An urban future of work beyond the labour market
My grandfather worked as a forced labourer. At the time, as part of the war effort, Germany was sending all able-bodied nationals to fight at the front, leaving factories and farms without the required workforce. My grandfather and his brother, as sons of farmers and even trained at the regional school of agriculture, were deported to Germany and put to work as farmhands. Though my grandfather kept good relations with his farmer-employer, his brother suffered the darker side of things with lack of food and exploitative working conditions. At rare occasions, they were allowed to return home to visit their wives and families. On one of those visits in 1944, when Belgium was almost liberated but war was still raging fiercely over Germany, he and his brother decided not to return. Their employers still expected them back, but they did not go. When he told me the story half a century later, he admitted that both he and his brother often still felt as if they were on leave of absence.
The story stuck with me for two reasons: it made Second World War history very real; but more importantly, it taught me something about industrial relations. Strange as a war experience may be to us now, the guilt feeling of not going to work when one is supposed to, is something most people relate to. Without being a forced labourer, or at least without carrying the title, the relationship between provider and executor of work is one of supplication. Supplication, from the Latin “supplicare” meaning “to request humbly”, often describes how the employee relates to his or her boss.
Despite all economic theory that studies the exchange between labourer and employer as a market of buying and selling, that is not how it is experienced “on the job”.
While my grandfather was tilling German soil in 1944, in the US state of Vermont, an Austro-Hungarian immigrant was arguing that a market in labour did not work. Or rather, that this market does not even exist. Karl Polanyi was trying to understand the causes of the great crises that shook the beginning of 20th Century: the First World War, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism, the New Deal in the US and First five-year plan in the Soviet Union. According to him, market liberalism had become the organising principle of the world economy. Yet its main tenant, that humans are only assistants to self-regulating markets, did not work. To shield the social from these market forces, states ventured into Wars, Totalitarian regimes or the launch of the Welfare State.
More importantly, Polanyi argued that some items sold on the market are not even “products” (“commodities” he would say). Land, money and labour are fictitious goods. Trading them would have disastrous consequences. Because land is no more than a subdivision of nature, buying and selling it for profit would exhaust natural resources. Property prices in some parts of London only confirm the fictitious nature of land as a good to buy and sell. Likewise, money is not a product. It is a means of exchange and store of value that results from banking or from the work of central banks. The financial crisis of 2008 with its “subprime mortgages”, “mortgage-backed securities” and “credit default swaps” illustrates his point sharply.
Labour is the third fictitious commodity. Labour is just another name for human activity, Polanyi notes. While for an employer it is a mere input for production of which cost needs to be minimised, for the worker it is livelihood. Adding rights and entitlements to labour increases its price and thus distorts a well-functioning market. This in the end makes human beings “an accessory to the economic system,” rather than the other way round. Conclusion, selling labour on the market is a bad idea.
But what alternatives do we have? Before a future of work is upon us in which robots work for us, and we live of the wealth they produce, other steps will be needed. These steps involve thinking about how individuals can harness their own activity to meet their needs. Needs in this case are not merely physical and psychological, but also social needs. Polanyi disagreed with Marx over what motivates human beings. Whereas Marx saw individual self-interest as the driving force, Polanyi saw the interests of family, clan or village or social motivations.
Polanyi identified two alternatives to the market: reciprocity and redistribution. Reciprocity is the exchange of one gift for another of roughly the same value; redistribution is the collection of goods by a central agent and their handing out to the group. An example of the first is a Potlatch: all participants bring a bit of food that is then shared and makes a varied meal. A more elaborate form of reciprocity is blood donation, where donors are often motivated by “I might need some myself some day.” Research on urban informal economies has shown that particularly in deprived urban areas, a lot of work is being performed outside the formal economy. The jobs range from small repair favours via care for young, old or ill to entire community building activities. They are performed not for money, but on the assumption that the favour will be returned at some later point in time or will benefit all.
