OECD, OECD Employment Outlook 2019: The Future of Work, Paris, 2019.
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RATING: 80/20
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Free to read online
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The World Bank opened its 2019 World Development Report, The Changing Nature of Work, by invoking Capital. Not to be outdone, the OECD opens The Future of Work by summoning up the Communist Manifesto:
‘The world is changing at lightening speed. Digitalisation, globalisation and demographic change are having a profound impact on our lives, on our cultures, on our societies. These and other megatrends are constantly (and rapidly) transforming the way we interact with our friends and families; how and where businesses operate; what goods and services we consume; what dreams we dream. Our education and health, the distribution of income and wealth, the jobs we have and how we work are all particularly sensitive to these changes. It is a transformational era. Disruption is the new normal’ (3).
Yet again, we are on ground mapped by classical Marxism. Unlike capitalist enterprises, which tend not to look far beyond their own immediate interests, or governments, which vary in their priorities, these international organisations take a broad and long view of capitalism and its reproduction as a global system. Both are fully committed to its development on a world scale, and their policy advice is geared towards producing the individual as an available, willing and productive worker for capital. It is in line with this vocation that the OECD has devoted this volume to the future of work. And while the World Bank is focused on proletarianising global labour reserves in the ‘informal’ economy, the OECD is concerned with enhancing the capacity of capital to extract surplus value from precarious and 'under-employed' workers in the advanced economies that make up its membership. It does so here, in fact, by developing an analysis of ‘joblessness’ first pioneered by the World Bank itself with and on behalf of the European Union (World Bank, 2014).
Both organizations take the changing nature of work – and the decreasing salience of ‘permanent employees working for a single employer’ (19) – as points of reference for employment regulations. For both, the relatively new circumstances of ‘fragmented’ production, global production/value chains, and global competitiveness require a new approach to skills and a shift to a universal regime of ‘social protection’, involving not only the dismantling of the ‘social democratic’ welfare systems developed in Western Europe in particular but also the development of improved regimes of protection in emerging economies. So I focus on the connections they make between new patterns of work, skills, and social protection, briefly recalling the position taken by the World Bank in The Changing Nature of Work (reviewed at length here), then turning to The Future of Work. Although the OECD offers a somewhat one-sided analysis of ‘joblessness’ focused only on getting more people into more productive work, the research drawn upon also throws considerable light on changing patterns of social reproduction and its symbiotic relationship with the world of waged labour. The rating given above, as for that for The Changing Nature of Work, reflects the importance of the document on the one hand (80), and its subservience to the logic of capital on the other.
Briefly, then, the World Bank promotes the idea of ‘good jobs’ – productive workers integrated into the global economy – and allies this to the claim that as job-specific skills are periodically rendered obsolete, basic and advanced cognitive skills and especially ‘socioemotional’ skills are more important. The latter include honesty, punctuality, responsibility, ‘grit’ or perseverance, teamwork and a strong work ethic, and as the opposite qualities are dishonesty, tardiness, irresponsibility, laziness, a tendency to wilt under pressure, and an inability to work cooperatively with others, this might seem rather trite and obvious. However, to think so would be to miss the point. In fact, the characteristics listed (clearly, they are not ‘skills’ as such) and the priority accorded to them fit exactly the requirements of Marx’s ‘general law of social production’, this being the idea that as modern industry ‘never views or treats the existing form of the production process as the definitive one’, it ‘incessantly throws masses of capital and of labour from one branch of production to another’, and therefore by its very nature requires of workers ‘variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility … in all directions’ (Capital, Penguin 1976, p. 617). ‘The ability to adapt quickly to changes,’ as the Bank puts it, ‘is increasingly valued by the labor market. The sought-after trait is adaptability - the ability to respond to unexpected circumstances and to unlearn and relearn quickly’ (72). In other words, its skills agenda is not tied to specific skills (beyond literacy and numeracy), but concerned with producing workers who are disciplined and disposed to adapt continually to the demands of capital. Allied to a ‘social protection’ regime that actually strips workers of any protection from the imperative to survive as best they can in globally competitive labour markets, its STEP (Skills Towards Employability and Productivity) programme places the emphasis on early childhood education for strong cognitive skills, and on schooling in socioemotional skills from primary level through to late adolescence (see for example Cunningham et al, 2016), on the grounds that ‘a large share of children entering primary school in 2018 will work in occupations that do not yet exist’ (70). What it seeks to produce, through the combined ‘skills’ and social protection approach, is a ‘commitment to work’ (72) – for capital. At the same time, the main message of The Changing Nature of Work is that there is a huge labour reserve, unemployed or under-employed, in the informal sector world-wide, available to be developed as a proletariat. Accordingly, its focus is more on systems of social protection and other policies that will draw the world’s poor into productive work than it is on the ‘skills agenda’ in isolation.
The OECD too takes its cue from Marx’s insight that the ‘possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice’ (Capital, p. 618). At the heart of its reform agenda are three initiatives – the Going Digital Project, the Skills Strategy, and the Jobs Strategy, the latter dating from 1994. Twenty-five years on, it formulates the package as follows:
First, ‘countries should focus on putting in place comprehensive adult learning strategies – in particular for low-skilled adults – to prevent skills depreciation and obsolescence, and facilitate transitions across jobs’; second, ‘social protection provisions should be reshaped to ensure better coverage of workers in non-standard forms of employment and to take into account a reality where jobs are evolving and long-term employment is disappearing’; and third, greater focus ‘must also be placed on collective bargaining and social dialogue, both of which can complement government efforts to make labour markets more adaptable, secure and inclusive’ (4).
