The Return of Work in Critical Theory

Self, Society, Politics

Christophe Dejours, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Emmanuel Renault, Nicholas H. Smith

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547185
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Teoría crítica

From John Maynard Keynes's prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to present-day speculation about automation, we have not stopped forecasting the end of work. Critical theory and political philosophy have turned their attention away from the workplace to focus on other realms of domination and emancipation. But far from coming to an end, work continues to occupy a central place in our lives. This is not only because of the amount of time people spend on the job. Many of our deepest hopes and fears are bound up in our labor—what jobs we perform, how we relate to others, how we might flourish.

The Return of Work in Critical Theory presents a bold new account of the human significance of work and the human costs of contemporary forms of work organization. A collaboration among experts in philosophy, social theory, and clinical psychology, it brings together empirical research with incisive analysis of the political stakes of contemporary work. The Return of Work in Critical Theory begins by looking in detail at the ways in which work today fails to meet our expectations. It then sketches a phenomenological description of work and examines the normative premises that underlie the experience of work. Finally, it puts forward a novel conception of work that can renew critical theory's engagement with work and point toward possibilities for transformation. Inspired by Max Horkheimer's vision of critical theory as empirically informed reflection on the sources of social suffering with emancipatory intent, The Return of Work in Critical Theory is a lucid diagnosis of the malaise and pathologies of contemporary work that proposes powerful remedies.

PART I

Worries About Work

Chapter One

UNEMPLOYMENT AND PRECARIOUS WORK

Our task in this chapter and the next one is to examine the significance of work as it is revealed in common worries that currently surround work. The pervasiveness of these worries, as reflected, for example, in the frequency with which they surface in the media, “state of the nation” discussions, and political campaigns around the world, is itself indicative of the underlying social significance of work. If work didn’t really matter, people wouldn’t worry so much about it (though of course they may worry about it without speaking publicly, without even articulating the worry at all—a point we shall return to later). But the worries about work that permeate modern societies also indicate something else: that all is not right with work. The worries that afflict modern societies around work are suggestive of a malaise around work. Modern societies are unsettled by how things stand with work in a way that reveals both the significance of work for those societies and the conflicts, tensions, and instabilities that abide in them.

Before we proceed with our sketch of the main worries that cluster around work, we should acknowledge the dangers that accompany such an exercise and make explicit the limits of what we aim to achieve. The main point to acknowledge is the variability of the experience of work and the standpoint-dependence of the worries that relate to it. Clearly, the features of work that most concern people change over time. What worried people about work a few decades ago may not be what worries them about it now, and what worries people about work now may not be what worries them in the decades to come. The world of work appears to the observer today still in the shadow of the global financial crisis of 2008, but who knows how it will look in a few years’ time? It is also clear that different countries have their own working cultures, traditions, and institutions that give national specificity to their experience of work and characteristic ways of dealing with its problems. One would expect the experience of work in a country with a minimum wage, extensive social welfare systems, and strong trade unions, for example, to differ significantly from that in a country without them. Third, and most tellingly, the experience of work, and the work-related anxieties to which one is vulnerable, depends on how one is socially situated and, in particular, on the socially constituted group to which one belongs. The worries about work of a poorly qualified school-leaver will differ from those of an expectant professional working mother; the anxious relation to work of a middle-aged man suddenly made redundant will differ from someone contemplating retirement after an uninterrupted working life. The young, the middle-aged, and the old have their own sets of worries about work, as do women and men, white people and people of color, the able-bodied and disabled. Age, gender, race, and ability/disability structurally affect the individual’s relation to work, as of course does “class,” however that is defined. It goes without saying that the relation to work of a subcontracted blue-collar worker, a domestic worker on a temporary migration visa, a self-employed shopkeeper, a chief executive of an investment bank, a tenured university professor, or whatever other class representative one might care to mention will vary enormously. And even when these and other structural differences in the relation to work are accounted for, each individual has his or her own unique experience of work and his or her own singular set of anxieties arising from work.

It is very important when reflecting on the meaning of work not to forget that one’s relation to work is contingent on many factors, including prevailing economic conditions, the national culture and institutions in which one is embedded, the position one finds oneself in on account of one’s age, gender, race, level of ability, and, of course, class as well as one’s own particular dispositions and values. The closer one gets to the concrete individual and his or her relation to work and the anxieties that color it, the more visible these contingencies will be. But there might also be something to be gained from moving back a distance and taking a high-altitude perspective on the subject matter before us. If one were to do that, and with a wide-angled lens take a snapshot, as it were, of the worries about work in our midst, what would show up? What patterns of anxiety do contemporary societies display in relation to work?

