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Precarity: Local Disorders or New Global Order?* *
Vyacheslav Bobkov
Doctor of Economics, Professor, Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation Chief Research Fellow, Plekhanov Russian University of Economics Head of the Laboratory of the Problems of the Level of Life and the Quality of Life,
Institute of Socio-Economic Studies of Population, Russian Academy of Sciences Address: Stryemiannyi per., 36, Moscow, Russian Federation 117997 E-mail: bobkown@mail.ru
Vadim Kvachev
PhD in Sociology, Senior Lecturer, Plekhanov Russian University of Economics Address: Stryemiannyi per., 36, Moscow, Russian Federation 117997 E-mail: kvachewg@mail.ru
The paper is devoted to the research of the nature of precarity. The authors explore the dual substance of precarity as both global and local phenomena. There are four major premises in the formation of precarity at the global and local levels: the divisions of labor markets deepening inequalities and asymmetries; the Fourth Industrial Revolution providing a demand for labor with machines replacing the living workforce; the changing nature of labor which dissolves the boundaries between alienated labor and independent private life; and the intervention of neoliberal ideology in practice, manifesting itself as invasion of the state and capital into the social production of individuals. The sum of these premises lead to the expansion of precarity in different forms, although mainly in the form of precarious employment. As a result, precarity is considered in the paper as a form of a new global order produced by the multitude of local disorders.
Keywords: precarity, precatious employment, labor market, Industry 4.0, alienation, exploitation, biopolitics, neoliberalism
Introduction
The current ‘normal” mode of relations between employers and employees which also qualifies as standard employment is a result of multiple consensuses between business, workers, and governments in the second half of the 20th century. The very core of these labor relations was created immediately after World War I in the form of the International Labor Organization. This was a response to international changes and, at the same time, a brick in the new world order that politicians tried to build.
The new world order, temporarily established in the second half of the 20th century, required new approaches to labor. The rise of communism in Russia and China showed
© Vyacheslav Bobkov, 2017
© Vadim Kvachev, 2017
© Centre for Fundamental Sociology, 2017 doi: 10.17323/1728-192X-2017-4-72-86
* The research has been implemented with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation (Project № 16-18-10140 “Precarious Employment in the Russian Federation: The Present Situation and Reducing Methods”).
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that exploited workers could become a substantial political force. The task was to loosen the contradictions. The original idea in capitalist countries was to constrain a free market relationship with the labor market, not only because the lack of regulation led to excessive exploitation, but also because poor working conditions resulted in the inability of the worker to provide an elementary reproduction of ones human resources, translating into the degradation of national human capital.
The ILO s core conventions were aimed at turning the savage capitalism of the early 20th century into a more civilized version, with multiple compromises between worker and employee. The very essence of the ILO s principles, “labor is not a commodity” (ILO, 1974), is recorded in its core document, the ILO Constitution. The purpose of the ILO was to show that the labor market, unlike any other free-market, is outside the purview of the laissez-faire principle. The labor market should be regulated rather strictly in order to provide a balance in asymmetric labor relations.
For that purpose, the Organization designed and created social-labor relations which included multiple characteristics including standardized working hours, a social security system, and legal wages not lower than the minimum specified by the state. After the Allies won WWII, the working class was unified by the European Left parties and movements and, as a result of a long struggle, achieved remarkable economic and social progress, including social guarantees. This progress resulted in developing values which later, in the 1990s, was called the “European social model”. It is based on stable labor and the social guarantees of permanent labor contracts and a high level of social protection of the employee. At the same time, in the USSR and Soviet Russia, the level of protection of employees was even higher. Consequently, the influence of the USSR on the European social model development during the 1950s to the 1980s was significant. The basic socially-oriented transformation of this period in Western Europe resulted in the formation of the “standard employment” notion.
At the same time, this was a broad social contract aimed at the stabilization of the social situation and gave an example of satisfactory relations between labor and the capital in non-socialist systems. From that time forward, the standard employment concept is associated with the “full-time nature of the job, its stability and the social standards linked with permanent full-time work” (ILO, 2006: 43-44). These characteristics are rooted in the previously-mentioned attempt to stabilize the labor market system.