For the OECD too, then, future prosperity depends upon globally competitive labour markets backed up by social policies and institutions that maximise the chances that individuals will seek paid work, and take new jobs as old ones inevitably disappear. Collective bargaining and social dialogue are identified as essential tools in capital’s pursuit of flexible adaptation: ‘collective bargaining can allow companies to adjust wages, working time, work organisation and tasks to new needs in a flexible and pragmatic manner. It can help shaping new rights, adapting existing ones, regulating the use of new technologies, providing active support to workers transitioning to new jobs and anticipating skills needs’ (190). As the reference to shaping new rights and adapting existing ones hints, social protection must abandon a regime in which ‘gold standard’ long-term full-time contracts are the norm, in favour of a lower floor of rights supportive of a wide range of temporary, part-time, short-term, intermittent or arms-length forms of employment. So the report urges policy-makers to bring non-standard forms of work into social protection and labour activation schemes – so long as ‘labour market and competition policy remain aligned’ (29); and at the same time to dilute provisions for full-time ‘permanent’ workers through ‘measures to encourage hiring on standard contracts by making them more attractive [to employers, that is] relative to non-standard employment relationships. Making standard employment more attractive could be achieved by easing the obligations or enhancing the flexibility associated with standard contracts for employers – while still ensuring an adequate level of protection for workers’ (138).
Following a foreword, an editorial, an executive summary and an overview chapter (the OECD favours overkill to get its message across), Chapters 2 and 3 explore the characteristics of contemporary labour markets, Chapter 4 proposes extending labour market regulation to non-standard workers, Chapter 5 spells out the role of collective bargaining as a means to institutionalising adaptation and improving productivity, Chapter 6 addresses adult learning systems, and Chapter 7 draws together the implications for regimes of social protection.
Much of the report, then, runs along familiar lines that reflect the objective of making all individuals and families dependent for their survival on competitive labour markets. Technological progress and the greater integration of economies along global supply chains are to be welcomed (40-42), as is the ever-growing proportion of people in work; and it simply has to be accepted that the employed will face more frequent job changes in the future. The OECD discounts the threat of a massive loss of jobs due to robotisation (‘only’ one in six jobs is at risk of disappearing, offset by the prospect that automation will create demand for new jobs too), but it detects widespread under-employment, wage stagnation, and increased instability (51-2), increased temporary employment and agency work, involuntary part-time work, and on-call labour, and rising levels of dependent self-employment and false self-employment, or disguised wage labour (58-62). The presentation is ideologically slanted, as you might expect. Forgetting that its dream of globally competitive labour markets necessarily means that some will have ‘good’ jobs, some precarious jobs, and some no jobs at all, it proclaims that: ‘Allowing all workers to benefit from future opportunities represents the single most important challenge that policy makers face’ (62). In fact, its idea of inclusiveness is that everyone will have the ‘opportunity’ (that is, no alternative but) to compete for work, with no guarantee of success, and it aims to make that competition more intense. It describes a volatile and highly polarised labour market, in the unpromising context of a shrinking share of national income overall going to labour, growing concentration of job supply as ‘super-star’ firms become more dominant, sharp regional inequalities within individual states, and rapidly rising income inequality (62-72). It then concedes, not surprisingly, that ‘important policy challenges remain in providing high-quality jobs to non-standard workers’, and declares that ‘identifying the appropriate policy responses will depend crucially on having good evidence on how the world of work is changing’: this in turn will allow policy makers to ‘steer the economy in the direction of better jobs for all’ (73). It then identifies three key features of the changing world of work: employment is less stable than in the past, while increasing numbers are ‘under-employed’ (part-time workers who would like more hours or full time jobs); ‘some groups in the labour market [in particular, young people without tertiary education] may be facing a future where it will be harder to find a well-paid job’; and at all skill levels, workers are finding it harder to find a job that matches their skills, or in the case of low-skilled and even some medium-skilled workers, to find a job at all (91-118).
Considering the bleakness of this prospect, the OECD’s prescription for ‘better jobs for all’ , set out in Chapters 4-7, is rather weak. In summary, the greater mobility of workers between jobs or between work and unemployment creates a need for safety nets, revisions to activation policies, and opportunities for training and reskilling (100). The ideal worker the OECD seeks to produce is emphatically not the permanent full-time employee in a secure occupation, but rather a flexible subject sometimes in work and sometimes not, represented in collective bargaining in which workers and employers are partners committed to reaching ‘mutually beneficial’ agreements that address ‘the realities of global markets, increased competition and fragmentation of production’ (191-2), and ‘protected’ by a social policy regime that demands and supports lifetime engagement with the labour market through diverse periods of employment and unemployment. In devising new regimes, the OECD wants above all to ensure that firms that follow the rules are not rendered uncompetitive: in order to eliminate ‘gaming’ the system, the employment status of workers should be clearly defined, and policy and law enforcement should minimise opportunities and incentives for misclassification. Rights and protections (which must be compatible with competition policy) should then be extended to ‘non-standard’ workers, and even to those in the ‘grey zone’ between employment and self-employment. An indication of just how compatible with competition policy its proposals are is that it greets the suggestion that the EU might like to consider a ‘platform work directive’ with the thought that ‘for many genuinely self-employed and highly skilled platform workers such regulation would be less necessary. As they are typically less vulnerable and their activities could genuinely be seen as international trade in services between undertakings’, while for the ‘more vulnerable self-employed platform workers in the grey zone, voluntary initiatives and/or self-regulation might offer a solution (at least temporarily)’. At the international level, ‘it is possible to envisage a set of guidelines for countries and platforms to sign up to and which might have a similar impact as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which have promoted responsible business conduct in global supply chains’ (156). There is an incipient direction of travel here towards the redefinition of jobs as ‘services’ traded, even internationally, between freely contracting subjects, and embedded in a universal framework that precludes ‘gaming’ the rules of a thoroughly competitive labour market. And as is noted in a discreet footnote, ‘a competitive market would require a residual labour supply elasticity close to infinity’ (ft. 48, p. 186). It is no coincidence that this is precisely what the World Bank seeks to achieve.
