World Bank, World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work, World Bank, 2018. Free download from https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2019.
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RATING: 80/20
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Free download
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Something is happening when the World Bank opens its annual World Development Report, officially published 12 October after being available in draft for comment and reaction on line for a few months before, with a reference to Capital. I’ll come to that shortly. It is a revolutionary document, for all that not much in it is new: a global capitalist manifesto that distils three decades of thinking about the politics of global competitiveness (Cammack, 2006), and essential reading. The unusual rating reflects this: 80 for significance, 20 because of its uncritical love for global capital.
First, some background. For those three decades, the Bank has been responding to the dramatic expansion of the world market and its establishment on a genuinely global scale by proposing policies through which all governments can turn their populations into willing and productive workers for global capital. In its World Development Report 1990: Poverty, it argued as follows:
The evidence in this Report suggests that rapid and politically sustainable progress on poverty has been achieved by pursuing a strategy that has two equally important elements. The first element is to promote the productive use of the poor's most
abundant asset – labour. It calls for policies that harness market incentives, social and political institutions, infrastructure, and technology to that end. The second is to provide basic social services to the poor. Primary health care, family planning, nutrition, and primary education are especially important (1990: 3).
As I summarised it, in arguing that the Wolfensohn-Stiglitz regime (1997-2000) represented a reinforcement rather than a reversal of ‘neoliberal’ policies, ‘since 1990 the Bank has been systematically engaged in promoting the proletarianisation of the world’s poor (their equipping for, incorporation into and subjection to competitive labour markets) and the creation of an institutional framework within which global capitalist accumulation can be sustained, while simultaneously seeking to legitimate the project through policies of controlled participation and pro-poor propaganda’ (Cammack, 2004: 190).
It is still banging the same drum. WDR 2019 repeats the argument, calling for investment in ‘human capital’ to enhance productivity, and a complementary regime of ‘social protection’ (the new ‘welfare’, restructured along neoliberal lines):
‘Innovation will continue to accelerate, but developing countries will need to take rapid action to ensure they can compete in the economy of the future. They will have to invest in their people with a fierce sense of urgency – especially in health and education, which are the building blocks of human capital – to harness the benefits of technology and to blunt its worst disruptions. … In countries with the lowest human capital investments today, our analysis suggests that the workforce of the future will only be one-third to one-half as productive as it could be if people enjoyed full health and received a high-quality education. Adjusting to the changing nature of work also requires rethinking the social contract. We need new ways to invest in people and to protect them, regardless of their employment status. Yet four out of five people in developing countries have never known what it means to live with social protection. With 2 billion people already working in the informal sector – unprotected by stable wage employment, social safety nets, or the benefits of education – new working patterns are adding to a dilemma that predates the latest innovations. This Report challenges governments to take better care of their citizens and calls for a universal, guaranteed minimum level of social protection. It can be done with the right reforms, such as ending unhelpful subsidies; improving labour market regulations; and, globally, overhauling taxation policies’ (2018: vii-viii).
So if you still think that the World Bank works on behalf of the United States, or the ‘advanced capitalist countries’, or (Western) multi- or transnational capital, or even that it has no idea what it is doing at all, it is time you thought again. The Bank, along with the OECD and other related international organisations, dreams not of a world free of poverty, as it once claimed (it now dreams of a world free of ‘extreme poverty’, which it understands as exclusion or marginalization from the world market and therefore unavailability for productive exploitation by capital), but of a world entirely governed by the ‘economic constitution’ promoted by ordo- and neo-liberals from the 1930s onwards (Bonefeld 2014, Dardot and Laval 2013, Slobodian 2018). In other words, it wishes to see a world of unlimited competitiveness in labour markets and between private capitals on a global scale, where survival for the propertyless can only be secured through enslavement to capital.
So to the opening lines, and Capital. Arguing that the nature of work is changing, the Bank raises the spectre of jobs being lost to robots, and invokes Marx to suggest that this has long been a worry, but should not be:
‘There has never been a time when mankind was not afraid of where its talent for innovation might lead. In the 19th century, Karl Marx worried that “machinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes”’ (2, paraphrasing Capital, [1867] 1976: 562).
This pseudo-narrative – that jobs need not be lost as a consequence of robotisation and other forms of innovation in production if governments equip their populations to succeed in competitive labour markets – is a pure diversion. In the absence of any evidence one way or the other the Bank actually has no more idea if it is true than you or I do (So ‘it is impossible to put a figure on the level of job displacement that will take place overall’, 21). Along with the OECD, though, it has always supported the uninterrupted division of labour and continuous technological revolution driven by competition between capitalists that Marx identified as leading inexorably to the complete subjugation of workers to the rule of capital, and it has always warned countries, when promoting this, that ‘old’ jobs will continually be lost, and the inevitable dislocations will have to be managed politically (World Bank, 2012). Marx, of course, did not so much ‘worry’ about this as document, in the brilliant fifteenth chapter of Capital in which the statement is found, the logic behind the process, and its catastrophic effects. Capitalists introduced machinery in order to reduce the cost of production, increase output, and outdo their competitors. But they also used it as a weapon in the class struggle against workers – Marx cites numerous parliamentary reports that identified the particular utility of technological advances that broke the dependence of manufactures on skilled workers, and quotes Andrew Ure, a leading apologist for the industrial class, on the ‘great doctrine … that when capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility’ (Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 370, in Marx, 1976: 563-4).
So it is at best a half-truth to say that the nature of work is changing: the present wave of scientific and technological innovation is a dramatic reflection of an inherent feature of capitalist production:
‘Modern industry, never views or treats the existing form of the production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production, but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of labour from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions’ (ibid: 617, emphasis mine).
All this the Bank understands perfectly well. It has consistently preached the need for governments to facilitate rather than impede the ‘throwing of masses of capital and labour from one branch of production to another’, counselled them on forms of ‘welfare’ conducive to the creation of mobile and flexible labour markets, and devised political strategies to isolate and neutralize opposition. Working with and alongside it, acolytes such as Nelson (1989) and Haggard and Kaufman (1995) have made careers out of propagating such schemes.