At some point, these conditions seemed to be an expected result of the market capitalist system order. A three-way social partnership system is considered to be the representation of the famous Fukuyamas end of history concept of labor markets. At a certain point, this constructed balance between labor and capital seemed to be the long-awaited social harmony under market conditions. Standard employment relations became mainstream not only in the Western countries where they originated, but also worldwide.
However, the economic and social development of global capitalism in recent decades showed that this system was not as stable as it appeared. The system of standardized labor relations seems to fall apart because it is unable to tackle global challenges. The ILOs report from 2012 concludes that there is a “larger majority of people who work, but who do
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not have a decent job, with a decent wage, a secure future, social protection, and access to rights” (ILO, 2012: 3). Established work conditions seem to be increasingly destroyed by different flexible and nonstandard labor practices, resulting in the expansion of precar-ity and precarious employment. These changes manifest themselves in the change of the nature of labor relations and the economic conditions of employment.
There are several basic premises that led to the worldwide expansion of precarity:
• The dynamics of international and national divisions of labor;
• The change in the nature of labor;
• Industry 4.0;
• The spreading of the neoliberalism ideology.
The total of these premises identifies a new form of reality in the labor market, known as precarity (Bobkov, 2017). It is inevitable that precarious employment is defined ex con-trario as the labor relations that are in any sense opposite to standard ones. Thus, precarity comes out as a three-dimensioned phenomenon made up of the lack of income and/ or wealth or poverty, the lack of control over ones space and time (especially at work), and the control over situations and practices including an inability to plan a future career (Herrmann, van der Maesen, 2008:15).
In modern societies, precarity is strongly connected to precarious work. In modern society, the living standards and a multitude of positions and statuses in society are mostly defined in terms of employment. Thus, labor markets are the key to the system of economic distribution: the social position is connected with the position of an individual in the space of the labor market.
In the broadest sense, precarious employment could be understood as a constrained form of work with limited social benefits and social insecurity. The main characteristics of precarious employment are the limited duration of the contract (fixed-term, shortterm, temporary, seasonal, day-labor, and casual labor) and the nature of the employment relationship (triangular and disguised employment relationships, bogus self-employment, subcontracting, and agency contracts) (ILO, 2012: 29). According to Vosko, it is also shaped by the social contexts of exclusion, discrimination, social relations, etc. (Vosko, 2006: 3-4).
For the purpose of understanding the nature of precarity, it is necessary to consider the four above-mentioned premises. The analysis should give us an understanding of the nature of precarity and an answer to the most intriguing question: is the expansion of precarity a result of multiple disorderly originated processes, or is it a certain new global order spread by means of capitalism?
The Dynamics of International and National Divisions of Labor
The standard employment relation system has never provided a fully global social stability. On closer inspection, the insubstantial balance is dissolving. Harmonized labor relations based on the appropriation of surplus value exists in the same way as did previously. Immanuel Wallerstein formulated that the key difference was an unequal exchange be-
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tween the West and Third-World countries in the capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein, 2004). In this exchange, the relatively high status of modern employees in Western countries is a result of transferring the exploitation of workers in less-developed countries. In other words, the high quality of life in advanced economies was created because of the low level of life in poorer countries. This appearance of imperialism in the labor market showed that the general principle of resource shortage has an effect on the labor market, just as in any economic institution.
The massive effect of this form of imperialism affected the world after the fall of the Soviet Union and the appearance of Chinese economic reform. The emergence of capitalism in post-Socialist countries was accompanied with a shocking neoliberal therapy which led to a near-annihilation of standard employment relations (Bobkov, Veredyuk, Aliev: 2017). New labor markets with low-cost labor opened to corporations as a new prospective for cost-saving. It turned out that labor markets are less regulated in less-developed countries, so corporations could set their own working standards. In turn, the governments in these countries were interested in lowering these standards to provide easy terms in raising investments. Ulrich Beck called this ability of corporations to influence governments “meta-power”, which is the ability to intimidate governments with the withdrawal of capital and thus be able to determine provided economic conditions (Beck, 2006: 52-53). These interactions between corporations and national governments resulted in different regimes of labor relations regulation with different standards, requirements of labor conditions, and payments. Local disorders erode the principal unity of approaches proclaimed by the ILO, and create “grey areas” of precarity and exploitation.