For the most part the argument proceeds in accordance with this logic. However, the lengthy discussion on ‘making adult learning systems future-ready for all’ (235-292) curiously lacks the strategic focus one expects from the OECD. First, it has already pointed out that workers with high levels of skill are not guaranteed jobs with high rewards, and the same seems to be true all down the skills ladder. Second, although it starts the chapter with a reference to ‘cognitive and interpersonal skills’, it says very little about the latter. Third, it reports that on average only ‘two in five adults participate in job-related formal and non-formal training in any given year, and this often only involves training for only few hours’ (sic, 238), but it never addresses the lack of realism in expecting a scaling-up to anything like the extent its proposals imply. Financing is discussed in a third of a page: apparently, establishing who should pay for adult learning is ‘not straightforward’ (278). Fourth, it dwells at length on the barriers that the most disadvantaged face in access to training (these being its primary targets), summarising them succinctly as motivation, time, and money, but gives no reasons to believe that these barriers can be overcome. In fact, it notes, ‘only 19% of adults who did not participate in training over the previous 12 months report that there were learning opportunities that they would have wanted to take up’ (246). Fifth, it reports that most companies prefer to train workers, if at all, when they start a job, and again gives no plausible reason why this might change. Indeed, it comments later that ‘where production processes become more fragmented and job tenure falls, firms’ and workers’ incentives to invest in firm-specific skills may weaken further’ (297). Sixth, it makes no reference to the digital and social media-related skills that are advanced and practically universal among the young, and practiced and developed most assiduously by those least engaged with the labour market. Seventh, it barely acknowledges anywhere something that anyone employed in tertiary education, for example, doesn’t need to be told, that most formal ‘training’ offered in large institutions, especially by outside providers, is formulaic, incompetent, largely irrelevant except to tick a compliance box, and universally despised. Eighth, it forgets that many qualities classed as skills are behavioural traits - such as punctuality – that do not need to be learned, but simply performed under threat of dismissal. Ninth, it seems barely aware of the class-strategic dimension of education that in the past prepared and habituated the poor for a grinding discipline of factory work, and must now prepare them to be flexible and mobile, and readied for a future of jobs that do not yet exist. So, tenth, it ignores the obvious: constant reference to a skills deficit is not expected to persuade the great majority of the least advantaged to take up training opportunities, but to get them to come to think that it is their own fault that they do not have a ‘good job’.
This lengthy chapter on adult education, then, is something of a diversion from its evidence-based analysis of the future of work. Following it, the final chapter argues that effective social protection will both make labour markets work better, and blunt resistance to competitive labour and product markets: it ‘provides a buffer against the individual and social costs of … adjustments and can ensure that those losing their jobs have the time to find good job matches or undertake training if needed. In doing so, it can also counter calls for policy responses that stifle economic dynamism, such as creating barriers to trade or innovation’ (294). So it identifies gaps in protection, particularly for hard-to-reach categories of worker, and suggests remedies to address them. Social protection regimes should be restructured, and made portable across different forms of employment, while ‘enforcing job-search responsibilities and other requirements for the part-time unemployed may be a necessary counter-weight to extending benefit rights to these groups’ (296). It then turns to ‘outreach strategies’ for accessing such workers with job search and related ‘support’ when they are in intermittent or precarious work, as well as when they become unemployed:
‘With the easier availability of task-based and independent forms of work, and a growing range of options for occasional short-duration or part-time employment, the traditional “in work”/“out of work” dichotomy appears increasingly anachronistic. In fact, in some countries, workers with intermittent employment and/or limited working hours already outnumber key categories of out-of-work individuals, such as those not working for family reasons, those unfit to work, or the longer-term unemployed. A strict focus on the jobless denies support from [sic, they mean ‘to’] a large number of precarious workers who face barriers to higher-quality employment. It therefore becomes more and more unsatisfactory as basis for targeting activation and re-employment programmes’ (sic, 318).
This leads belatedly, at the very end of the report, to the core of its strategic focus:
‘Weak work incentives are rarely the only employment barrier for jobseekers, and often not the main one. But they are central to activation approaches which tie benefit to active job search and participation in labour market programmes. Importantly, a more fluid labour market with more options for when and how long to work creates more opportunities for acting on positive and negative incentives. This has significant implications for the scope of job-search and other behavioural requirements for benefit claimants, and for the design of tax-benefit systems more generally’ 320.
Three lessons are drawn. First, ‘incentives that favour specific employment forms can become more distortionary and economically damaging than they had been in the past’; second, ‘tax-benefit provisions, which create sudden income drops or gains as people vary earnings or working hours, are more likely to affect working time and earnings when choices are no longer constrained to, say, 40, 30, or 20 hours per week’; and
‘Third, and perhaps most important, governments should review whether benefit reforms that are intended to tackle benefit coverage gaps create a need to rebalance the demanding and supporting elements of existing rights-and-responsibilities frameworks. Job-search and related activation requirements help in targeting support to genuine jobseekers and restrict opportunities for benefit receipt by others. An emergence of alternative working arrangements, with additional scope for arranging work or earnings patterns in a way that is compatible with benefit receipt, calls for additional efforts to formulate and enforce clear and reasonable responsibilities for benefit recipients. Likewise, extending the scope of job-search responsibilities and provisions for active participation in re-employment measures may be a necessary counter-weight to any extensions of benefit rights to new groups of jobseekers, such as part-time unemployed, those with intermittent employment, or those who entered unemployment after periods of self-employment’ (320).
