The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract

Working and Living in Contingency

Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever, Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349577590, 9781137495532
• eBook ISBN: 9781137495549
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection analyzes shifting relationships between gender and labour in post-Fordist times. Contingency creates a sexual contract in which attachments to work, mothering, entrepreneurship and investor subjectivity are the new regulatory ideals for women over a range of working arrangements, and across classed and raced dimensions.

1

Contingent Labour and the Rewriting of the Sexual Contract

Lisa Adkins

Introduction

This book is concerned with labour in post-Fordist capitalism and especially with its reworking and restructuring. This reworking and restructuring is multi-dimensional and multi-faceted and its terms are constantly under revision. Such ceaseless and apparently limitless restructuring – including of the conditions and possibilities of labour – is taking place in a context where capital has been released from the equilibrium-seeking devices and regulatory constraints of Fordism. This is a context where capital seeks not a social contract with labour but a contingent and provisional contract, a contract where nothing is guaranteed for the worker or would-be worker other than the hope or possibility of work but not necessarily a sustaining wage or a life that can be planned into the future.

The techniques of such contingency are legion. They include the contracting and sub-contracting of labour (including the transformation of employees into self-employed workers), the externalisation of wages (where wages are placed in a perpetual state of market competition) and insourcing. The latter involves the break-up of organisations into discrete enterprises, the formation of sub-contracting chains between and across such enterprises, and the transformation of employees into assignment workers. The techniques of contingency also include the rewriting of employment and working contracts (such that employment and social rights are downgraded and where work and wages themselves are by no means guaranteed), and the use of commercial – rather than labour or employment – law in the writing and framing of employment contracts and of broader workplace agreements (Adkins, 2015; Bryan and Rafferty, 2014; Cooper, 2012; Fudge, 2012; Fudge and Strauss, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2012; Rafferty and Yu, 2010). In these conditions it is no surprise that the figures of the independent contractor and the entrepreneur have emerged as the ideal workers of post-Fordism. These are workers who invest in their own human capital, contract out their own labour and take on the risks and costs of such investments and of contracting themselves, as well as the risks and costs of their whole lives and life-times. Moreover, these are workers who paradigmatically fund these activities via indebtedness: they invest in themselves as assets in the hope of future returns.

Notwithstanding the emergence of these ideal figures, the realities of post-Fordist contingency are austere: debt is leveraged by repressed and stagnant wages to fund livelihoods; underemployment and unemployment have increased apace;1 the unemployed train for work that never arrives; would-be workers are commanded to become employable by investing in the self; and contracted workers with unpredictable and unknowable working hours live without time horizons in an ever-expanding extended present. One feature of the contingent contracting of post-Fordism is, then, an erosion of the distinctions between the employed, the waged, the wageless, the underemployed and the unemployed. Critical in this erosion or flattening is an active recalibration of the relations between capital and labour. Peck and Theodore (2012) elaborate, for example, how contingent contracting is shaping the terms of a reworked labour market settlement, ‘which is systematically skewed against the interests of labour – a downscaling and atomization of employment relations achieved in the context of transnationalizing employment relations’ (Peck and Theodore, 2012: 743). But as well as a recalibration of class relations, this book proposes that the contingent contracting of post-Fordism and the reworked labour settlement it is unfolding is also the scene of the roll-out of a post-Fordist sexual contract.

The features of the Fordist sexual contract – including the regulatory ideals of the dependent housewife, the male breadwinner, the family wage and the heteronormative family on which it rested – are well established, as is the significance of these socio-economic formations to the balance-seeking techniques and standardising impulses of Fordism. It is clear, however, that the contingent contracting of post-Fordism has dismantled these ideals. The break-up of collective wage bargaining, the end of life-long employment and the disassembling of employment contracts with rights and social provisions attached to them (and especially provisions for dependants) have, for example, dismantled the family wage and the male breadwinner ideal. Indeed, an adult worker model has replaced this ideal, a model where all workers – regardless of their circumstances – are positioned as duty-bound to work or, if not in employment, to be actively seeking and constantly prepared for the possibility of waged work. The contingent contracting of post-Fordism therefore demands that individuals craft their own employability. In the face of such models and demands, this volume asks how, and in what ways, is the contingent contract implicated in unfolding and setting the co-ordinates of a post-Fordist sexual contract?