Despite all the intentions towards a global government, the world economy remains a patchwork of economic areas defined by the combination of state regulations, informal rules, and corporative policies. Corporations can easily move through these areas in the pursuit of profit maximization, while workforce flows are restricted by migration legislation and governments tied by an inability to negotiate uniform international rules.
Z. Bauman hence proclaims a “disengagement between capital and labor”. Capital is unbound in a global way; it “has cut itself loose from its dependency on labor through a new freedom of movement undreamt of in the past” (Bauman, 2001: 25). Bauman describes it in a rather poetic way: “Having shed the ballast of bulky machinery and massive factory crews, capital travels light with no more than cabin luggage” (Bauman, 2013: 2). Through this liquidity, capital had acquired the possibility to look worldwide for the most advantageous conditions.
No national government will formally renounce standard employment regulations. In some developing countries, very rigid labor relations regulations can be found (Freeman, 2009: 29). In fact, though, many governments of these countries turn a blind eye to the state of labor market enforcement where corporations are allowed to ignore some rules. Moreover, “deregulation in labor markets provided opportunities for employers to cut excess costs...The resultant higher profit has permitted them to grow fast and provide more employment, albeit at low wages and at uncertain terms” (Acharya, 2006: 74-75). In other words, even if unemployment is decreased, new jobs usually are of low quality.
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Labor market deregulation also appears in advanced economies (Peters, 2008). However, in this case, global labor functions distribution leads to deindustrialization and the increase of service-type jobs in the Western and North American economies. In this case, old-fashioned Keynesian tools of regulation cannot embrace the multitudes of precarious work cases concealed in many gaps of even the most rigid regulation framework. The general principle is that cost-effective capital is much faster in decision-making than the state bureaucracy.
On the level of the national economy, the labor market is segmented into categories dependent on the nature of labor (Harrison, Sum, 1979). “Good jobs” are those that include high earnings and the possibility to increase earnings, provide benefits and social security, and control over work activities and terms of employment, as well as over job termination. “Bad jobs” are opposite in everyway (Kalleberg, 2011:9-10). Precarity influences the worker, depending on the nature of his or her labor. The most protected positions are high-qualified intellectual-by-nature workplaces, while the least protected are low-qualified manual jobs.
Precarity reveals itself in the context of global inequality, and each national case is built in this global tendency. The ILO showed cross-national differences in the labor market in its 2013 World of Work report. The number of those who are involved in vulnerable employment in advanced economies in 2013 was 10%, while the figure was 55.4% in developing countries (ILO, 2014: 40). Data provided by the ILO shows that the number of those involved in vulnerable employment in developing countries has risen to 78.9% in 2016 (ILO, 2017). Another report of the ILO shows that the number of working poor in emerging countries in 2016 was 30.2%, while the number was 72.2% in developing countries (ILO, 2016: 4).
However, for the share of workers involved in vulnerable employment, the unemployment rate and working poverty numbers are only several of the many factors identifying the conditions of worldwide precarity. We see only the surface of the statistics. The international division of labor also divides the lives of millions of workers into categories dependent on the role of the nation in the global production process. This is the global distribution of risk of being subject to different forms of precarity.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
In the 1974 book titled The Fragment on Machines, Marx states that as capitalism is developing, the living labor force will be more and more appropriated by the objectified labor of machinery (Marx, 1974). This process can be considered as a replacement of circulating capital by fixed capital. Ultimately, living labor will become an infinitely small quantity in the production process, a minimally-required appendix for the powerful system of machines. The machinery is a result of a social knowledge aimed at production intensification. Thus, objectified labor in the form of embodied intellect, that is, machinery, expels living labor outside the production process, as in the famous proverb “le mort saisit le vif”.
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The differentiated and yet globalized world of labor exists in the context of emerging technologies known as Industry 4.0. As before, these changes came to the labor markets not in the least because of technological development. The evolution of material production in the previous decades was aimed at increasing the role of fixed capital and decreasing the role of variable capital in the production process. Finally, it resulted in Industry 4.0, which caused changes in the nature of work and production.