What follows, then, is a critical reading of this important, dissembling, but nevertheless revealing report. The key to understanding it is that the Bank does not deny that the new technology may produce unequal opportunities and divisive outcomes, but argues that this is because not all workers are equally available to be exploited productively by capital. The first chapter, ‘The Changing Nature of Work’, identifies the persistence of informality as posing ‘the greatest challenge for emerging economies’:
‘Informal employment remains at more than 70 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa and 60 percent in South Asia and at more than 50 percent in Latin America. In India, the informal sector has remained at around 90 percent, notwithstanding fast economic growth and technology adoption. Both wages and productivity are significantly lower in the informal sector. Informal workers have neither health insurance nor social protection. Technology may prevent Africa and South Asia from industrializing in a manner that moves workers to the formal sector’ (19).
So while the Bank cannot say how many jobs will be ‘displaced’ or how fast, it does argue that technology ‘is changing the skills being rewarded in the labor market’:
‘The premium is rising for skills that cannot be replaced by robots—general cognitive skills such as critical thinking and socio-behavioral skills such as managing and recognizing emotions that enhance teamwork. Workers with these skills are more adaptable in labor markets. Technology is also disrupting production processes by challenging the traditional boundaries of firms, expanding global value chains, and changing the geography of jobs. Finally, technology is changing how people work, giving rise to the gig economy in which organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements’.
In short, ‘the demand for routine job-specific skills is declining’ (23), while the changing nature of work ‘demands skill sets that improve the adaptability of workers, allowing them to transfer easily from one job to another’ (24). This bears out Marx’s prediction that the ‘possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production’, necessarily replacing ‘the partially developed individual, who is the bearer of one specialized social function’, with ‘the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity [they] take up in turn’ (Marx, 1976: 618). Even more strikingly, perhaps echoing his longer-term perspective that wages globally would tend towards subsistence levels as the world market advanced, the Bank finds (with specific reference to the global ‘gig’ economy) that because recent technological developments are blurring the divide between formal and informal work, ‘there is something of a convergence in the nature of work between advanced and emerging economies’:
‘Labor markets are becoming more fluid in advanced economies, while informality is persisting in emerging economies. Most of the challenges faced by short-term or temporary workers, even in advanced economies, are the same as those faced by workers in the informal sector. Self-employment, informal wage work with no written contracts or protections, and low-productivity jobs more generally are the norm in most of the developing world. These workers operate in a regulatory gray area, with most labor laws unclear on the roles and responsibilities of the employer versus the employee. This group of workers often lacks access to benefits. There are no pensions, no health or unemployment insurance schemes, and none of the protections provided to formal workers’ (27).
‘This type of convergence,’ they add, speaking for themselves, ‘is not what was expected in the 21st century’. Their response is to call for radical change to social protection systems and labour regulations on a global scale, in emerging and advanced countries alike, and they approach this through a focus on ‘the importance of human capital for the workforce of the future’ (29). ‘If robust global connections arrive too slowly in Africa,’ they say, ‘then industrialization may no longer be a plausible path to job creation. This threat strengthens the case for investing promptly in the precursors of globalization: education and transportation infrastructure’ (30). The question then arises: who should make this investment, and how widely? Their answer is crystal clear. Investment in human capital will increase the chances of citizens’ success in global markets, but must not involve placing greater requirements on firms: ‘Globalization raises incomes, but it may not do much to reduce informality if regulatory aspirations increase along with global connections. Indeed, informality could even rise if globalization sufficiently increases regulation’ (31). Governments should not oblige firms to finance pensions and other forms of insurance through payroll taxes as this does little good if these workers represent only a small share of the workforce, and further demands for employer-provided support (such as a minimum wage, employer-provided health care, or protection against dismissal) deter hiring and formalization of labour even further. So social inclusion should be extended to all workers, but governments ‘should move away from regulation-based distribution to direct social welfare support’ (31). This is the neoliberal prescription for making all the propertyless class available for work while perfecting competitive labour markets. The role of the state is to make available to capital all their working age population, healthy, educated, and ready to work. So ‘given the considerable uncertainty about the future of employment, governments should rethink policies that deter job creation, and emphasize policies that protect the vulnerable while still encouraging employment’ (31). So endeth the first chapter, and the lesson is clear: by ‘social inclusion’ for all, the Bank means their obligatory induction into the social relation that is capital.
The means by which this is to be achieved are rolled out in the following six chapters.
Chapter Two, ‘The Changing Nature of Firms’, calls for an easing of barriers for start-ups to encourage competitive markets, and globally coordinated tax regimes. It celebrates recently established large firms that exploit digital platforms, giving examples from Africa, China, India, and the Middle East, and argues generally that: ‘More start-ups mean more competition. If the business conditions are right, it is more likely that some start-ups will grow strongly, creating jobs. Faced with new competition, less productive firms – so long as they are not state-owned or politically connected – exit the market’ (41). Its review of issues around global tax regimes is based on the premise that all firms should ideally face a single uniform global regime.
Chapter Three then turns to the report’s central focus: ‘Building Human Capital’. Its main task is to introduce the Bank’s Human Capital Project and Human Capital Index, a major initiative that seeks to establish comparative measures for investment in health and education across the global economy. It defines human capital as ‘the knowledge, skills and health that people accumulate over their lives, enabling them to realize their potential as productive members of society’ (50). The advocacy of state investment in health and education, equally to girls and boys and in rural as much as urban society, as also reflected in the Millennium Development Goals, is in itself unlikely to be disputed. Issues arise, rather, around the means by which the Bank seeks to change minds and behaviour – the subject of WDR 2015, on which I have written elsewhere (World Bank, 2015; Cammack, 2015), and the primacy given to estimating the future productivity of workers. This chapter details the ‘international metric’, an index ‘designed to highlight how improvements in the current education and health outcomes shape the productivity of the next generation of workers’ (56). Given this objective, ‘the components of the human capital index are aggregated by first transforming them into measures of their respective contributions to worker productivity relative to a benchmark corresponding to a complete education and full health’ (58): the essence of the project is captured in Table 3.1 (p. 59), ‘Measuring the productivity as a future worker of a child born in 2018’. The Bank accepts that this first edition of the index should be approached cautiously, due to the absence or deficiency of key data sources, but if you are interested, Singapore places first, Ireland sixth, the UK fifteenth, the US twenty-fourth, China forty-sixth, India one-hundred-and-fifteenth, and Chad last. The Bank is keen to see data-gathering improved, and areas such as cognitive and socio-behavioural skills (‘such as commitment to work’, 72) included. In the meantime, the chapter concludes,
‘As the nature of work changes, human capital becomes more important. Yet significant gaps in human capital persist across the world. These gaps – manifested in low education and health outcomes – hurt the future productivity of workers and future competitiveness of economies. To address this issue, governments must seek remedies. However, because of the long time needed for human capital investments to yield economic returns, the political incentives for human capital investments are often missing. The human capital project aims to create not just these incentives, but also the policy guidance for more and better investments in human capital’ (64).
