a precarious labour situation.  Those people are ex-working class, if you like.  Then there’s the middle group – and they listen to some very ugly voices, some of these people.  They are very atavistic, they may listen to neo-populist and neo-fascist messages, because they are easily led to think that migrants are the cause of their problems or that some other group is the cause of their problems…

A lot of these Occupy people are into odious figures like Ron Paul…

Exactly.  And then you have another group that consists somewhat of migrants, who treat their labour essentially as instrumental and get their life outside of the labour market, and tends to be politically passive.  And then you have a third group of young educated people who have status frustration because they thought they were going to come out of education into a career that would meet their aspirations – and they are not finding it.

So we have downward social mobility?

Yes, downward social mobility – and people treated as para something, para-legal, para-medic…These jobs offer no social mobility.  So you have all these different groups, but they all experience the same thing, this sense of social insecurity.  And they are all treated as if they should be providing flexible labour supply.  But they have differing consciousness.

Traditionally, according to the Marxist category, one of the purposes of the capitalist factory system is to “socialise” labour.  The skills of collective working, teamwork, and so on, were seen as fundamental to the political organisational capacity of the proletariat.  Is your thesis on the precariat more about the so-called “individualisation” and “risk exposure” of labour and lifestyles, as described by sociologists like Beck and Giddens?

I know that argument, but I think it’s both, in the sense that we obviously have had individualisation in the labour market, in the sense of contractualising, decentralising, and so on.  Individualised risk is obviously much greater.  But the challenge before us is to say, going on with my Polanyian framework, is that every great forward march is about the emerging class.  Not only that, but it always involves new forms of collective action and struggle.  You’ll never get a forward march without collective struggle.  So if you have an individualising process in the labour process, which we do have, you’ve got to have a collective re-action to that.  What we have to realise as progressives, as egalitarians, is that this doesn’t mean that the same form of collective action takes place each time.  The old labour unions were very progressive in the early twentieth century, fantastic, and we don’t want to be too critical of that.  But they are not appropriate, in that form, in this stage of struggle.  What we’re going to see, therefore, is the emergence of different forms of association, where we overcome the tendencies that the capitalist economy has, of making everyone compete against everybody else…

But that doesn’t mean that our enemy is always capital directly.  That is something that’s very difficult for the Left to understand.  We need, for example, to see the growth of what I call “collaborative bargaining” alongside collective bargaining.  What does that mean?  It means that the precariat must have a voice in all the agencies of the bargaining system.  And much of the bargaining goes on between occupational groups.  For example, the doctors in the medical professions often get a large part of the rental surplus from the labour process at the expense of the nurses and auxiliaries.  The nurses get benefit at the expense of the auxiliaries.  So, to portray the struggle as merely between labour and capital oversimplifies dramatically, because what happens is that you get a pattern of exploitation and oppression very easily reproduced which serves the purpose of the salariat and capital…

How is this different from the traditional problem of collective bargaining, breaking down the barriers between skilled and unskilled workers, as we saw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the passage from craft to industrial unionism?

This is different because the precariat is not even integrated into the production process.  They are different forms, there needs to be a different strategy.  But it’s similar in conceptualising it, because it’s a double struggle.  The trouble is that labour unions have been forced, understandably, to look after the interests of their members, who are a shrinking part of the workforce.  So your precariat is coming out here, and it has not been incorporated into the process.  And, at the moment, the collective voice of the precariat is still very weak.

So the point is that we need new forms of collective action, and this is going to involve new types of collective organisation.  We need collective struggle.  What we’re seeing, I think, is the gradual emergence of a new type of association, through the NGO developments.  Now, we know that these can easily be turned into a vehicle for the middle class, we don’t want to idealise the NGOs.  But we see a lot of these organisations, and the organisations that do the most to suppress any form of precariat organisation are the labour unions.

I think the struggle of the Left is to become the voice of the precariat.  Only if you start to look at the world from the perspective of the precariat do you start asking the relevant questions.  If you think in the old labourist, in the “old” socialist model, then you think about collective bargaining, you think about labour regulations, you think about profits versus wages…You think of the standard things.  I really believe that we have to change the language and change the images of progressive politics.  I don’t think the old language gets you too far, which doesn’t mean that the old values are wrong.  The old values are what we have today.  Anyone on the Left should have a Renaissance set of values coupled with an egalitarian set of values.  In the sense that we should want people to have a sense of autonomy and freedom.  We lost that debate in the twentieth century.  For some reason, the Left gave the image that it wasn’t interested in freedom, and that was a failure.  But now we have an opportunity to put our values in a different, radical way.  Don’t forget that the Left has always been about reinventing radicalism.  I think we are seeing a birth of it.  We have to be imaginative as progressives.  That means we have to look at our past and say, we can’t use the old language in the same way, but it doesn’t mean that we are abdicating our values.  We’ve got to fight for egalitarianism now.

The last point I want to make is that on the Left we need respect for each other.  Too often we are trying to find faults in ourselves rather than actually trying to build a new progressive politics.  But I’m optimistic.