The idea inspired us to launch EULER, a two-and-a-half year action-research in several European neighbourhoods. We assumed that in an informal urban economy participants develop a wide variety of skills. Lack of formal proof means owners can hardly ever apply these skills in other contexts. Our investigation did not aim to bring the skills into the formal economy, but rather look at the types of skills that are being developed, and what they mean in a rapidly changing world of work.
We still believe that a lot of informal work is better rewarded through reciprocity, and finds a better home outside the labour market than within.
Redistribution is reciprocity with a middleman. A central institution collects and then redistributes to members of a community. Government tax systems are the most obvious example. Credit unions where members contribute money with which financial services are provided are another. In the world of work the pooling and redistributing of jobs has come in many guises. In early 20th century Milwaukee, Wisconsin, there were no ships to load and unloaded during winter because the waters were not navigable due to ice. Men in the industry used to leave the city when there was no work, making them unavailable when port operators needed them again. One operator called D.J. Nugent came up with the idea of looking for temporary work for his men during the off-season. He looked for vacancies in the nearby manufacturing plant, and hired out his men to do the work during winter. In doing so, he laid the foundations of what is now called temporary work agencies. In a more recent history, the emergence of ubiquitous communication technology made it possible to pool work on line, and do so at a much finer scale. Platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and TaskRabbit allow people to put small jobs online and others to get paid to do these jobs. In a sense these also pool work, and redistribute it over their wide pool of workers. Uber does the same for drivers.
But these forms of redistribution are still situated well within the labour market, if not at the forefront of it. At the edges, there are companies that try to bring reciprocity back into the redistribution of work. Cooperatives are one way of ensuring the worker remains owner of his work, rather than delegating that ownership to shareholders or investors. His work becomes a gift to the company, which in return gives the worker a salary or other benefits. The fact that cooperatives do not have to be small, is proven by the Basque conglomerate Mondragon, which employs roughly 75,000 people.
As part of the research-investigation EULER, we are setting up an experiment in London. We are launching a company called Elephant Path. Its main purpose it to provide job opportunities for the people of Somers Town, one of the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods. More than 2 in 5 residents of Somers Town are economically inactive, which is double the national average. While this category includes students and people in the military, a large part is unemployed and no longer looking for work. Among the reasons why they stopped looking are lack of confidence in their skills and fear of getting stuck in a job they don’t like. By means of micro-jobs, we hope to give participants a taste of different types of work, so they can develop further what they like and discard what they don’t. The micro-side of it should also take away the fear of a permanent career direction.
Most importantly, the company aims to become a middleman for reciprocity. It distributes micro-jobs to participants who want to contribute to the group, not just earn easy money, let alone enrich shareholders or investors. Through different safeguards we are trying to make this real. One is ownership: the company is owned by those who work for it. For a micro-job company, this is uncharted territory. Another is delayed payment: jobs-done increase the value of the company as a whole. The person performing the job increases his share in the company with the same amount, so when he or she needs the money they can still claim it by selling his or her shares to the cooperative. For instance person A performs a task worth £5. The client pays £5 to Elephant Path, and Elephant Path’s amount in Outstanding shares increases by £5. The £5 in shares are in person A’s name on the balance sheet. Should person A need money, the shares can be sold to Elephant Path, transforming them into shares the cooperative has reacquired, called Treasury shares.
The fact that the worker remains owner of his work and of the organising platform, makes it the honest alternative to what has become known as the Uber-model.
This article wondered if there is a world of work beyond the labour market. It argues that labour is what human activity becomes in the labour market. But the world is bigger than that. As Polanyi showed, there is even an economy outside the labour market. Skills can be applied and exchanged, favours can be done and received and lessons can be learned outside the rigid framework of accumulating wealth. There is a gift economy based on reciprocity, and redistribution to facilitate this. There are investigations into the informal economies and experiments with collectively owned companies. Maybe we are running out of alternatives to forced labour inside the labour market, but as Coriolanus said: “there is a world elsewhere.”