With this in mind, Chapter Four turns to ‘Lifelong Learning’: ‘Automation is reshaping work and the skills demanded for work. … a large share of children entering primary school in 2018 will work in occupations that do not yet exist’ (70). So the focus is on meeting the skills that will be sought by future labour markets, and the short version is that Marx’s ‘general law of social production’ reigns supreme. The longer version is that early years learning matters, the quality of all provision is as important as the extent, adaptability matters, and everything must be geared to the (changing) world of work. One example: ‘Adult learning is an important channel for readjusting skills to fit in the future of work, but it would benefit from a serious design rethink. … This section mainly focuses on three types that are particularly relevant to preparing adults for the changing labor markets: programs on adult literacy; skills training for wage employment; and entrepreneurship programs’ (81). Here there is ‘tremendous scope for improving the design of adult learning programs using insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics’ (84): the good news is that the adult brain’s ability to learn is significantly dependent on how much it is used; the bad, that it lessens all the same with age. And adult learning programmes ‘are more successful when they are explicitly linked to employment opportunities’, and when the private sector is involved (85). True, of course, if what you must learn is to be a productive and committed worker for private capital. The chapter concludes:
‘In Togo, teaching informal business owners “personal initiative” – a mindset of self-starting behavior, innovation, and goal-setting – boosted the profits of firms by 30 percent two years after the program. This approach was much more effective than traditional business training. For factory workers in India, acquiring skills such as time management, effective communication, and financial management increased their productivity’ (85).
This leads seamlessly to Chapter Five, ‘Returns to Work’, with its primary focus on types of exclusion from formal labour markets:
‘Learning does not end in school. Students who move into jobs have an opportunity to continue to accumulate human capital, but they face obstacles. For one thing, the emerging economies have a large informal sector. People working in this sector tend to be in low-productivity jobs that do not provide learning or stable sources of income. By creating the conditions for formal sector jobs, governments can offer better learning and income opportunities for the poor. Another obstacle is that women are often excluded from work. And yet another is that the poor in emerging economies are concentrated in rural areas in the agriculture sector. Raising their productivity is crucial to gaining human capital’ (92).
The focus of the chapter, accordingly, is on informality (94-6), working women (96-9), and working in agriculture (99-102), and it is here that its ambition to increase the global pool of workers to the maximum extent emerges most strongly. The Bank has no time for informal firms, which are ‘run by uneducated owners, serve low-income consumers, use little capital, and rarely move to the formal sector’ (94). Creating stable formal private sector jobs for the poor is the key policy goal. Governments should therefore streamline business regulation (on which see the Bank’s Doing Business series, inaugurated in 2002), with the aim of turning informal sector ‘owners’ into private sector workers. Second, all forms of legal and institutional discrimination should end, and positive forms of support should be provided, with the aim of vastly improving access to paid work for women. Third, given that 68 per cent of employment in low-income countries is in agriculture, training should be provided and access to markets improved, exploiting digital technologies where possible, to bring about a shift from staple to non-staple crops, and integration into value chains. In summary:
‘Work is the next venue for human capital accumulation after school. Poorer economies have much to do because they lag behind advanced economies in the returns to work. Governments can raise those returns by increasing formal jobs for the poor, enabling women’s economic participation, and expanding agricultural productivity in rural areas. Formal jobs create more learning opportunities. Empowering women will raise the stock of human capital in the economy. And expanding agricultural productivity in rural areas will provide better work opportunities for the poor. Jobs that generate and build skills will prepare workers for the future’ (102).
The Bank then attempts, in Chapter Six, on ‘Strengthening Social Protection’, to devise a potentially universal framework through which the state, employers and individuals themselves will contribute to a social protection system that will ‘manage labour market challenges’ (106). This is the latest turn in an approach shaped by the concept of the ‘double role of risk management instruments – protecting basic livelihood as well as promoting risk taking’ (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 2000: 1), and the conversion of ‘welfare’ from safety net to springboard (World Bank, 2001), to quote the sub-title of the key social protection policy document that followed (Cammack, 2012: 366-71). In other words, social transfer payments should structure risks and incentive structures in ways that enable and ‘encourage’ or oblige the poor to ‘risk’ entry into competitive labour markets, rather than provide safety nets that reinforced their tendency to be risk-averse. A key component of this approach, in relation to labour regulation, is that formal sector firms should not face payroll costs that act as a disincentive to hiring – meaning in turn that beyond an (ideally expanded) minimum provided by the state, individuals should make greater contributions themselves, as now with pensions, for example. In seeking to turn what was once welfare into a springboard to propel the world’s poor into the productive proletariat, the Bank has always heeded Holzmann and Jorgensen’s advice that ‘experience with public interventions and attempted reforms has shown that the best technical solution may not be politically sustainable. … Reforming public programs of risk management such as pensions, unemployment or sickness benefits, proves very difficult politically. Entrenched interests, acquired rights or a lack of credibility of the proposed alternatives are among the most common obstacles . . . This suggests that, in order to be able to introduce new and better instruments of SRM [social risk management], a better understanding of the political economy of reform is required’ (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 2000: 23-5). This battle is being fought all around us.