Within the framework of Industry 4.0, a multitude of self-regulated intelligent electronic systems are created to replace lower-qualified industrial labor, and accomplishes the Marxian transfiguration of labor into a minimally-required appendix. Where there were many factory workers in the previous era, there will be few highly-qualified engineers and programmers in the future.
Of course, the projects within Industry 4.0 mostly exist in high-developed economies. In the Western world, technologies are aimed at the creation of the ‘communism of capital” (Virno, 2004: 110-111) or technological socialism (Mason, 2016), in which radically decreased costs of production will lead to the elimination of scarcity, and the ability of the economy to satisfy all basic needs equally. Moreover, in the long term, Industry 4.0 could extinguish the phenomenon of work in material production as such. If the work is most effectively done by machines, why do we need human participation in the production process at all? The work could become the excessive inhuman activity performing outside the social context. The moderate socialist era could come in the form of a universal basic income replacing traditional wages and other forms of social security.
However, there is a cloud behind every silver lining. The pursuit for the elimination of primitive work is also a response to the dynamics of the international division of labor, labor migration, and the dependence of advanced economies on developing ones. Industry 4.0 should eliminate and disguise the unpleasant marks of imperialist exploitation in developing countries, such as child and forced labor, poor conditions of work, and a low level of life. Nevertheless, it is questionable that Industry 4.0 will positively influence poor countries. On the contrary, the sharp increase of the level of life in Western countries will at the same time provide much more independency on their economies from the global Third-World factories with their cheap labor. Concurrently, the collapse of work of the developing countries’ material production means the elimination of an enormous number of workplaces.
In the case of Industry 4.0, precarity comes as a change in the conditions of production which influences the organization of labor relations, employment, and the labor market. It deepens the existing asymmetry of the labor markets and social inequality by improving the well-being of rich countries and eliminating jobs in the poor ones.
The Nature of Labor
Manuel Castells noted that new technologies will imminently lead society to new forms of labor-relations organization (Castells, 2010). Castells emphasizes that it is traditional working patterns that have to be changed pursuant to new social and digital trends. G.
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Esping-Andersen underlines that “the advanced Western nations’ welfare states were built to cater to an economy dominated by industrial mass production ... This consensus has disappeared because the underlined assumptions no longer obtain” (Esping-Andersen, 1996: 3).
As the scope of the so-called “non-manufacturing sector” widens, labor becomes more and more immaterial, and gradually transforms into “info-labor” (Berardi, 2009). It involves the manipulation of intangible objects such as information, although it does not require complex and expensive means of production, as most info-work can be done by means of a personal computer.
The exploitation of the industrial proletariat as proclaimed by Marx in the 19th century seemed to be an anachronism in a world where intellect as a factor of production means more than proletarian manual labor. In the Fordist industrial production process, the mass of low-qualified workers (the reserve army of labor) unified in terms of skills and the nature of their labor were exploited by capital by the appropriation of surplus value. In the post-Fordist era where the nature of labor changed, it seems obvious that there is no alienation since there is fewer material results of labor.
However, the famous philosopher Paolo Virno objects to such an interpretation of this exploitation (Virno, 2004). The strict rules of Weberian bureaucratic organization were aimed at the delimitation of spaces. A classic bureaucratic attribute is the creation of boundaries between the professional and personal spheres. A person as an individual in this case is also a person as a professional, but these two social roles are different in terms of time (there is working time and leisure time), capabilities (there are professional skills and personal psychological qualities), space (there are working places and home space), etc.
The erosion of this rationale of the division of labor leads to the dissolution of conventional organizational and administrative hierarchies. Virno shows that the problem of the transition in the nature of labor connected with the replacement of the bureaucratic division of working functions by “division of linguistic and cognitive capabilities” (Virno, 2004:18) determining innovativeness and adaptability in an immaterial working process. This leads to the fusion of the professional and personal spheres.