This is significant, for two reasons. First, it represents a consensus emerging out of joint work involving the World Bank, the OECD, and the European Commission, initiated in the midst of the recent Europe-wide recession. Second, in proposing the extension of the scope of activation and job-search requirements to the segment of the labour force in various forms of non-standard employment, it expands the pool of labour targeted for squeezing out more surplus value. The first of the annual series Employment and Social Developments in Europe (European Commission, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, 2012) explicitly rejected the ‘one breadwinner family model’ (‘The empirical evidence shows that in most countries the one breadwinner family model does not really protect from poverty’, p. 179), and went on to conclude that ‘it is paramount to monitor the situation of the in-work poor in the near future, and to assess the effectiveness of policies in supporting labour market participation of all adults in the household, in providing a living wage, and in facilitating upward transitions for those trapped in low-paid or precarious jobs’ (ibid: 180). In pursuit of these objectives, it commissioned and financed a World Bank study whose results were presented at a workshop in Brussels in May 2014 with ‘experts from the OECD’ present, and published as Portraits of Labour Market Exclusion (Sundaram et al, 2014). The objective of the study, which focused only on those who were registered unemployed, or inactive in the labour market, was to look behind aggregate data to establish whether this population fell into distinctive groups, and how if at all each could be drawn more successfully into the labour market. At its core were case studies of Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania. It found six such groups in all six countries, along with one or two more specific to each country concerned: middle aged job losers; youth not in employment, education and training; early retirees (accounting for around half of the out-of-work population in Romania and 30 per cent in Hungary), including the disabled; inactive women and stay-at-home mothers; long-term unemployed; and rural unemployed. The OECD (whose Head of Employment-Oriented Social Policies, Herwig Immervoll, had been involved in the 2014 study) subsequently took the lead on a further joblessness project with six country case studies (to which Australia was subsequently added), reported in its Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers (Nos. 192, 205-10, 226). As a short cut, in the absence of space to analyse its findings in depth, and to forestall claims that I am fabricating a conspiracy narrative from chance connections, I reproduce the acknowledgements in the lead paper of the project (Fernandez et al, 2016):
‘This document was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union Programme for Employment and Social Innovation “EaSI” (2014-2020, EC-OECD grant agreement VS/2016/0005, DI150038), as part of a joint project between the European Commission (EC), the OECD and the World Bank. The authors gratefully acknowledge feedback on earlier drafts from a number of EC and OECD colleagues and, in particular, multiple rounds of discussions with the World Bank (Aylin Isik-Dikmelik, Sandor Karacsony, Natalia Millan, Mirey Ovadiya, Frieda Vandeninden and Michele Davide Zini), and the extensive in-depth comments they provided on the empirical results, the underlying concepts and Stata programs. The paper also accounts for feedback received during and after a project kick-off seminar, held at OECD in Paris on 3 March 2016 with the participation of the EC, World Bank and representatives from twelve countries, and during a seminar held at the European Commission, DG EMPL, on 17 February 2016’.
The OECD study used the same methodology (‘latent class analysis’) as its predecessor, and collected data on Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, and Spain, using 2013 EU-SILC (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) household survey data. It also extended its focus to cover ‘joblessness’, ‘under-employment’, and ‘weak labour-market attachment’ (ibid: 9-18).
This brings us, then, to the state of the art of the concerted response of these three organisations to the ‘global financial crisis’, and it is absolutely clear that their only concern is to develop and promote strategies to extract labour more efficiently from households, and maximise the return to government spending in doing so. ‘Inactive spouses’ are a particular target throughout and evidence of a desire to do away with the one breadwinner household for once and for all, but at the same time initial concerns over precarious work have given way to a positive recommendation to bring it under the scope of job-search and activation processes. So The Future of Work now recommends that governments should ‘consider if and when employment services should actively connect people to potentially precarious forms of work’ (35, 325).
The overall logic is clear. The European Commission estimates that on the one hand, 20 per cent of the population are effectively condemned from birth to virtual exclusion from educational achievement and decent work (European Commission, 2018, Ch.3 is eloquent on this, and on the intertemporal multiplier of disadvantage), while on the other, groups such as the (dwindling) number of stay-at-home spouses can be tempted into work by such benefits as tax breaks and increased childcare facilities. Similarly, on ‘under-employment’ the OECD comments that ‘it is important to remember that new, non-standard forms of work often emerge in response to the real needs of both employers and workers. For example, companies need to have sufficient flexibility to adjust workforces and working hours in response to fluctuating and unpredictable demand. Workers may be seeking greater flexibility to fit work around caring responsibilities and/or leisure in order to achieve a better work-life balance’ (134). What this produces is a dual strategy of rewards and punishments – rewards for the relatively few who either demonstrate their acceptance of neoliberal discipline by undertaking certificated training, or forsake ‘inactivity’ at home for the labour market, and punishments for the underclass of troublesome youth and families who opt for ‘leisure’ or otherwise resign themselves to their fate, with an intuitive grasp of the social statistics confirmed by the Commission. Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage are quite right, in this context, to suggest that there is no ‘crisis of social reproduction’: whatever the physical and emotional harm it entails, household social reproduction strategies ‘adapt to, and even increase, inequality without indicating a necessity for wider change. At the micro-scale, some households will certainly experience this as a crisis, but the majority continue to "cope" with the effects of depletion, harm and ongoing struggle, and at more macro-scales, communities and workforces continue to be reproduced in a way that is suitable to capital’ (2019: 11). This is a crucial insight, but I would go further. From the point of view of capital, there can be no such thing as a crisis of social reproduction. Rather, Individuals and families adapt, or do not, to the needs of the labour market – some build up their educational credentials and work experience, postpone or renounce marriage and parenthood, and otherwise manage their human capital ‘wisely’; others opt out, effectively becoming a new servant class, obliged by the ‘reform’ of social protection to commit themselves more intensively to precarious and zero hour contract work, and increasingly make themselves available to clean the houses, care for the children, and cook or deliver the food for the decently employed. It is a matter of indifference to capital (and to the OECD and its partners, despite their fine language of 'inclusion' and the like) which path they take, as they can safely be left to sort themselves into one group or another. And if this were not enough, as the World Bank explains, there are untold millions of hewers of wood and drawers of water in the developing world ready to enter the working class or the underclass as required.
References
Cunningham, Wendy, Pablo Acosta and Noël Muller. 2016. Minds and Behaviors at Work: Boosting Socioemotional Skills for Latin America’s Workforce, World Bank.
European Commission. 2012. Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2011. Brussels.
European Commission. 2018. Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2018. Luxembourg.
Fernandez, Rodrigo et al. 2016. Faces of Joblessness: Characterising Employment Barriers to Inform Poverty, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 192, Paris: OECD.
Nunn, Alexander, and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage. 2019. 'Social reproduction strategies: Understanding compound inequality in the intergenerational transfer of capital, assets and resources', Capital & Class, OnlineFirst, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816819880795.