Against this background, the primary coordinates of the system of social protection proposed are clear. Underpinning the Bank’s approach is the contention that the ‘Bismarckian social insurance model of earnings-based contributions … premised on steady wage employment, clear definitions of employers and employees, and a fixed point of retirement’ has to be rethought: it ‘is not a good fit for developing countries, where formal and stable employment are (sic) not common’, and ‘is also increasingly unsuitable for the changing nature of work in which traditional employer-employee relationships are no longer the norm’ (113). So first, as far as possible, the very poor should receive sufficient ‘assistance’ to make them available for productive work. Second, while a minimum level of support should be provided by the state, individuals should contribute themselves as far as possible, through insurance, to covering the risks inherent in exposure to globally competitive labour markets. Third, the burden of payroll taxes should be reduced as far as possible, in order to remove inequity across informal and formal sectors, and reduce disincentives to hiring. And fourth, in order to win support for these policies, the Bank must address, at a minimum in its rhetoric, the political context of continuing poverty, increased inequality, and hostility to austerity and the rollback of welfare in the advanced capitalist economies.
The result is a four-tier system that is structured in terms of risks and incentives, but gestures towards universal provision as a springboard to productive work as an ideal end goal. The first level is ‘social assistance’ through conditional cash transfers and targeting: ‘social assistance, especially income support plus interventions, has often raised productivity and resilience among informal workers’ (108). Such thinking is of course already embodied not only in the developing world, in relation to school attendance, for example, but in parallel initiatives in advanced economies, such as the UK’s ‘Troubled Families’ programme (Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017). While the enhanced role proposed would require ‘broader and more permanent coverage than most social assistance programmes currently provide’, it should be expanded only at the same pace as the mobilization of required resources, taking into account the adverse incentive effects of excessive redistribution, and in this context the Bank discusses at length but does not endorse Universal Basic Income schemes (109-12), suggesting that it views these as ideal but not yet feasible. The time is not yet right, it says, for a social minimum provided by a single scheme (112). The example of the UK’s ‘Universal Credit’ may suggest that this is correct. A universal basic income scheme, don’t forget, is a neoliberal concept making the largest possible proportion of the world’s population available to capital without distorting competitive markets.
At a second level, ‘Social assistance should be complemented with insurance that does not fully depend on formal wage employment. An arrangement of this nature would provide basic universal coverage, subsidizing premiums for the poor and topping up social assistance. Mandatory earnings-based contributions would also be necessary’ (106). This would be complemented at a third level by incentivized (‘nudged’) voluntary contributions (‘In Kenya, giving people a golden-colored coin with numbers for each week to keep track of their weekly deposits doubled their savings rate’, 115), and again, the key concept is effective individual management of risk:
‘A reformed system must ensure that low-income workers have access to effective risk management tools. The right combination of instruments, subsidized for the poorest, is required to cover losses from livelihood disruptions, sickness, disability, and untimely death. Instruments that support stable consumption patterns, or are consumption smoothing, are also important. A comprehensive package of protection in pursuit of these goals would contain, first, a guaranteed minimum insurance with subsidized coverage against impoverishing losses. This instrument would complement social assistance by providing coverage against losses that would be too large to cover through transfers. Second, a mandated savings and insurance plan would allow for consumption smoothing. Finally, market-based “nudged” or purely voluntary savings would allow people to contribute more, if desired’ (114).
The intention here is to enable a reduction in payroll tax rates, and in keeping with this, the final level consists of a modified structure of employers’ contributions through the reform of labour market regulations. This should take account of the fact that more than half of the global work force is informal, end the practice of expecting labour regulations to substitute for social protection, and make it easier for firms to ‘adjust the composition of their workforces’ (116), so that they can more readily adopt new technologies and increase productivity. ‘Hiring and firing’ should be made easier, by shifting from severance pay to unemployment benefit funded by individual savings (‘Savings could be drawn on for unemployment or for retraining’, 117) or to state transfers set low enough to avoid undermining the incentive to work, and combined with active reemployment support measures to ‘assist’ the unemployed back into work.
In its final chapter, the report turns to the need for a new social contract (‘a policy package that aims to contribute to a fairer society’) focused on social inclusion, ‘defined as improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of those most disadvantaged in society’ (124). It asks three questions: ‘First, how can society frame a new social contract in the context of high informality and the changing nature of work? Second, if a government is given a mandate to prepare a social contract aimed at improving fairness in society, what would be its basic ingredients? And, third, how can the state finance any proposed reforms?’ (125). There are no surprises in the answers. For a start, the Bank ominously gives Danish ‘flexicurity’, ‘the economic reforms introducing market principles that began in 1978 in China, the Balcerowicz Plan in Poland in 1989, and the Hartz reforms in Germany in 2003’ as examples of ‘substantially new social contracts’, and goes out of its way to warn specifically that it does not have a revived Rooseveltian ‘New Deal’ in mind (125-6). It then highlights ‘equality of opportunity’, which means ‘boosting social protections, including social assistance and insurance, in ways that are compatible with work’ (127), the need for a level playing field for acquiring skills, a focus on early childhood development from conception to the age of five, a social contract on literacy and numeracy to ensure that students master these skills by age 10, and economic opportunities for the ‘productive inclusion’ (13) of young adults into the workforce. Protection from the cradle to the grave has long gone, and is replaced by the production of young adults as willing workers for capital. Social protection is not protection for human society, it turns out, but protection for capital.
References
Bonefeld, Werner (2014), Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, London: Bloomsbury.
Cammack, Paul (2004), ‘What the World Bank Means by Poverty Reduction and Why it Matters’, New Political Economy, 9, 2, 189-211.
Cammack, Paul (2006), ‘The Politics of Global Competitiveness’, Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, No. 1, Institute for Global Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, e-space Open Access Repository.
Cammack, Paul (2012), ‘Risk, Social Protection and the World Market’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42, 3, pp. 359-377.
Cammack, Paul (2014), ‘The World Development Report 2015: Programming the Poor, Working Papers Series: The Multilateral Development Banks and the Global Financial Crisis, No. 7, Southeast Asian Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong.
Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval (2013), The New Way of the World: On Neo-Liberal Society, London: Verso.
Haggard, Stephan and Robert R. Kaufman (1995), The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Holzmann, Robert and Steen Jorgensen (2000) ‘Social Risk Management: A New Conceptual Framework for Social Protection, and Beyond,’ Social Protection Discussion Paper, No. 0006, February, Washington DC: Human Development Network, World Bank.
Marx, Karl [1867] (1976), Capital, Volume 1, Penguin/New Left Review, London.
Nelson, Joan (ed), Fragile Coalitions: the Politics of Economic Adjustment, New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books.
Nunn, Alex and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage (2017), ‘Disciplinary Social Policy and the Failing Promise of the New Middle Classes: The Troubled Families Programme’, Social Policy and Society, 16, 1, 119–129.
Slobodian, Quinn (2018), Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
World Bank (1990), World Development Report 1990: Poverty, Washington DC: World Bank.
World Bank (2001), Social Protection Sector Strategy: From Safety Net to Springboard, Washington DC: World Bank.
World Bank (2012), World Development Report 2013: Jobs, Washington DC: World Bank.
World Bank (2015), World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behavior, Washington DC: World Bank.
First, some background. For those three decades, the Bank has been responding to the dramatic expansion of the world market and its establishment on a genuinely global scale by proposing policies through which all governments can turn their populations into willing and productive workers for global capital. In its World Development Report 1990: Poverty, it argued as follows:
The evidence in this Report suggests that rapid and politically sustainable progress on poverty has been achieved by pursuing a strategy that has two equally important elements. The first element is to promote the productive use of the poor's most
abundant asset – labour. It calls for policies that harness market incentives, social and political institutions, infrastructure, and technology to that end. The second is to provide basic social services to the poor. Primary health care, family planning, nutrition, and primary education are especially important (1990: 3).
As I summarised it, in arguing that the Wolfensohn-Stiglitz regime (1997-2000) represented a reinforcement rather than a reversal of ‘neoliberal’ policies, ‘since 1990 the Bank has been systematically engaged in promoting the proletarianisation of the world’s poor (their equipping for, incorporation into and subjection to competitive labour markets) and the creation of an institutional framework within which global capitalist accumulation can be sustained, while simultaneously seeking to legitimate the project through policies of controlled participation and pro-poor propaganda’ (Cammack, 2004: 190).
It is still banging the same drum. WDR 2019 repeats the argument, calling for investment in ‘human capital’ to enhance productivity, and a complementary regime of ‘social protection’ (the new ‘welfare’, restructured along neoliberal lines):
‘Innovation will continue to accelerate, but developing countries will need to take rapid action to ensure they can compete in the economy of the future. They will have to invest in their people with a fierce sense of urgency – especially in health and education, which are the building blocks of human capital – to harness the benefits of technology and to blunt its worst disruptions. … In countries with the lowest human capital investments today, our analysis suggests that the workforce of the future will only be one-third to one-half as productive as it could be if people enjoyed full health and received a high-quality education. Adjusting to the changing nature of work also requires rethinking the social contract. We need new ways to invest in people and to protect them, regardless of their employment status. Yet four out of five people in developing countries have never known what it means to live with social protection. With 2 billion people already working in the informal sector – unprotected by stable wage employment, social safety nets, or the benefits of education – new working patterns are adding to a dilemma that predates the latest innovations. This Report challenges governments to take better care of their citizens and calls for a universal, guaranteed minimum level of social protection. It can be done with the right reforms, such as ending unhelpful subsidies; improving labour market regulations; and, globally, overhauling taxation policies’ (2018: vii-viii).
So if you still think that the World Bank works on behalf of the United States, or the ‘advanced capitalist countries’, or (Western) multi- or transnational capital, or even that it has no idea what it is doing at all, it is time you thought again. The Bank, along with the OECD and other related international organisations, dreams not of a world free of poverty, as it once claimed (it now dreams of a world free of ‘extreme poverty’, which it understands as exclusion or marginalization from the world market and therefore unavailability for productive exploitation by capital), but of a world entirely governed by the ‘economic constitution’ promoted by ordo- and neo-liberals from the 1930s onwards (Bonefeld 2014, Dardot and Laval 2013, Slobodian 2018). In other words, it wishes to see a world of unlimited competitiveness in labour markets and between private capitals on a global scale, where survival for the propertyless can only be secured through enslavement to capital.
So to the opening lines, and Capital. Arguing that the nature of work is changing, the Bank raises the spectre of jobs being lost to robots, and invokes Marx to suggest that this has long been a worry, but should not be:
‘There has never been a time when mankind was not afraid of where its talent for innovation might lead. In the 19th century, Karl Marx worried that “machinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes”’ (2, paraphrasing Capital, [1867] 1976: 562).
This pseudo-narrative – that jobs need not be lost as a consequence of robotisation and other forms of innovation in production if governments equip their populations to succeed in competitive labour markets – is a pure diversion. In the absence of any evidence one way or the other the Bank actually has no more idea if it is true than you or I do (So ‘it is impossible to put a figure on the level of job displacement that will take place overall’, 21). Along with the OECD, though, it has always supported the uninterrupted division of labour and continuous technological revolution driven by competition between capitalists that Marx identified as leading inexorably to the complete subjugation of workers to the rule of capital, and it has always warned countries, when promoting this, that ‘old’ jobs will continually be lost, and the inevitable dislocations will have to be managed politically (World Bank, 2012). Marx, of course, did not so much ‘worry’ about this as document, in the brilliant fifteenth chapter of Capital in which the statement is found, the logic behind the process, and its catastrophic effects. Capitalists introduced machinery in order to reduce the cost of production, increase output, and outdo their competitors. But they also used it as a weapon in the class struggle against workers – Marx cites numerous parliamentary reports that identified the particular utility of technological advances that broke the dependence of manufactures on skilled workers, and quotes Andrew Ure, a leading apologist for the industrial class, on the ‘great doctrine … that when capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility’ (Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 370, in Marx, 1976: 563-4).