In attempting to sketch these patterns, we by no means want to suggest that they are unaffected by the structures just mentioned. On the contrary, one of our central claims will be that social structures—the things that determine, with more or less force, how one is socially positioned—and patterns of individual experience can only be properly understood together. The malaises around work are by no means evenly distributed, and some people may be so fortunate as to hardly suffer from them at all. But those will be few in number. And, in any case, to the extent that the malaises around work are features of contemporary societies as a whole, they present problems that societies have to deal with and in that sense are of universal concern.

So what are the major anxieties that contemporary societies face around work?

FEAR OF UNEMPLOYMENT

No doubt the biggest worry surrounding work, from an individual’s point of view, is the fear of being out of it. Generally speaking, the magnitude of a fear can be said to depend on two things: the harm that would be suffered if the object of the fear came to pass and the likelihood of it happening. While one can be irrationally terrified of something that is actually quite harmless and very unlikely to happen, as a rule fears are proportionate to the harmfulness of the things feared and the probability of their occurrence. Assuming that the fear of unemployment follows this rule—that for most people, unemployment would affect them badly and is a real possibility—we can ask what the harm of being unemployed consists in and the likelihood of falling victim to it.

First a few brief remarks about the latter aspect. Clearly, the chances of finding oneself out of work are indicated by the levels of unemployment. In 2013 the global unemployment rate was estimated to be 6 per cent, meaning roughly that of all the people who are available for paid work, 1 in 16 are failing to find any at all. By current estimates, about 202 million people find themselves in this predicament. They are spread across the world, but not evenly so. One is more likely to be counted among them if one lives in North Africa, the Middle East, and the so-called developed economies—where unemployment rates currently average at 12.2 percent, 10.9 percent, and 8.6 percent respectively—than in South East Asia or Latin America. But if current economic trends and forecasts are anything to go by, the chances of finding oneself in the ranks of the unemployed are on the rise just about wherever one lives.1

Of course one’s vulnerability to unemployment depends on more than one’s geographic location. It is affected by one’s gender, race, class, and, most strikingly, age.2 In 2013 more than one in ten (12.6 percent) of people aged between fifteen and twenty-four across the globe struggled in vain to enter the labor market. The youth of the European Union faced a particularly tough plight, with more than one in five of them (22.6 percent) failing in their search for a job. In Spain and Greece, where the youth unemployment levels in 2012 were a staggering 52.4 and 54.2 percent respectively, young people were more likely to fail than to succeed in finding paid work; a situation that shows no sign of abating. The employment prospects of young people in many other European countries are bleak, if not quite as grim, with unemployment rates of between 20 and 35 percent common. A sizable proportion of the youth of the Middle East and North Africa, where the predicted youth unemployment rates for 2014–2018 are 30 percent and 24 percent respectively, seem destined to have their fear of unemployment realized. And even in countries where youth and general adult unemployment levels are close to or below the global average, one may find oneself in a group that is particularly vulnerable to unemployment, such as the Aboriginal and Torres Islander peoples in Australia, more than one in five of whom were unemployed in 2012–2013.3

Since the statistical category of unemployment does not include people who are out of work but who do not meet the criteria of actively seeking paid employment, the “real” level of unemployment, or the number of people involuntarily without a job, is likely to be much higher than the official unemployment figures suggest, however scrupulously those figures are obtained. Generally speaking, unemployment statistics are geared toward economic macro management, and most economists would agree that they underestimate the threat of joblessness individuals actually face. Furthermore, since the category of unemployment also excludes those who find the merest slither of paid work, the unemployment rate as such tells us nothing about the extent of underemployment, that is, of insufficient paid work. Indeed, official unemployment figures serve to disguise the actual lack of paid work of the underemployed.4 The fear of unemployment is unlikely to be assuaged by a few hours of casual work per week, even if it is enough to raise one out of the rank of the statistically unemployed. Though it is less amenable than unemployment to measurement, the evidence suggests that underemployment, at least in the sense of paid work that is involuntarily temporary (rather than continuing) and part time (rather than full time), or work that falls short of a desired level of employment, is extensive and increasing.5

There can be little doubt that real unemployment is more pervasive than national unemployment rates indicate, worrying enough as those are, especially for the young and members of socially disadvantaged groups. At the same time, it is just as certain that employment remains a key institution of society, one that affects and shapes the lives of the vast majority of people across the globe. We need to remind ourselves of this fact in view of the prevalence of the myth of the end of work mentioned in our introduction. The myth of the end of work tells us that productively working human beings are being replaced at ever increasing speed by intelligent machines, taking away their jobs and leading inexorably to higher and higher levels of unemployment. According to the myth, within the foreseeable future there will be hardly any work worth paying for—and so next to no employment left to do. But as we have already seen, the reasoning behind this scenario is fallacious (it makes faulty inferences about the fate of the whole of the division of labor based on the fate of some of its parts), and it neglects the de facto centrality of the institution of employment to the lives of multitudes of people across the globe.