There is no more restriction between professional skills and personal qualities, between working and time off work, or between the workplace and personal space. Virno referred to the Marxian difference between physical and virtuosic labor. In the Fordist era, the only object of capital exploitation was the mechanical function of the human being. In the post-Fordist era, capital fully exploits all the professional, psychological, individual and other qualities of ones personality. In the Fordist era, labor was alienated in the form of material production; in the post-Fordist era, it is alienated in the form of the appropriation of the worker s personality for the purpose of immaterial production. Through this vision, we could develop an understanding of precarity as a new form of exploitation and alienation where the internal sources of the individual are put on the free-market as the products. This leads us directly to the next premise of the political and ideological parameters of precarity.
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Neoliberalism
Karl Polanyi, a social predictor rather than an economist, wrote about the current economics system, stating that “a civilization was being disrupted by the blind action of soulless institutions the only purpose of which was the automatic increase of material welfare” (Polanyi, 2001: 228). The Great Transition, documented by Polanyi, was a transition from a multi-sphere, complex civilization to a society dominated by inevitable free-market laws. This is why precarity is not only an abstract but also a political and ideological issue. Precarity itself could be described as “a tendency of economic and legal deregulation of labor relations and an increase in the forced labor in the time of parallel overthrow of social guarantees” (Bobkov, Chernykh, Aliev, 2011: 161), i.e., the practice of turning social-labor relations into free-market relations. The transformation itself is based on the ideology of neoliberalism, a fundamentalist version of conventional wisdom among economists persuaded that a society could be reduced to a market.
L. F. Vosko considered standard employment relations that are constructed from three prominent pillars: (a) bilateral employment relations which implies that the labor market, unlike other markets, is highly regulated, and imposes responsibility for social stability as well as for economic efficiency; (b) standardized working time, which is uniform and synchronized paid working hours, working weeks, and the working year; (c) and the continuity of employment, that is, open-ended employment relationships (Vosko, 2010: 52-61). Neoliberalism attacked all three of these pillars as a way to destroy uneconomical conditions in labor relations.
One of the very first and farthest-reaching attacks on standard employment relations was executed by the assertive concept of human capital introduced by the distinctive representative of fundamentalist free-market ideology proponents, G. Becker (Becker, 1993). The aim of the human capital concept was to conceal the very nature of labor relations, and to present it as if the employee is equal to the employer. This means that both are equal economic agents in the free market, and both are entrepreneurs. The only difference between them, according to the theory, is that the employee owns immaterial human capital and an aggregate of innate abilities, and acquired knowledge, skills and motivations. In other words, an individual in the labor market operates with his or her personal skills and qualities as if they were parts of some sort of capital analogous to the material capital of the business.
This concept is insightfully described by L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello as a “new spirit of capitalism”. This new capitalist order implies that each worker is an investor and entrepreneur of his or her own human and intellectual capital. A person can invest in one or another “project”, and then return a profit (Boltanski, Chiapello, 2011). Just as a businessman manages his capital, a worker manages his time and resources, investing them in one or another project as a form of self-investment. He takes risks, and in the case of success, he earns a profit. On the one hand, as a result, the responsibility for social security and quality of life transfers from the government or the employers to the employees in this model. At the same time, an unsuccessful career and poverty are interpreted as
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an ineffective project or, in other words, a bankruptcy. On the other hand, work and leisure interfuse with each other because, in the conditions of this new modern capitalism, a ceaseless flood of projects demands the full immersion into a working process that does not correspond to traditional work schedules and regimes. Boltanski and Chiapello mark that the new capitalist order demands to reject “stability, rootage, devotion to one particular place, assurance in relations and liabilities for the long term” (Boltanski, Chiapello, 2011: 229).
The philosopher and sociologist A. Gorz proclaims that the new economy of labor requires a total dedication from workers. He writes that “workers should become businessmen by themselves and even at the big factories ... they have to care for profitability of their work” (Gorz, 2007: 6). The neoliberal paradigm not only constructs a new global order, but also the system of production of a human being. The new subject is constructed under this system: a worker-entrepreneur is independently managing his own work, time, and human capital, while at the same time, is exposed to the alienation of his own personality to severe market relations where everything can be sold and bought (Tsianos, Papadopoulos, 2006).