Sundaram, Ramya, et al. 2014. Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion, Washington DC: World Bank.
‘The world is changing at lightening speed. Digitalisation, globalisation and demographic change are having a profound impact on our lives, on our cultures, on our societies. These and other megatrends are constantly (and rapidly) transforming the way we interact with our friends and families; how and where businesses operate; what goods and services we consume; what dreams we dream. Our education and health, the distribution of income and wealth, the jobs we have and how we work are all particularly sensitive to these changes. It is a transformational era. Disruption is the new normal’ (3).
Yet again, we are on ground mapped by classical Marxism. Unlike capitalist enterprises, which tend not to look far beyond their own immediate interests, or governments, which vary in their priorities, these international organisations take a broad and long view of capitalism and its reproduction as a global system. Both are fully committed to its development on a world scale, and their policy advice is geared towards producing the individual as an available, willing and productive worker for capital. It is in line with this vocation that the OECD has devoted this volume to the future of work. And while the World Bank is focused on proletarianising global labour reserves in the ‘informal’ economy, the OECD is concerned with enhancing the capacity of capital to extract surplus value from precarious and 'under-employed' workers in the advanced economies that make up its membership. It does so here, in fact, by developing an analysis of ‘joblessness’ first pioneered by the World Bank itself with and on behalf of the European Union (World Bank, 2014).
Both organizations take the changing nature of work – and the decreasing salience of ‘permanent employees working for a single employer’ (19) – as points of reference for employment regulations. For both, the relatively new circumstances of ‘fragmented’ production, global production/value chains, and global competitiveness require a new approach to skills and a shift to a universal regime of ‘social protection’, involving not only the dismantling of the ‘social democratic’ welfare systems developed in Western Europe in particular but also the development of improved regimes of protection in emerging economies. So I focus on the connections they make between new patterns of work, skills, and social protection, briefly recalling the position taken by the World Bank in The Changing Nature of Work (reviewed at length here), then turning to The Future of Work. Although the OECD offers a somewhat one-sided analysis of ‘joblessness’ focused only on getting more people into more productive work, the research drawn upon also throws considerable light on changing patterns of social reproduction and its symbiotic relationship with the world of waged labour. The rating given above, as for that for The Changing Nature of Work, reflects the importance of the document on the one hand (80), and its subservience to the logic of capital on the other.
Briefly, then, the World Bank promotes the idea of ‘good jobs’ – productive workers integrated into the global economy – and allies this to the claim that as job-specific skills are periodically rendered obsolete, basic and advanced cognitive skills and especially ‘socioemotional’ skills are more important. The latter include honesty, punctuality, responsibility, ‘grit’ or perseverance, teamwork and a strong work ethic, and as the opposite qualities are dishonesty, tardiness, irresponsibility, laziness, a tendency to wilt under pressure, and an inability to work cooperatively with others, this might seem rather trite and obvious. However, to think so would be to miss the point. In fact, the characteristics listed (clearly, they are not ‘skills’ as such) and the priority accorded to them fit exactly the requirements of Marx’s ‘general law of social production’, this being the idea that as modern industry ‘never views or treats the existing form of the production process as the definitive one’, it ‘incessantly throws masses of capital and of labour from one branch of production to another’, and therefore by its very nature requires of workers ‘variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility … in all directions’ (Capital, Penguin 1976, p. 617). ‘The ability to adapt quickly to changes,’ as the Bank puts it, ‘is increasingly valued by the labor market. The sought-after trait is adaptability - the ability to respond to unexpected circumstances and to unlearn and relearn quickly’ (72). In other words, its skills agenda is not tied to specific skills (beyond literacy and numeracy), but concerned with producing workers who are disciplined and disposed to adapt continually to the demands of capital. Allied to a ‘social protection’ regime that actually strips workers of any protection from the imperative to survive as best they can in globally competitive labour markets, its STEP (Skills Towards Employability and Productivity) programme places the emphasis on early childhood education for strong cognitive skills, and on schooling in socioemotional skills from primary level through to late adolescence (see for example Cunningham et al, 2016), on the grounds that ‘a large share of children entering primary school in 2018 will work in occupations that do not yet exist’ (70). What it seeks to produce, through the combined ‘skills’ and social protection approach, is a ‘commitment to work’ (72) – for capital. At the same time, the main message of The Changing Nature of Work is that there is a huge labour reserve, unemployed or under-employed, in the informal sector world-wide, available to be developed as a proletariat. Accordingly, its focus is more on systems of social protection and other policies that will draw the world’s poor into productive work than it is on the ‘skills agenda’ in isolation.
The OECD too takes its cue from Marx’s insight that the ‘possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice’ (Capital, p. 618). At the heart of its reform agenda are three initiatives – the Going Digital Project, the Skills Strategy, and the Jobs Strategy, the latter dating from 1994. Twenty-five years on, it formulates the package as follows:
First, ‘countries should focus on putting in place comprehensive adult learning strategies – in particular for low-skilled adults – to prevent skills depreciation and obsolescence, and facilitate transitions across jobs’; second, ‘social protection provisions should be reshaped to ensure better coverage of workers in non-standard forms of employment and to take into account a reality where jobs are evolving and long-term employment is disappearing’; and third, greater focus ‘must also be placed on collective bargaining and social dialogue, both of which can complement government efforts to make labour markets more adaptable, secure and inclusive’ (4).
