The non-rise of the precarious proletariat

On CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition, Canada’s official portal into utopian-socialist ideas from around the world, you may have heard a recent two-part interview (totalling almost 72 minutes: this is my interviewee’s envy talking) about the supposed death of “homo economicus.”

It was between host Michael Enright, for whom all social change since the Paris Commune of 1870 has been downhill, and Peter Fleming, author of the recent book The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation. Fleming, an amiable-sounding New Zealander, professes for a living at the Cass Business School at City University London. Time was when business schools taught accounting, finance, and profit-and-loss. Now business schools seem to specialize in profit-is-loss critiques of capitalism, the social system that made them possible (or at least made them possible at compensation levels the critical profs insist on).

Fleming’s themes will have been familiar to Sunday Edition listeners: the “widening corporate hellscape everywhere,” “neo-liberalism — the reduction of all social life to the logic of profit-seeking behaviour,” the “uber-rich” (by which he doesn’t mean high-income ride-sharers) being “wealthier now than ever.” “Rupert Murdoch and Goldman Sachs have commandeered the state and effectively de-democratized it” and that’s just “the elite we can see” (cue the shark music from Jaws).

“Most economics textbooks don’t tell us,” Fleming tells us, “the real reason why homo economicus was probably invented. Capitalism creates a good deal of socio-economic ‘crap’ as a rule (e.g., pollution, stress, insecurity, in work poverty, waste, etc.), the inevitable collateral damage of profit-seeking behaviour… Homo economicus was meant to be an effective relay mechanism, shifting capitalism’s excrement to the next leastpowerful party in the sequence. This is what rationality and efficiency really means in the context of freemarket capitalism.” If you like your economics earthy, if imprecise, this is the book for you.

Part of Fleming’s concern is the “precarity” or, to translate from the Progressive Academese, the precariousness of many new kinds of jobs. He and Enright joked about how there might have to be a new “workers of the world, unite!” for the precariously employed.

You hear a lot of that sort of talk these days. Good thing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is on the case. Just this month it published the results of a questionnaire on “contingent and alternative employment arrangements” that it annexed to its monthly 60,000-person “Current Population Survey.” Contingent workers are those who don’t believe their job will last. You can define that in different ways, obviously. The BLS used three definitions and found that, in May 2017, contingent workers accounted for between 1.3 and 3.8 per cent of total U.S. employment. Since total U.S. employment was 153 million, we’re talking 1.98 million to 5.81 million contingent workers. As with many things American, they’re a small percentage of the total but a big absolute number.

And they’re more and more significant every day, we’re told. They’re actually not. In February 2005, the last time the survey was conducted, contingent workers were between 1.8 and 4.1 per cent of total employment. In February 1995, the survey’s first year, they were between 2.2 and 4.9 per cent of total employment. In other words, their share of total employment has fallen over the last two decades, not risen.

Being in a job you think is about to end isn’t the perfect or only definition of “precarity,” but if you are in such a job, you may well feel your situation is precarious. Well, the good news is that, in the U.S. at least, your chance of feeling that way has been declining. Moreover, only a little over a half of contingent workers said they would prefer a permanent job. A third said they were fine with precarity while the rest expressed no opinion.

This BLS study brings to mind a StatCan report from 2013 that looked at worker reallocation in Canada through the usual labour market mechanisms of hiring, firing, being put on temporary layoff and quitting. Even in 2013 we were hearing lots about how the labour market was changing radically. (For that matter, Jeremy Rifkin’s apocalyptic The End of Work came out in 1995, which — embarrassingly for its author — came out five years before the U.S. unemployment rate hit a 30-year low of 3.9 per cent.)

What did StatCan conclude about worker reallocation in the 21st century? “The pace of labour reallocation was no higher during the 2000s than it was during the 1980s or 1990s. This conclusion holds whether all workers are considered or whether attention is restricted to individuals aged 25 to 54… (W)orker reallocation rates did not display any statistically significant trend during the period from 1976 to 2011.”

Everything changes every day and thank goodness for that: Otherwise we wouldn’t need newspapers. But the fundamental things? They often still apply, even as our self-absorbed time goes by.

THEY’RE MORE AND MORE SIGNIFICANT EVERY DAY, WE’RE TOLD. THEY’RE ACTUALLY NOT.