The neoliberal concept was the manual of practice for the governments in the last quarter of the 20th century. It is praised by representatives of this ideology in Russia as well. Its absurdity in Russian conditions is obvious, as the investment in the skills of the workers never recovered with an increase in income. More than 16% of employees are poor, 50% more suffer from a low level of life and do not provide an expanded reproduction of material conditions in their lives. The most precarious groups are intellectual workers such as medics, teachers, researchers, etc. Their wages and incomes are generally already much lower than the low-to-middle average performance at both the national and regional levels. As the famous opponent of neoliberalism, D. Harvey, claims, “neoliberal state is necessarily hostile to all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation. Independent trade unions or other social movements... have therefore to be disciplined, if not destroyed, and this in the name of the supposedly sacrosanct individual liberty of the isolated laborer” (Harvey, 2005: 75).
Precarity is a practical issue in which the ideology of neoliberalism results and, at the same time, is its ultimate representation. P. Herrmann describe it as “implementing the claims” of the current system: extreme individualism of classical economics and its translation into a libertarian political culture is consequentially implemented and defined as new principal norm of the entire social fabric” (Herrmann, 2011: 33-34). This principal neoliberal norm states the new global order in which deregulated, entrepreneurial human resources replaces the socially-provided labor in the former welfare state.
What actually happens is that social labor implies the usage of common social skills and intellect; thus, the result of the production process is not only a commodity but also a “production of social relations” (Hardt, Negri, 2009). That idea referred to is one expressed by Marx when he wrote “The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the con-
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trol of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it” (Marx, 1974). Immaterial informational labor thus results in the construction of social organization.
The strategic aim of competitive fighting of capital in the labor market in society is the control over personality, as long as the individual characteristics could be appropriated as a factor of production and, in this sense, as human capital. Capital invades the process of human production and reproduction. This is what M. Hardt and A. Negri called the “biopolitical production” (Hardt, Negri, 2009). “Biopolitics” is a term invented by M. Foucault to describe a neoliberal technique of deregulatory regulation: it establishes a set of rules that is alleged to be objective and depersonalized while it is integrated into the system of values and beliefs of a person. Then biopolitics is controlling his or her behavior, leaving the person with the feeling that a free choice had been made (Foucault, 1997).
A human being produced in the context of biopolitical production is “atomic individual whose natural self-interest and tendency to compete must be fostered and enhanced. He or she is a fundamentally self-interested and rational individual who will navigate the social realm by constantly making rational choices based on economic knowledge and the strict calculation of the necessary costs and desired benefits. The popularity of self-help guides and self-management manuals are seen as a symptom of this current, neoliberal understanding of the subject: individuals are solely responsible for a number of problems that were previously considered social or political issues” (Oksala, 2013: 66-67). The variety of techniques is countless, from teaching children social studies and economics at school, to self-education, mindset trainings, communications in social nets, etc.
In the neoliberal paradigm, precarity appears as the deregulation of the social system, a shift of risks from the state and business towards the employee. The precarious conditions of an individual destroy the assurance of the social security system, and leaves the individual face-to-face with a free market. The commoditization of labor reveals itself in the objectification of the human personality.
Conclusions
The great deconstruction of standard employment relations and traditional labor market regulation have roots in the following four above-mentioned premises: the dynamics of divisions of labor markets deepening inequalities and asymmetries; the Fourth Industrial Revolution providing a demand for labor with machines replacing living workforce; the changing of the nature of labor that dissolves boundaries between alienated labor and an independent private life; and the intervention of neoliberal ideology manifesting itself as an invasion of the state and capital into the social production of individuals. The totality of these premises leads to the expansion of precarity in different forms, but mainly in the form of precarious employment as projected on the precarity of modern societies.
The main question of whether these premises represent disorder or order was raised by Marco Ricceri (Ricceri, 2016). Proponents of the first point of view (let us call it “legitimizing” as it claims that positive outcomes will be achieved) insisted that the current state of society in general and labor in particular is a result of uncontrolled global process, an
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inevitable new step in the development of civilization. This is why workers should make peace with these new unstable and precarious conditions and prepare to change the way they work. The second point of view (let us call it ‘critical” as it not only sees imbalances and controversies in the modern state of thing but also points out its benefits) tried to show the avoidable character of these capitalistic transformations.