For the OECD too, then, future prosperity depends upon globally competitive labour markets backed up by social policies and institutions that maximise the chances that individuals will seek paid work, and take new jobs as old ones inevitably disappear. Collective bargaining and social dialogue are identified as essential tools in capital’s pursuit of flexible adaptation: ‘collective bargaining can allow companies to adjust wages, working time, work organisation and tasks to new needs in a flexible and pragmatic manner. It can help shaping new rights, adapting existing ones, regulating the use of new technologies, providing active support to workers transitioning to new jobs and anticipating skills needs’ (190). As the reference to shaping new rights and adapting existing ones hints, social protection must abandon a regime in which ‘gold standard’ long-term full-time contracts are the norm, in favour of a lower floor of rights supportive of a wide range of temporary, part-time, short-term, intermittent or arms-length forms of employment. So the report urges policy-makers to bring non-standard forms of work into social protection and labour activation schemes – so long as ‘labour market and competition policy remain aligned’ (29); and at the same time to dilute provisions for full-time ‘permanent’ workers through ‘measures to encourage hiring on standard contracts by making them more attractive [to employers, that is] relative to non-standard employment relationships. Making standard employment more attractive could be achieved by easing the obligations or enhancing the flexibility associated with standard contracts for employers – while still ensuring an adequate level of protection for workers’ (138).
Following a foreword, an editorial, an executive summary and an overview chapter (the OECD favours overkill to get its message across), Chapters 2 and 3 explore the characteristics of contemporary labour markets, Chapter 4 proposes extending labour market regulation to non-standard workers, Chapter 5 spells out the role of collective bargaining as a means to institutionalising adaptation and improving productivity, Chapter 6 addresses adult learning systems, and Chapter 7 draws together the implications for regimes of social protection.
Much of the report, then, runs along familiar lines that reflect the objective of making all individuals and families dependent for their survival on competitive labour markets. Technological progress and the greater integration of economies along global supply chains are to be welcomed (40-42), as is the ever-growing proportion of people in work; and it simply has to be accepted that the employed will face more frequent job changes in the future. The OECD discounts the threat of a massive loss of jobs due to robotisation (‘only’ one in six jobs is at risk of disappearing, offset by the prospect that automation will create demand for new jobs too), but it detects widespread under-employment, wage stagnation, and increased instability (51-2), increased temporary employment and agency work, involuntary part-time work, and on-call labour, and rising levels of dependent self-employment and false self-employment, or disguised wage labour (58-62). The presentation is ideologically slanted, as you might expect. Forgetting that its dream of globally competitive labour markets necessarily means that some will have ‘good’ jobs, some precarious jobs, and some no jobs at all, it proclaims that: ‘Allowing all workers to benefit from future opportunities represents the single most important challenge that policy makers face’ (62). In fact, its idea of inclusiveness is that everyone will have the ‘opportunity’ (that is, no alternative but) to compete for work, with no guarantee of success, and it aims to make that competition more intense. It describes a volatile and highly polarised labour market, in the unpromising context of a shrinking share of national income overall going to labour, growing concentration of job supply as ‘super-star’ firms become more dominant, sharp regional inequalities within individual states, and rapidly rising income inequality (62-72). It then concedes, not surprisingly, that ‘important policy challenges remain in providing high-quality jobs to non-standard workers’, and declares that ‘identifying the appropriate policy responses will depend crucially on having good evidence on how the world of work is changing’: this in turn will allow policy makers to ‘steer the economy in the direction of better jobs for all’ (73). It then identifies three key features of the changing world of work: employment is less stable than in the past, while increasing numbers are ‘under-employed’ (part-time workers who would like more hours or full time jobs); ‘some groups in the labour market [in particular, young people without tertiary education] may be facing a future where it will be harder to find a well-paid job’; and at all skill levels, workers are finding it harder to find a job that matches their skills, or in the case of low-skilled and even some medium-skilled workers, to find a job at all (91-118).
Considering the bleakness of this prospect, the OECD’s prescription for ‘better jobs for all’ , set out in Chapters 4-7, is rather weak. In summary, the greater mobility of workers between jobs or between work and unemployment creates a need for safety nets, revisions to activation policies, and opportunities for training and reskilling (100). The ideal worker the OECD seeks to produce is emphatically not the permanent full-time employee in a secure occupation, but rather a flexible subject sometimes in work and sometimes not, represented in collective bargaining in which workers and employers are partners committed to reaching ‘mutually beneficial’ agreements that address ‘the realities of global markets, increased competition and fragmentation of production’ (191-2), and ‘protected’ by a social policy regime that demands and supports lifetime engagement with the labour market through diverse periods of employment and unemployment. In devising new regimes, the OECD wants above all to ensure that firms that follow the rules are not rendered uncompetitive: in order to eliminate ‘gaming’ the system, the employment status of workers should be clearly defined, and policy and law enforcement should minimise opportunities and incentives for misclassification. Rights and protections (which must be compatible with competition policy) should then be extended to ‘non-standard’ workers, and even to those in the ‘grey zone’ between employment and self-employment. An indication of just how compatible with competition policy its proposals are is that it greets the suggestion that the EU might like to consider a ‘platform work directive’ with the thought that ‘for many genuinely self-employed and highly skilled platform workers such regulation would be less necessary. As they are typically less vulnerable and their activities could genuinely be seen as international trade in services between undertakings’, while for the ‘more vulnerable self-employed platform workers in the grey zone, voluntary initiatives and/or self-regulation might offer a solution (at least temporarily)’. At the international level, ‘it is possible to envisage a set of guidelines for countries and platforms to sign up to and which might have a similar impact as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which have promoted responsible business conduct in global supply chains’ (156). There is an incipient direction of travel here towards the redefinition of jobs as ‘services’ traded, even internationally, between freely contracting subjects, and embedded in a universal framework that precludes ‘gaming’ the rules of a thoroughly competitive labour market. And as is noted in a discreet footnote, ‘a competitive market would require a residual labour supply elasticity close to infinity’ (ft. 48, p. 186). It is no coincidence that this is precisely what the World Bank seeks to achieve.
