Even the leftists agree a job guarantee pushes capitalism everywhere while making sure everyone can participate in the market

The reaction to this was exactly as Kalecki forecast. One way to understand the emergence of neoliberalism as the game-plan for running economies from the 1970s onwards is that it was a direct attempt to wrest back control over the economy on the part of management, breaking union organisation as it did so, and radically depoliticising all questions about the economy – from the distribution of its rewards to the control over what and how it produced.

In terms of presentation by the government and media, the economy was shifted from something that we all take part in and create – something, in other words, that is the product of all of our work, plus the natural riches of the world we inhabit – and into a mysterious external force that, like an angry volcano-god, demanded sacrifice: unemployment, pay cuts, austerity. This brutality was glossed over with rhetorical appeals to competition, and to calculation: one was good, the other necessary.

What has happened under the pressure of the pandemic is that the reality of the economy as a social process has been rather starkly revealed. We can all see now that work performed in specific ways matters, whether it is care work or delivering food. The (classically neoliberal) move to disguise all these specific forms of work behind a general claim of seeking ‘productivity’ – with, naturally, some of the most important work being the most ‘unproductive’, since it produces no output that can be reasonably counted or measured, as in the case of carework – suddenly looks rather flimsy.

Meanwhile, this economy has plainly over-rewarded activities that are valueless, or close to valueless, and massively under-rewarded some essentials – to the point of depriving the people performing essential work of the protection they need. What researchers based mainly at Manchester University usefully labelled the “foundational economy” after the Great Financial Crisis should now be the focus for a slow, humane move back towards a functioning society: first get the fundamental tasks that a minimum civilised existence today requires – like keeping shops open or buses running – done right and safely. Everything else is secondary.

The exit from this phase of the pandemic crisis will pose specific problems – which sectors to reopen? how to guarantee safety when they do? – that require specific and detailed answers. The left should be proposing that control of this process is put in the hands of those who actually do the work, and who will be first to suffer the consequences of infection, rather than to the scheming of this government and Tory donors. Income support and the suspension of essential payments, from utility bills to monthly rent, are all necessary during this period and for the immediate future, and current income provision should be preserved and expanded. But these furlough income payments aren’t a job guarantee. In a sense, they are the exact opposite: they are a non-work guarantee. They are guarantees of protection for when work should not be performed.

Guaranteeing jobs in a pandemic.

Indeed, there are specific concerns with job guarantees that the pandemic emergency poses, centred critically on the degree of authoritarianism imposed. It is one thing to say everyone should work. It is quite another to insist that everyone must work, even when it is actively dangerous – or could seem to be so.

The government’s current messaging, such as it is, leans towards should; it may move into must, and cuts to furlough payments inch it towards that. It is essential, in circumstances of pandemic risk and with the possibility of second or more waves of the current virus, as well as the high degree of uncertainty around the immunity of those who have been infected, to have the right to refuse work and to insist on the right of refusal in unsafe conditions. Most people have a good sense of this already, as the polling unease about ending the lockdown clearly indicates.

Of course, it would be possible to write a comprehensive, codified ‘Job Guarantee’ which also built-in recommendations for work only being provided if it was also safe. It would also be possible to write promises in this Job Guarantee to make sure hours were short, pay was high, union membership provided and so on. But the more desirable the features of the guaranteed job, the harder it would run into Kalecki’s political barrier: the greater the encroachment on the prerogative of employers to set the conditions of employment, the greater the resistance by those employers. The job guarantee we would want is not a job guarantee we are likely to get.

In practice, where workplace organisation is weak, a general Job Guarantee would be more likely to create substandard but nonetheless compulsory jobs. Indeed, some of the technocratic supporters of a general Job Guarantee envisage precisely this mechanism at work: creating undesirable guaranteed jobs to reduce the inflationary pressure on the wider economy by undermining conventional employment.

By substituting miserable guaranteed work for the misery of unemployment, workers outside the guaranteed sector can still be disciplined to accept lower wages, worse conditions, and the authority of their employer. And for employers, the ability to draw from a stock of easily accessed, suitably work-disciplined and perhaps even trained workers is, potentially, preferable to drawing additional labour from a stock of the unemployed. We’ve already seen variants of this form of ‘Job Guarantee’ in the form of workfare schemes.

The major barrier to this outcome is the existence of strong, independent trade unions. But as Ben Wray notes, citing Kalecki in his recent article for Conter, these don’t exist at present. If we take strike days as an indication of union power, the latest figures suggest trade unions have never been weaker – at least until now.

Since the financial crisis, we have seen a decade of weak economic growth matched with stagnant or falling real wages but very significant job creation. On Wray’s estimate, about 1m unionised and relatively secure jobs in the public sector have been replaced with non-union, poorly paid and insecure private sector jobs. But the peculiarity of the pandemic is that it has now created the conditions where those who work are potentially in a position to exert some control over how that work is performed. The strikes by retail workers across the US for greater protection at work are the best example of the broader point. For the UK, whilst there have been a few scattered strikes (most notably by bin workers), it has been the top-level negotiations between the TUC and a strongly anti-union government that have been most telling.

What we don’t know, as yet, is how the UK’s labour market, with its weak unions and proliferation of crap jobs, will respond to a collapse in demand as we move out of the initial phase of this crisis. After the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-9, unemployment spiked upwards, but then rapidly came down as shoddy, poorly-paid, insecure jobs were created on a grand scale over the next decade.

The same pattern seems more unlikely now, largely because the immediate future is one in which the regulation of labour will remain extensive, and therefore the ability to create new jobs difficult – and, potentially, expensive in terms of the provision of health protection for additional employees. Unemployment maintained at a continuously higher level is likely, but it may lose the disciplinary function Kalecki highlighted where the need to monitor and regulate labour is still present – as it will be. The shift in the balance of power created by the pandemic can remain in place at least as long as restrictions on work are necessary – and that shift, in turn, opens up the requirement for more direct forms of control and management of labour.

The new frontiers of control: biology and data.

There is a further twist to the problem of the disputed control of work. We can see already the glimmerings of a future in which the biological monitoring, regulation and control of labour becomes far more pervasive: infra-red sensors built into Amazon warehouses, mass contact tracing, temperature checks on the morning commute.

Where once the monitoring of one’s health was largely left to the individual worker, the pandemic is beginning to socialise this on a grand scale. At the same time, the sudden expansion of homeworking under the lockdown has (in effect) hugely expanded the boundaries of the workplace – not just geographically, as is obvious, but also temporally, with working days expanded and the work-life balance “obliterated” for those working from home. Somewhere down the line, of course, the great private behaviour-monitors of credit scoring and life insurance will move into this space, whilst the $14bn commercial genomics market is set to grow exponentially over the next few years.

These are all massively data-intensive technologies and industries. And they increasingly impose themselves on what, historically, was a sphere of human life outside of the market and free from the direct control of capital. The frontier of control for work is no longer simply in the specialised locations where work is performed – the office, the factory, the building site – but, potentially, the entire sphere of our existence, from the home to the workplace, and all points in between.