In fact, each point of view is partially true. Local disorders form a new global order manifested in precarity, which starts from the precarious employment in the labor markets, and results in the existential precarity of an individual and society (Sennett, 2006). However, this global order is not governed by some evil force from the outside, but constituted by many social and economic practices existing in the context of the capitalist system. The problem of precarity is not in struggling against something outside human society, but in changing society itself.
Paradoxically, precarity is destroying and bolstering the global order at the same time. Local disorders produce inconsistent regimes of regulation and conflicting economic zones, but also create global order which is rather chaotic, but still is sufficiently organized. This is the true nature of this great destruction of the world of labor: local disorders form up a worldwide hierarchy mirroring the level and scope of global precarity. This system is a completely new capitalist order which no longer suffers from crises only because it is itself a crisis of capitalism shaking society to its foundations (Gorz, 2007: 48). Thus, precarity is not a coincidence, but is an institutionalized order which is pragmatically and consciously constructed as an element of global and national policies (Sager, 2015: 120-126).
However, as Foucault stated, where there is power, there is resistance. Precarious conditions not only make exploitation more sophisticated, but also provides the worker with the resources to consolidate and fight for their rights. Uber drivers use the soft spot in the software to increase the constantly-decreasing prices of the company, and thus get more money from their work; remote workers get control over their time and effort; restrictive administrative power over office workers dissolves if there is no office at all. Moreover, precarization, especially if it is voluntary, does not always means the worsening of labor conditions. Social quarantines may exist in the form of informal network liabilities between the employer and the employee existing outside state regulatory measures (De-genne, 2002: 210-211).
Precarity invariably is not a choice, but a new global socio-economic order. Consisting of local disorders, it allows for multitude adaptations and resistance strategies. These strategies for both the employer and the employee provide measures for balancing imbalances, and the equalization of inequalities. Consequently, the future is open for improving employment relations and the labor struggle. What is needed from researchers is intellectual vigilance and a conscientious attitude to the world of work.
Finally, the problem of precarious employment is not in the struggle with some outside force but with the changes of the society as a whole. This change could be based on a transformation to the co-evolution of society and nature (Bobkov, Bobkov, Herrmann, 2016). The resulting society could be founded on the scientific principles of the develop-
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mental acceleration of human intellect in regard to the complexity to the world around it
(Bobkov et al, 2017: 673).
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Неустойчивость: локальные беспорядки или новый глобальный порядок?
Вячеслав Бобков
Доктор экономических наук, профессор, заслуженный деятель науки Российской Федерации, научный
руководитель ОАО «Всероссийский центр уровня жизни», руководитель научных проектов РЭУ
им. Г. В. Плеханова, заведующий Лабораторией проблем уровня и качества жизни Института социально-
экономических проблем народонаселения РАН
Адрес: Стремянный пер. д. 36, г. Москва, Российская Федерация П7997
E-mail: bobkovvn@mail.ru
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Вадим Квачев
Кандидат социологических наук, старший преподаватель, Российского экономического университета им. Г. В. Плеханова
Адрес: Стремянный пер. д. зб, г. Москва, Российская Федерация П7997 E-mail: kvachevvg@mail.ru
Статья посвящена исследованию природы неустойчивости. Авторы показывают ее двойственный характер как локального и глобального явления. Существуют четыре основных предпосылки, которые влияют на распространение неустойчивости на глобальном и локальных уровнях: разделение труда, углубляющее асимметрию и неравенство на рынке труда; четвертая промышленная революция, замещающая труд машинами; изменяющаяся природа самого труда, размывание границы между отчужденным трудом и частной жизнью; и распространение неолиберальной идеологии и практики, которая проявляется как вторжение государства и капитала в процесс социального производства индивидов. Сумма этих предпосылок ведет к расширению неустойчивости в различных формах, главным образом в форме неустойчивой занятости. Неустойчивость становится формой нового глобального порядка, возникающего как результат множества локальных беспорядков
Ключевые слова: неустойчивость, неустойчивая занятость, рынок труда, Индустрия 4.0, отчуждение, эксплуатация, биополитика, неолиберализм