For the most part the argument proceeds in accordance with this logic. However, the lengthy discussion on ‘making adult learning systems future-ready for all’ (235-292) curiously lacks the strategic focus one expects from the OECD. First, it has already pointed out that workers with high levels of skill are not guaranteed jobs with high rewards, and the same seems to be true all down the skills ladder. Second, although it starts the chapter with a reference to ‘cognitive and interpersonal skills’, it says very little about the latter. Third, it reports that on average only ‘two in five adults participate in job-related formal and non-formal training in any given year, and this often only involves training for only few hours’ (sic, 238), but it never addresses the lack of realism in expecting a scaling-up to anything like the extent its proposals imply. Financing is discussed in a third of a page: apparently, establishing who should pay for adult learning is ‘not straightforward’ (278). Fourth, it dwells at length on the barriers that the most disadvantaged face in access to training (these being its primary targets), summarising them succinctly as motivation, time, and money, but gives no reasons to believe that these barriers can be overcome. In fact, it notes, ‘only 19% of adults who did not participate in training over the previous 12 months report that there were learning opportunities that they would have wanted to take up’ (246). Fifth, it reports that most companies prefer to train workers, if at all, when they start a job, and again gives no plausible reason why this might change. Indeed, it comments later that ‘where production processes become more fragmented and job tenure falls, firms’ and workers’ incentives to invest in firm-specific skills may weaken further’ (297). Sixth, it makes no reference to the digital and social media-related skills that are advanced and practically universal among the young, and practiced and developed most assiduously by those least engaged with the labour market. Seventh, it barely acknowledges anywhere something that anyone employed in tertiary education, for example, doesn’t need to be told, that most formal ‘training’ offered in large institutions, especially by outside providers, is formulaic, incompetent, largely irrelevant except to tick a compliance box, and universally despised. Eighth, it forgets that many qualities classed as skills are behavioural traits - such as punctuality – that do not need to be learned, but simply performed under threat of dismissal. Ninth, it seems barely aware of the class-strategic dimension of education that in the past prepared and habituated the poor for a grinding discipline of factory work, and must now prepare them to be flexible and mobile, and readied for a future of jobs that do not yet exist. So, tenth, it ignores the obvious: constant reference to a skills deficit is not expected to persuade the great majority of the least advantaged to take up training opportunities, but to get them to come to think that it is their own fault that they do not have a ‘good job’.
This lengthy chapter on adult education, then, is something of a diversion from its evidence-based analysis of the future of work. Following it, the final chapter argues that effective social protection will both make labour markets work better, and blunt resistance to competitive labour and product markets: it ‘provides a buffer against the individual and social costs of … adjustments and can ensure that those losing their jobs have the time to find good job matches or undertake training if needed. In doing so, it can also counter calls for policy responses that stifle economic dynamism, such as creating barriers to trade or innovation’ (294). So it identifies gaps in protection, particularly for hard-to-reach categories of worker, and suggests remedies to address them. Social protection regimes should be restructured, and made portable across different forms of employment, while ‘enforcing job-search responsibilities and other requirements for the part-time unemployed may be a necessary counter-weight to extending benefit rights to these groups’ (296). It then turns to ‘outreach strategies’ for accessing such workers with job search and related ‘support’ when they are in intermittent or precarious work, as well as when they become unemployed:
‘With the easier availability of task-based and independent forms of work, and a growing range of options for occasional short-duration or part-time employment, the traditional “in work”/“out of work” dichotomy appears increasingly anachronistic. In fact, in some countries, workers with intermittent employment and/or limited working hours already outnumber key categories of out-of-work individuals, such as those not working for family reasons, those unfit to work, or the longer-term unemployed. A strict focus on the jobless denies support from [sic, they mean ‘to’] a large number of precarious workers who face barriers to higher-quality employment. It therefore becomes more and more unsatisfactory as basis for targeting activation and re-employment programmes’ (sic, 318).
This leads belatedly, at the very end of the report, to the core of its strategic focus:
‘Weak work incentives are rarely the only employment barrier for jobseekers, and often not the main one. But they are central to activation approaches which tie benefit to active job search and participation in labour market programmes. Importantly, a more fluid labour market with more options for when and how long to work creates more opportunities for acting on positive and negative incentives. This has significant implications for the scope of job-search and other behavioural requirements for benefit claimants, and for the design of tax-benefit systems more generally’ 320.
Three lessons are drawn. First, ‘incentives that favour specific employment forms can become more distortionary and economically damaging than they had been in the past’; second, ‘tax-benefit provisions, which create sudden income drops or gains as people vary earnings or working hours, are more likely to affect working time and earnings when choices are no longer constrained to, say, 40, 30, or 20 hours per week’; and
‘Third, and perhaps most important, governments should review whether benefit reforms that are intended to tackle benefit coverage gaps create a need to rebalance the demanding and supporting elements of existing rights-and-responsibilities frameworks. Job-search and related activation requirements help in targeting support to genuine jobseekers and restrict opportunities for benefit receipt by others. An emergence of alternative working arrangements, with additional scope for arranging work or earnings patterns in a way that is compatible with benefit receipt, calls for additional efforts to formulate and enforce clear and reasonable responsibilities for benefit recipients. Likewise, extending the scope of job-search responsibilities and provisions for active participation in re-employment measures may be a necessary counter-weight to any extensions of benefit rights to new groups of jobseekers, such as part-time unemployed, those with intermittent employment, or those who entered unemployment after periods of self-employment’ (320).