So it is at best a half-truth to say that the nature of work is changing: the present wave of scientific and technological innovation is a dramatic reflection of an inherent feature of capitalist production:
‘Modern industry, never views or treats the existing form of the production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production, but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of labour from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions’ (ibid: 617, emphasis mine).
All this the Bank understands perfectly well. It has consistently preached the need for governments to facilitate rather than impede the ‘throwing of masses of capital and labour from one branch of production to another’, counselled them on forms of ‘welfare’ conducive to the creation of mobile and flexible labour markets, and devised political strategies to isolate and neutralize opposition. Working with and alongside it, acolytes such as Nelson (1989) and Haggard and Kaufman (1995) have made careers out of propagating such schemes.
What follows, then, is a critical reading of this important, dissembling, but nevertheless revealing report. The key to understanding it is that the Bank does not deny that the new technology may produce unequal opportunities and divisive outcomes, but argues that this is because not all workers are equally available to be exploited productively by capital. The first chapter, ‘The Changing Nature of Work’, identifies the persistence of informality as posing ‘the greatest challenge for emerging economies’:
‘Informal employment remains at more than 70 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa and 60 percent in South Asia and at more than 50 percent in Latin America. In India, the informal sector has remained at around 90 percent, notwithstanding fast economic growth and technology adoption. Both wages and productivity are significantly lower in the informal sector. Informal workers have neither health insurance nor social protection. Technology may prevent Africa and South Asia from industrializing in a manner that moves workers to the formal sector’ (19).
So while the Bank cannot say how many jobs will be ‘displaced’ or how fast, it does argue that technology ‘is changing the skills being rewarded in the labor market’:
‘The premium is rising for skills that cannot be replaced by robots—general cognitive skills such as critical thinking and socio-behavioral skills such as managing and recognizing emotions that enhance teamwork. Workers with these skills are more adaptable in labor markets. Technology is also disrupting production processes by challenging the traditional boundaries of firms, expanding global value chains, and changing the geography of jobs. Finally, technology is changing how people work, giving rise to the gig economy in which organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements’.
In short, ‘the demand for routine job-specific skills is declining’ (23), while the changing nature of work ‘demands skill sets that improve the adaptability of workers, allowing them to transfer easily from one job to another’ (24). This bears out Marx’s prediction that the ‘possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production’, necessarily replacing ‘the partially developed individual, who is the bearer of one specialized social function’, with ‘the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity [they] take up in turn’ (Marx, 1976: 618). Even more strikingly, perhaps echoing his longer-term perspective that wages globally would tend towards subsistence levels as the world market advanced, the Bank finds (with specific reference to the global ‘gig’ economy) that because recent technological developments are blurring the divide between formal and informal work, ‘there is something of a convergence in the nature of work between advanced and emerging economies’:
‘Labor markets are becoming more fluid in advanced economies, while informality is persisting in emerging economies. Most of the challenges faced by short-term or temporary workers, even in advanced economies, are the same as those faced by workers in the informal sector. Self-employment, informal wage work with no written contracts or protections, and low-productivity jobs more generally are the norm in most of the developing world. These workers operate in a regulatory gray area, with most labor laws unclear on the roles and responsibilities of the employer versus the employee. This group of workers often lacks access to benefits. There are no pensions, no health or unemployment insurance schemes, and none of the protections provided to formal workers’ (27).
‘This type of convergence,’ they add, speaking for themselves, ‘is not what was expected in the 21st century’. Their response is to call for radical change to social protection systems and labour regulations on a global scale, in emerging and advanced countries alike, and they approach this through a focus on ‘the importance of human capital for the workforce of the future’ (29). ‘If robust global connections arrive too slowly in Africa,’ they say, ‘then industrialization may no longer be a plausible path to job creation. This threat strengthens the case for investing promptly in the precursors of globalization: education and transportation infrastructure’ (30). The question then arises: who should make this investment, and how widely? Their answer is crystal clear. Investment in human capital will increase the chances of citizens’ success in global markets, but must not involve placing greater requirements on firms: ‘Globalization raises incomes, but it may not do much to reduce informality if regulatory aspirations increase along with global connections. Indeed, informality could even rise if globalization sufficiently increases regulation’ (31). Governments should not oblige firms to finance pensions and other forms of insurance through payroll taxes as this does little good if these workers represent only a small share of the workforce, and further demands for employer-provided support (such as a minimum wage, employer-provided health care, or protection against dismissal) deter hiring and formalization of labour even further. So social inclusion should be extended to all workers, but governments ‘should move away from regulation-based distribution to direct social welfare support’ (31). This is the neoliberal prescription for making all the propertyless class available for work while perfecting competitive labour markets. The role of the state is to make available to capital all their working age population, healthy, educated, and ready to work. So ‘given the considerable uncertainty about the future of employment, governments should rethink policies that deter job creation, and emphasize policies that protect the vulnerable while still encouraging employment’ (31). So endeth the first chapter, and the lesson is clear: by ‘social inclusion’ for all, the Bank means their obligatory induction into the social relation that is capital.
The means by which this is to be achieved are rolled out in the following six chapters.
Chapter Two, ‘The Changing Nature of Firms’, calls for an easing of barriers for start-ups to encourage competitive markets, and globally coordinated tax regimes. It celebrates recently established large firms that exploit digital platforms, giving examples from Africa, China, India, and the Middle East, and argues generally that: ‘More start-ups mean more competition. If the business conditions are right, it is more likely that some start-ups will grow strongly, creating jobs. Faced with new competition, less productive firms – so long as they are not state-owned or politically connected – exit the market’ (41). Its review of issues around global tax regimes is based on the premise that all firms should ideally face a single uniform global regime.