In addressing this question, a number of key sites, modes of co-ordination, models and demands emerge as central, many of which stand in contrast to those at issue in the setting of the Fordist sexual contract. These include employability and work-readiness, entrepreneurship, financial accounting and calculation, indebtedness, attachments to work and to working, diverse and dispersed processes of sub-contracting (both formal and informal), employment and working contracts, and the very nature of post-Fordist labour. Through detailed analyses of these latter formations and practices this volume elaborates how a range of ideals operative for women are unfolding in the contingent contracting of post-Fordism, ideals which are emerging against a background of precarity, insecurity, wage repression, under- and unemployment, financialisation and pervasive debt. Amongst these are ideals of intensive mothering, a rearticulated domesticity, familism, entrepreneurship, boundless love, heteronormative femininity and intimacy, excessive attachments to work, indebted citizenship and financial literacy. Critically, while the Fordist sexual contract ideally placed women in the space of the home and separated domesticity and motherhood from the world of paid labour, the post-Fordist sexual contract places the ideals of intensive mothering, domesticity, entrepreneurialism and an investor spirit towards work and working on the same continuous plane.

Yet while this volume traces how these ideals and their co-ordinates are emergent and unfolding in the context of contingent contracting, it also maps how they are illusive and virtually impossible to attain, requiring constant and exhausting labour and especially constant investment in the self. Indeed, this volume maps how the very contingency that yields such ideals both demands such constant investment and is productive of such impossibility. Despite this impossibility, aspirations to such ideals abound, not least because they offer a path to middle-classness. But these ideals are themselves classed and raced. Claims towards intensive mothering, for example, cannot be made by those women workers who care for the children of others, and claims to entrepreneurialism and/or employability can be thwarted when the worker or aspiring worker has the ‘wrong’ kind of human capital. In the context of such impossibility, a further question that this volume explores is how and why many women are so attached to and endure their exhausting and impossible lives. In part, this is of necessity and about ‘getting by’, but also at issue here are powerful affective attachments to work and working, especially affects such as love, which enable fortitude and endurance in the present via a heightened anticipation of and hopes for a better future, even if that future must be endlessly deferred. Such affects – which have a history which is not coterminous with post-Fordism – attach women to precarious, insecure, fatiguing and impossible forms of working and living, indeed to the continuous plane on which the terms of the post-Fordist contract are endlessly played out. This volume therefore underscores how the contingent contracting of post-Fordism is connected to particular forms of suffering – endurance, exhaustion, deferral – which are embedded in the very attachments that many women have to their work and their lives, indeed in attachments to the demand that to become a viable economic subject, workers must invest the whole of their lives in their work.

Work-readiness, employability and excessive attachments

In his contribution to this volume, Dan Irving confronts head-on the demands of capitalism interested in the whole life of the employee. He is concerned, in particular, with how contemporary workplaces demand that all aspects of the lives of employees – including bodies, minds and psychic lives – are put to work in the interests of the creation of economic value. This demand stands in contrast to that of the Fordist workplace, which was paradigmatically interested in the exchange of labour power as commodity, a demand that left in place ‘a clear distinction between one’s work and oneself’. Irving notes how the enrolment of the whole lives of employees in the creation of value has witnessed the introduction of a range of new forms of workplace surveillance and control, including performance reviews and surveillance technologies which scrutinise employee passions, sentiments, feelings and embodied states as well as the self-management of these states. In this context, the prudent employee and would-be employee should continuously invest in their bodily and affective states to ensure future employability. It is therefore not simply the accumulation of skills and capacities which are imperative for employability, but continuous investment in the self, indeed investment in the process of self-actualisation.

Irving is concerned with how the set of demands for employees and potential employees to work on the self as a requirement of employability plays out in regard to under- and unemployed populations. This is so not least because the demand that would-be employees work on the self is also a demand for such populations to ‘step . . . out of their own marginalisation’ and shoulder responsibility for their own economic condition. That is, this demand locates a lack of employability in subjects themselves: as an outcome of a failure of the right kind of investment in the body and soul such that the self can be put to work. Irving tracks, in particular, how the demand that employees and potential employees fashion both their body and soul plays out for under- and unemployed trans* populations, and especially trans women in the process of gender transition. Transition, as Irving makes clear, concerns a set of implicit and explicit negotiations regarding trans women as economic subjects. This is so not least because, for women, post-Fordist work typically demands a work-readiness defined by normative femininity, a demand that in turn means that during transition trans women must demonstrate commitment to expressing a ‘soft, docile, patient and eager femininity that will generate confidence amongst management, put . . . co-workers at ease and produce satisfied customers’. Indeed, Irving suggests, that what is so significant regarding this demand for trans women is that it makes explicit how normative femininity is hardwired to definitions of work-readiness and employability. In this context he notes that transition ‘can be thought of as a promissory note of sorts, an available moment in which the trans woman can fashion herself as a recognisable woman who will eventually generate value for capital’.