Of course, the fact that the vast majority of the world’s population is either engaged in or dependent on paid work is no consolation to those who are involuntarily without it. We have just seen that unemployment is at alarmingly high levels, that its likelihood is such as to make it a real concern. But how seriously should one be concerned about becoming a victim? What, exactly, is bad about being unemployed?

We do not need to introspect or to speculate to answer this question: the impact of unemployment on the unemployed themselves, including their families, has been subject to extensive empirical investigation, using a wide range of methods, over a long period of time, in many different places. The research shows that in addition to the material deprivations that follow from the lack of paid work, there are psychological costs that the unemployed must bear. If you find yourself unemployed, you are likely not only to be financially badly off but to be in poor physical and psychological shape too. You are less likely to have interests that engage you, to have a lively sense of purpose, to have hope for the future. You are more likely to be depressed, to feel anxious and distressed, to believe that your life is not worth living. The association between unemployment and poor mental health, between being out of paid work and having the pathologically low self-esteem and interest in life that characterizes depression, has been known since the first studies of the psychological impact of unemployment.6 But what is now also known, or at least commands the assent of the large body of unemployment researchers, is that the unemployed as a group do not just happen to be in poor mental health relative to the employed: they are in that condition because of their unemployment.7 An abundance of research over the past decades provides compelling evidence that unemployment is the cause of the poor psychological and physical state that the unemployed generally find themselves in. Sophisticated meta-analyses of the results of the many studies of the psychological impact of unemployment provide “a clear and unequivocal warning that unemployment is a severe risk for public mental health that must be fought with all possible means.”8

While the serious negative impact of unemployment on body and soul is not in dispute, there is some disagreement about how the effects of unemployment on the individual are to be explained. Put otherwise, while there is agreement that unemployment causes rather than merely correlates with poor health, there is some dispute about where this causal power lies. There are two main lines of thinking about this issue. One, championed by David Fryer, is that the distress endured by the unemployed is rooted fundamentally in their material deprivation, that is, in poverty.9 It is because the unemployed are generally so poor, and do not have adequate material resources at their disposal, that they suffer in the ways that they do. Poverty does not just make it difficult to maintain good physical health by eating well, keeping warm, and so on; it also has an array of damaging psychological consequences. Poverty puts all sorts of constraints on action, it prevents one from doing the things one desires to do and it forces one into doing things one would otherwise not choose for oneself or one’s family. It is such material incapacity for self-directed action, according to this approach, that lies at the root of the psychological distress known to be caused by unemployment. On top of this, the unemployed must generally, on account of their poverty, deal with the psychological burden of stigmatization. If they are in receipt of social welfare, or even suspected of it, they regularly find themselves subject to psychologically damaging hostile social attitudes and may face humiliation by their enforced state of financial dependence and inability to maintain a household.

There is plenty of evidence to show that poverty leads to psychological distress as well as physical hardship and that the unemployed, lacking an income, are particularly prone to it. And there can be little doubt that fear of such material deprivation moves the expressions of despair so frequently uttered in face of losing one’s job. At the front of the minds of most people about to lose their jobs are questions like “how will I feed the kids?,” “how will I pay the rent?,” that is, anxieties about imminent poverty. Unfortunately for many of those who find themselves in this predicament, the dire material deprivations they fearfully anticipate will have unforeseen psychological costs too.

It would be egregious to downplay the role of poverty in the misery of the unemployed. But one can be mindful of the severe material deprivations occasioned by unemployment without identifying what is bad about unemployment with them. This is the second approach to the question of how unemployment causes poor mental health. According to this line of thought, developed most powerfully by Marie Jahoda, there are psychological costs to being out of work that are explained by specific psychological needs that those in work are generally able to satisfy but that are generally unmet among the unemployed.10 There is thus a kind of psychic deprivation to being out of work in addition to both the material deprivation that arises from earning no income and the psychic deprivation that the material deprivation of poverty brings in train. Jahoda uses the pregnant term categories of experience to designate those aspects of psychic life that are generally given some expression among the employed, thus fulfilling a vital human need, but which generally fail to find expression among the unemployed, thus causing psychological distress. According to this approach, it is the absence of these categories of experience in the psychic life of the unemployed that is responsible for the poor mental health known to exist among that group—in addition to the material deprivations they suffer.

Jahoda identifies five categories of this sort. The first has to do with the experience of time. In contrast to the employed, whose waking hours are preshaped by culturally imposed time structures, the unemployed generally find themselves in a kind of formless time, an empty stretch that is a struggle to fill. They are particularly prone to chronic boredom, wasting time, and oversleeping—themselves hardly signs of sound mental health. The second category includes regular shared experiences and contacts wit...