Chapter Three then turns to the report’s central focus: ‘Building Human Capital’. Its main task is to introduce the Bank’s Human Capital Project and Human Capital Index, a major initiative that seeks to establish comparative measures for investment in health and education across the global economy. It defines human capital as ‘the knowledge, skills and health that people accumulate over their lives, enabling them to realize their potential as productive members of society’ (50). The advocacy of state investment in health and education, equally to girls and boys and in rural as much as urban society, as also reflected in the Millennium Development Goals, is in itself unlikely to be disputed. Issues arise, rather, around the means by which the Bank seeks to change minds and behaviour – the subject of WDR 2015, on which I have written elsewhere (World Bank, 2015; Cammack, 2015), and the primacy given to estimating the future productivity of workers. This chapter details the ‘international metric’, an index ‘designed to highlight how improvements in the current education and health outcomes shape the productivity of the next generation of workers’ (56). Given this objective, ‘the components of the human capital index are aggregated by first transforming them into measures of their respective contributions to worker productivity relative to a benchmark corresponding to a complete education and full health’ (58): the essence of the project is captured in Table 3.1 (p. 59), ‘Measuring the productivity as a future worker of a child born in 2018’. The Bank accepts that this first edition of the index should be approached cautiously, due to the absence or deficiency of key data sources, but if you are interested, Singapore places first, Ireland sixth, the UK fifteenth, the US twenty-fourth, China forty-sixth, India one-hundred-and-fifteenth, and Chad last. The Bank is keen to see data-gathering improved, and areas such as cognitive and socio-behavioural skills (‘such as commitment to work’, 72) included. In the meantime, the chapter concludes,
‘As the nature of work changes, human capital becomes more important. Yet significant gaps in human capital persist across the world. These gaps – manifested in low education and health outcomes – hurt the future productivity of workers and future competitiveness of economies. To address this issue, governments must seek remedies. However, because of the long time needed for human capital investments to yield economic returns, the political incentives for human capital investments are often missing. The human capital project aims to create not just these incentives, but also the policy guidance for more and better investments in human capital’ (64).
With this in mind, Chapter Four turns to ‘Lifelong Learning’: ‘Automation is reshaping work and the skills demanded for work. … a large share of children entering primary school in 2018 will work in occupations that do not yet exist’ (70). So the focus is on meeting the skills that will be sought by future labour markets, and the short version is that Marx’s ‘general law of social production’ reigns supreme. The longer version is that early years learning matters, the quality of all provision is as important as the extent, adaptability matters, and everything must be geared to the (changing) world of work. One example: ‘Adult learning is an important channel for readjusting skills to fit in the future of work, but it would benefit from a serious design rethink. … This section mainly focuses on three types that are particularly relevant to preparing adults for the changing labor markets: programs on adult literacy; skills training for wage employment; and entrepreneurship programs’ (81). Here there is ‘tremendous scope for improving the design of adult learning programs using insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics’ (84): the good news is that the adult brain’s ability to learn is significantly dependent on how much it is used; the bad, that it lessens all the same with age. And adult learning programmes ‘are more successful when they are explicitly linked to employment opportunities’, and when the private sector is involved (85). True, of course, if what you must learn is to be a productive and committed worker for private capital. The chapter concludes:
‘In Togo, teaching informal business owners “personal initiative” – a mindset of self-starting behavior, innovation, and goal-setting – boosted the profits of firms by 30 percent two years after the program. This approach was much more effective than traditional business training. For factory workers in India, acquiring skills such as time management, effective communication, and financial management increased their productivity’ (85).
This leads seamlessly to Chapter Five, ‘Returns to Work’, with its primary focus on types of exclusion from formal labour markets:
‘Learning does not end in school. Students who move into jobs have an opportunity to continue to accumulate human capital, but they face obstacles. For one thing, the emerging economies have a large informal sector. People working in this sector tend to be in low-productivity jobs that do not provide learning or stable sources of income. By creating the conditions for formal sector jobs, governments can offer better learning and income opportunities for the poor. Another obstacle is that women are often excluded from work. And yet another is that the poor in emerging economies are concentrated in rural areas in the agriculture sector. Raising their productivity is crucial to gaining human capital’ (92).
The focus of the chapter, accordingly, is on informality (94-6), working women (96-9), and working in agriculture (99-102), and it is here that its ambition to increase the global pool of workers to the maximum extent emerges most strongly. The Bank has no time for informal firms, which are ‘run by uneducated owners, serve low-income consumers, use little capital, and rarely move to the formal sector’ (94). Creating stable formal private sector jobs for the poor is the key policy goal. Governments should therefore streamline business regulation (on which see the Bank’s Doing Business series, inaugurated in 2002), with the aim of turning informal sector ‘owners’ into private sector workers. Second, all forms of legal and institutional discrimination should end, and positive forms of support should be provided, with the aim of vastly improving access to paid work for women. Third, given that 68 per cent of employment in low-income countries is in agriculture, training should be provided and access to markets improved, exploiting digital technologies where possible, to bring about a shift from staple to non-staple crops, and integration into value chains. In summary:
‘Work is the next venue for human capital accumulation after school. Poorer economies have much to do because they lag behind advanced economies in the returns to work. Governments can raise those returns by increasing formal jobs for the poor, enabling women’s economic participation, and expanding agricultural productivity in rural areas. Formal jobs create more learning opportunities. Empowering women will raise the stock of human capital in the economy. And expanding agricultural productivity in rural areas will provide better work opportunities for the poor. Jobs that generate and build skills will prepare workers for the future’ (102).
The Bank then attempts, in Chapter Six, on ‘Strengthening Social Protection’, to devise a potentially universal framework through which the state, employers and individuals themselves will contribute to a social protection system that will ‘manage labour market challenges’ (106). This is the latest turn in an approach shaped by the concept of the ‘double role of risk management instruments – protecting basic livelihood as well as promoting risk taking’ (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 2000: 1), and the conversion of ‘welfare’ from safety net to springboard (World Bank, 2001), to quote the sub-title of the key social protection policy document that followed (Cammack, 2012: 366-71). In other words, social transfer payments should structure risks and incentive structures in ways that enable and ‘encourage’ or oblige the poor to ‘risk’ entry into competitive labour markets, rather than provide safety nets that reinforced their tendency to be risk-averse. A key component of this approach, in relation to labour regulation, is that formal sector firms should not face payroll costs that act as a disincentive to hiring – meaning in turn that beyond an (ideally expanded) minimum provided by the state, individuals should make greater contributions themselves, as now with pensions, for example. In seeking to turn what was once welfare into a springboard to propel the world’s poor into the productive proletariat, the Bank has always heeded Holzmann and Jorgensen’s advice that ‘experience with public interventions and attempted reforms has shown that the best technical solution may not be politically sustainable. … Reforming public programs of risk management such as pensions, unemployment or sickness benefits, proves very difficult politically. Entrenched interests, acquired rights or a lack of credibility of the proposed alternatives are among the most common obstacles . . . This suggests that, in order to be able to introduce new and better instruments of SRM [social risk management], a better understanding of the political economy of reform is required’ (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 2000: 23-5). This battle is being fought all around us.