This is significant, for two reasons. First, it represents a consensus emerging out of joint work involving the World Bank, the OECD, and the European Commission, initiated in the midst of the recent Europe-wide recession. Second, in proposing the extension of the scope of activation and job-search requirements to the segment of the labour force in various forms of non-standard employment, it expands the pool of labour targeted for squeezing out more surplus value. The first of the annual series Employment and Social Developments in Europe (European Commission, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, 2012) explicitly rejected the ‘one breadwinner family model’ (‘The empirical evidence shows that in most countries the one breadwinner family model does not really protect from poverty’, p. 179), and went on to conclude that ‘it is paramount to monitor the situation of the in-work poor in the near future, and to assess the effectiveness of policies in supporting labour market participation of all adults in the household, in providing a living wage, and in facilitating upward transitions for those trapped in low-paid or precarious jobs’ (ibid: 180). In pursuit of these objectives, it commissioned and financed a World Bank study whose results were presented at a workshop in Brussels in May 2014 with ‘experts from the OECD’ present, and published as Portraits of Labour Market Exclusion (Sundaram et al, 2014). The objective of the study, which focused only on those who were registered unemployed, or inactive in the labour market, was to look behind aggregate data to establish whether this population fell into distinctive groups, and how if at all each could be drawn more successfully into the labour market. At its core were case studies of Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania. It found six such groups in all six countries, along with one or two more specific to each country concerned: middle aged job losers; youth not in employment, education and training; early retirees (accounting for around half of the out-of-work population in Romania and 30 per cent in Hungary), including the disabled; inactive women and stay-at-home mothers; long-term unemployed; and rural unemployed. The OECD (whose Head of Employment-Oriented Social Policies, Herwig Immervoll, had been involved in the 2014 study) subsequently took the lead on a further joblessness project with six country case studies (to which Australia was subsequently added), reported in its Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers (Nos. 192, 205-10, 226). As a short cut, in the absence of space to analyse its findings in depth, and to forestall claims that I am fabricating a conspiracy narrative from chance connections, I reproduce the acknowledgements in the lead paper of the project (Fernandez et al, 2016):
‘This document was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union Programme for Employment and Social Innovation “EaSI” (2014-2020, EC-OECD grant agreement VS/2016/0005, DI150038), as part of a joint project between the European Commission (EC), the OECD and the World Bank. The authors gratefully acknowledge feedback on earlier drafts from a number of EC and OECD colleagues and, in particular, multiple rounds of discussions with the World Bank (Aylin Isik-Dikmelik, Sandor Karacsony, Natalia Millan, Mirey Ovadiya, Frieda Vandeninden and Michele Davide Zini), and the extensive in-depth comments they provided on the empirical results, the underlying concepts and Stata programs. The paper also accounts for feedback received during and after a project kick-off seminar, held at OECD in Paris on 3 March 2016 with the participation of the EC, World Bank and representatives from twelve countries, and during a seminar held at the European Commission, DG EMPL, on 17 February 2016’.
The OECD study used the same methodology (‘latent class analysis’) as its predecessor, and collected data on Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, and Spain, using 2013 EU-SILC (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) household survey data. It also extended its focus to cover ‘joblessness’, ‘under-employment’, and ‘weak labour-market attachment’ (ibid: 9-18).
This brings us, then, to the state of the art of the concerted response of these three organisations to the ‘global financial crisis’, and it is absolutely clear that their only concern is to develop and promote strategies to extract labour more efficiently from households, and maximise the return to government spending in doing so. ‘Inactive spouses’ are a particular target throughout and evidence of a desire to do away with the one breadwinner household for once and for all, but at the same time initial concerns over precarious work have given way to a positive recommendation to bring it under the scope of job-search and activation processes. So The Future of Work now recommends that governments should ‘consider if and when employment services should actively connect people to potentially precarious forms of work’ (35, 325).
The overall logic is clear. The European Commission estimates that on the one hand, 20 per cent of the population are effectively condemned from birth to virtual exclusion from educational achievement and decent work (European Commission, 2018, Ch.3 is eloquent on this, and on the intertemporal multiplier of disadvantage), while on the other, groups such as the (dwindling) number of stay-at-home spouses can be tempted into work by such benefits as tax breaks and increased childcare facilities. Similarly, on ‘under-employment’ the OECD comments that ‘it is important to remember that new, non-standard forms of work often emerge in response to the real needs of both employers and workers. For example, companies need to have sufficient flexibility to adjust workforces and working hours in response to fluctuating and unpredictable demand. Workers may be seeking greater flexibility to fit work around caring responsibilities and/or leisure in order to achieve a better work-life balance’ (134). What this produces is a dual strategy of rewards and punishments – rewards for the relatively few who either demonstrate their acceptance of neoliberal discipline by undertaking certificated training, or forsake ‘inactivity’ at home for the labour market, and punishments for the underclass of troublesome youth and families who opt for ‘leisure’ or otherwise resign themselves to their fate, with an intuitive grasp of the social statistics confirmed by the Commission. Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage are quite right, in this context, to suggest that there is no ‘crisis of social reproduction’: whatever the physical and emotional harm it entails, household social reproduction strategies ‘adapt to, and even increase, inequality without indicating a necessity for wider change. At the micro-scale, some households will certainly experience this as a crisis, but the majority continue to "cope" with the effects of depletion, harm and ongoing struggle, and at more macro-scales, communities and workforces continue to be reproduced in a way that is suitable to capital’ (2019: 11). This is a crucial insight, but I would go further. From the point of view of capital, there can be no such thing as a crisis of social reproduction. Rather, Individuals and families adapt, or do not, to the needs of the labour market – some build up their educational credentials and work experience, postpone or renounce marriage and parenthood, and otherwise manage their human capital ‘wisely’; others opt out, effectively becoming a new servant class, obliged by the ‘reform’ of social protection to commit themselves more intensively to precarious and zero hour contract work, and increasingly make themselves available to clean the houses, care for the children, and cook or deliver the food for the decently employed. It is a matter of indifference to capital (and to the OECD and its partners, despite their fine language of 'inclusion' and the like) which path they take, as they can safely be left to sort themselves into one group or another. And if this were not enough, as the World Bank explains, there are untold millions of hewers of wood and drawers of water in the developing world ready to enter the working class or the underclass as required.
References
Cunningham, Wendy, Pablo Acosta and Noël Muller. 2016. Minds and Behaviors at Work: Boosting Socioemotional Skills for Latin America’s Workforce, World Bank.
European Commission. 2012. Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2011. Brussels.
European Commission. 2018. Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2018. Luxembourg.
Fernandez, Rodrigo et al. 2016. Faces of Joblessness: Characterising Employment Barriers to Inform Poverty, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 192, Paris: OECD.
Nunn, Alexander, and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage. 2019. 'Social reproduction strategies: Understanding compound inequality in the intergenerational transfer of capital, assets and resources', Capital & Class, OnlineFirst, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816819880795.
Sundaram, Ramya, et al. 2014. Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion, Washington DC: World Bank.