Drawing on interviews with trans women living in urban settings in North America concerning their work biographies, Irving records how gender alterity in the workplace is routinely problematised and often punished. He also documents how transitioning for trans women is a perilous process, which may include poor workplace performance evaluations, potential dismissal and spells of unemployment (both voluntary and involuntary). Indeed, he underscores how transitioning hinders the recognition of trans women as viable economic subjects. He builds a case for understanding how the shift from male to female embodiment is a critical moment or event in terms of such recognition. Transition is a time when trans women must labour on their gender performances and cultivate their own employability. In a context where post-Fordist service relations demand the deployment of a desirable femininity, failure to measure up to normative gender expectations, that is, failure to perfect performances of normative femininity,2 therefore amounts to a failure of employability and to a potential life-time of unemployment and/or underemployment. Transition is thus a time when the sexual contract of post-Fordist labour is made explicit. Given that the stakes are so high, many trans women choose to cease employment when they are transitioning, or aim to transition when they are between jobs. Yet Irving is clear that investments made in transitioning and in the perfection of performances of femininity are no guarantee of employability. Indeed, his chapter makes clear that the very embrace of an entrepreneurial stance towards employability that such an investment approach to the self requires – whereby the individual constantly toils to develop, manage and market the whole self as a revenue-generating enterprise – is by no means a guaranteed route to employment since employability is not a once-and-for-all status but one that has to be continuously worked on, negotiated and constantly won. Overall, Irving’s contribution to this volume concerns recognition of how the ‘logics of value production inform the nature of transitioning’ and how in turn the demands placed on transitioning subjects must themselves be located and understood in terms of transformations to labour. His empirical investigations highlight exactly how in order to be viable economic subjects and to become employable, workers must put their whole selves into the service of capitalist value production.

Transformations to labour and especially the rewriting of employability are at the heart of Kori Allan’s contribution to this volume. Allan maps how in the contemporary Canadian context an investor subjectivity is increasingly demanded not only for employment but also unemployment, indeed how access to services for the unemployed – including training and skills programmes – requires the cultivation of an entrepreneurial, investor subjectivity. She elaborates how the cultivation of such a subjectivity is demanded particularly of unemployed and underemployed migrants who are skilled, highly educated and professionally trained. The latter are actively recruited by the Canadian state and characterised as subjects who are full of economic potential. Yet paradoxically, skilled migrant workers experience widespread under- and unemployment, which in turn has been located as a loss for the Canadian economy by government agencies, particularly in regard to potential economic growth. As Allan elaborates, training programmes specifically targeted at attempting to redress this loss have been introduced. Such programmes encourage migrants to become more employable and focus – despite existing high skill levels – on alleged ‘skills deficits’ and ‘lack of Canadian experience’. In so doing, Allan makes clear, such programmes encourage the cultivation of an investor ethos: of investment in human capital as assets which will yield future returns notwithstanding the circumstances of the present. Indeed, she argues that integration programmes make explicit how both unemployment and inclusion into the nation for skilled migrants require the cultivation of such an investor subjectivity.

Allan makes explicit that unemployment and underemployment are by no means a ‘skills deficit’ problem or a ‘migrant’ problem but that their framing as such must be understood as the outcome of the deregulation of the labour market and the restructuring and reform of the welfare state. The latter have worked to replace standard employment with precarious employment and collectively provisioned work training with privatised training. Moreover, they have worked to position and locate human capital deficits as the cause of under- and unemployment and demand that individual workers address any such deficiencies via work-related activities such as training programmes, educational programmes and unpaid or voluntary work activities. Indeed, they demand that workers and potential workers shoulder the costs and risks of these activities themselves and accept responsibility for their own employability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, Allan explores how these demands are embedded in training programmes operating in Toronto which are specifically targeted at under- and unemployed migrants. Working mostly in survival jobs, participants attend these programmes with the hope of escaping such precarious work. Indeed, programme counsellor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Contingent Labour and the Rewriting of the Sexual Contract
• Part I: Work-Readiness, Employability and Excessive Attachments
• Part II: Rewriting the Domestic, New Forms of Work, and Asset-Based Futures
• Part III: Dispossession, Familism, and the Limits of Regulation
• Index