Against this background, the primary coordinates of the system of social protection proposed are clear. Underpinning the Bank’s approach is the contention that the ‘Bismarckian social insurance model of earnings-based contributions … premised on steady wage employment, clear definitions of employers and employees, and a fixed point of retirement’ has to be rethought: it ‘is not a good fit for developing countries, where formal and stable employment are (sic) not common’, and ‘is also increasingly unsuitable for the changing nature of work in which traditional employer-employee relationships are no longer the norm’ (113). So first, as far as possible, the very poor should receive sufficient ‘assistance’ to make them available for productive work. Second, while a minimum level of support should be provided by the state, individuals should contribute themselves as far as possible, through insurance, to covering the risks inherent in exposure to globally competitive labour markets. Third, the burden of payroll taxes should be reduced as far as possible, in order to remove inequity across informal and formal sectors, and reduce disincentives to hiring. And fourth, in order to win support for these policies, the Bank must address, at a minimum in its rhetoric, the political context of continuing poverty, increased inequality, and hostility to austerity and the rollback of welfare in the advanced capitalist economies.
The result is a four-tier system that is structured in terms of risks and incentives, but gestures towards universal provision as a springboard to productive work as an ideal end goal. The first level is ‘social assistance’ through conditional cash transfers and targeting: ‘social assistance, especially income support plus interventions, has often raised productivity and resilience among informal workers’ (108). Such thinking is of course already embodied not only in the developing world, in relation to school attendance, for example, but in parallel initiatives in advanced economies, such as the UK’s ‘Troubled Families’ programme (Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017). While the enhanced role proposed would require ‘broader and more permanent coverage than most social assistance programmes currently provide’, it should be expanded only at the same pace as the mobilization of required resources, taking into account the adverse incentive effects of excessive redistribution, and in this context the Bank discusses at length but does not endorse Universal Basic Income schemes (109-12), suggesting that it views these as ideal but not yet feasible. The time is not yet right, it says, for a social minimum provided by a single scheme (112). The example of the UK’s ‘Universal Credit’ may suggest that this is correct. A universal basic income scheme, don’t forget, is a neoliberal concept making the largest possible proportion of the world’s population available to capital without distorting competitive markets.
At a second level, ‘Social assistance should be complemented with insurance that does not fully depend on formal wage employment. An arrangement of this nature would provide basic universal coverage, subsidizing premiums for the poor and topping up social assistance. Mandatory earnings-based contributions would also be necessary’ (106). This would be complemented at a third level by incentivized (‘nudged’) voluntary contributions (‘In Kenya, giving people a golden-colored coin with numbers for each week to keep track of their weekly deposits doubled their savings rate’, 115), and again, the key concept is effective individual management of risk:
‘A reformed system must ensure that low-income workers have access to effective risk management tools. The right combination of instruments, subsidized for the poorest, is required to cover losses from livelihood disruptions, sickness, disability, and untimely death. Instruments that support stable consumption patterns, or are consumption smoothing, are also important. A comprehensive package of protection in pursuit of these goals would contain, first, a guaranteed minimum insurance with subsidized coverage against impoverishing losses. This instrument would complement social assistance by providing coverage against losses that would be too large to cover through transfers. Second, a mandated savings and insurance plan would allow for consumption smoothing. Finally, market-based “nudged” or purely voluntary savings would allow people to contribute more, if desired’ (114).
The intention here is to enable a reduction in payroll tax rates, and in keeping with this, the final level consists of a modified structure of employers’ contributions through the reform of labour market regulations. This should take account of the fact that more than half of the global work force is informal, end the practice of expecting labour regulations to substitute for social protection, and make it easier for firms to ‘adjust the composition of their workforces’ (116), so that they can more readily adopt new technologies and increase productivity. ‘Hiring and firing’ should be made easier, by shifting from severance pay to unemployment benefit funded by individual savings (‘Savings could be drawn on for unemployment or for retraining’, 117) or to state transfers set low enough to avoid undermining the incentive to work, and combined with active reemployment support measures to ‘assist’ the unemployed back into work.
In its final chapter, the report turns to the need for a new social contract (‘a policy package that aims to contribute to a fairer society’) focused on social inclusion, ‘defined as improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of those most disadvantaged in society’ (124). It asks three questions: ‘First, how can society frame a new social contract in the context of high informality and the changing nature of work? Second, if a government is given a mandate to prepare a social contract aimed at improving fairness in society, what would be its basic ingredients? And, third, how can the state finance any proposed reforms?’ (125). There are no surprises in the answers. For a start, the Bank ominously gives Danish ‘flexicurity’, ‘the economic reforms introducing market principles that began in 1978 in China, the Balcerowicz Plan in Poland in 1989, and the Hartz reforms in Germany in 2003’ as examples of ‘substantially new social contracts’, and goes out of its way to warn specifically that it does not have a revived Rooseveltian ‘New Deal’ in mind (125-6). It then highlights ‘equality of opportunity’, which means ‘boosting social protections, including social assistance and insurance, in ways that are compatible with work’ (127), the need for a level playing field for acquiring skills, a focus on early childhood development from conception to the age of five, a social contract on literacy and numeracy to ensure that students master these skills by age 10, and economic opportunities for the ‘productive inclusion’ (13) of young adults into the workforce. Protection from the cradle to the grave has long gone, and is replaced by the production of young adults as willing workers for capital. Social protection is not protection for human society, it turns out, but protection for capital.
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