Abstract
Precarious Lives has many strengths. The book is impressive in scale and ambition. Arne Kalleberg makes an exceptional effort to define and conceptualize precarious, nonstandard, irregular work and analyze its prevalence and divergent consequences in six rich industrial democracies. Precarity isn’t a thing in itself, Kalleberg argues, but a pattern of employment that takes shape differently depending on government social welfare systems and employers’ labor relations policies. Moreover, the volume is sophisticated in its theoretical breadth, reaching from canonical varieties of capitalism and power resources theories to financialization arguments to ideas about liquid modernity. In addition, Kalleberg is acutely aware that the biggest consequence of precarious labor is that workers bear the risks, as opposed to employers and governments. This privatization of risk has, as he shows in an excellent Chapter Seven, dire consequences for the subjective sense of well-being for individuals and their families. But this is a book symposium, and I am supposed to be here for provocation, not praise. Let me turn to limitations, or perhaps better to say different emphases that I wish Kalleberg had pursued.
One, I would have liked to have seen more of an organizational emphasis. Kalleberg repeatedly observes that the post-World War II Fordist consensus was a golden era for only a minority of the labor force—white men working for large organizations. But he doesn’t mention the boring conformity of that era. Arne and I are from the same generation, and surely he recoiled as much as I did at the thought of spending one’s entire life working for the same company. The security we reminisce about today felt like prison with golden handcuffs back in the 1960s. This Fordist system was poised for overthrow. Piore and Sabel (1984) in their Second Industrial Divide showed how flexible specialization outflanked mass production, and Ben Harrison (1994) in his Lean and Mean analyzed how decentralized companies undercut slow moving behemoths. Labor historian Louis Hyman (2018) in his recent book Temp emphasizes how the risk-averse, loyal company man was ripe for picking. He focuses on two organizations, Manpower, the temporary staffing agency, and McKinsey, the global consulting firm. Manpower brought the outsourcing of personnel to American corporations in the 1970s and made it easy and legible. There was no turning back. McKinsey and other elite consulting firms, with their own exhaustive and intensive internal up or out career ladders, basically destroyed the white-collar middle class by restructuring, delayering, and eliminating multiple levels and units in corporate hierarchies. Temporary and flexible became organizational alternatives to permanent and rigid. Understanding the differential receptivity of organizations to these changes and how new organizations created in this century have embraced flexibility are crucial topics to explore.
Two, a cultural lens to studying precarity seems necessary. We have witnessed an ideological transformation, with entrepreneurship, startup businesses, social movements, and nonprofits celebrated at the expense of established organizations. This enshrinement of agency, of being a founder, of disrupting established entities and mindsets has now become baked into our zeitgeist. This cultural transformation in which things that were solid become liquid even remakes nonstandard work. Temporary work in response to changes in demand has become cutely labeled a side hustle. Instability and unpredictability produce ingenuity. Think of all the examples from the pandemic: craft brewers making sanitizers, knitting clubs producing masks, upscale restaurants turning to takeout, and neighborhood bodegas becoming pantry shelves. We marvel at the rapidity of this ability to repurpose and in so doing further enshrine an entrepreneurial ideology.
This culture shift in the United States to being entrepreneurial and adaptive is not entirely new. Twenty years ago, I wrote an essay asking whether work has come to resemble the challenges of gigging practiced by itinerant freelance musicians (Powell 2001). What is different now is that a mode of work that was formerly perceived by some as aberrant and others as a necessity is now venerated by many. Entrepreneurship has become the normative ideal for a neoliberal era. And one might suspect that the virtual, remote experiment we are currently living through will further erode connections between employees and employers and increase free agency. To be sure, there is resistance to this new era, by both gig workers and high-tech workers (Vallas 2019), but protests against digital subjugation also signal how pervasive the credo of “move fast and break things” has become.
Three, one area where the book seems somewhat time stamped, to me at least, is in its consideration of technological change, most significantly how digital data and artificial intelligence are reshaping work. Perhaps nowhere is this more dramatic than in what we used to call the professions. In the previous century, it was common to say that a job is how you make money, a professional career is how you make your mark. But professional careers have been irrevocably altered, with nonstandard work now much more commonplace. The medical profession is a prime example. The patient in a hospital bed is now a placeholder for the real patient who is no longer in the bed, but in a computer. That virtual entity gets all the attention, and electronic health records have displaced living persons. Studies show that for every hour medical professionals spend with patients, two hours are spent with electronic health records. These records and the attention to them not only render medical care draining and soulless, they detach it from place. Records can be read from anywhere; work schedules become untethered from organizations.
Medical work teams are now assembled from across the country. We have seen vivid examples in the current pandemic, with emergency nurses and doctors rushing around the country to help in various hot spots. Back in 2018, which seems like decades ago, I had major back surgery. As we waited for the anesthesiologist to show up, I interviewed the twelve-person team, lying on the surgical gurney. Only my surgeon lived locally. Nine of the twelve participating staff lived out of state—in Alabama, Georgia, and Texas, near airports. They commuted to a Silicon Valley hospital for three days of intense twelve-hour shifts because, they said, of high pay, benefits, and better working conditions. Their schedules were produced two weeks in advance so as to permit just-in-time coordination. High-skill medicine, too, has become precarious, and these working conditions increase detachment and burnout.
When place and work become disconnected and work hours are routinely irregular, the damages to both the self and the civic fabric of communities are real. Kalleberg is sensitive to these issues in his opening chapter, discussing work by Beck, Bauman, and Standing. But the comparative discussions in this important book don’t follow these arguments as closely. Only in his discussion of Japan, which he knows so well from his earlier work on Japanese workplaces, does he dwell on how precarity robs people of real contact with other humans. I wanted more on the effects that precarity has on attachments. Kalleberg is sensitive to how precarity reshapes lives and careers—young people living with their parents into their 30s, delaying family and children amid declining prospects of income security. I would have loved for him to go further and ask what the wider consequences are to community, to a sense of membership in organizations, to social bonds writ large. If technological change weakens the spatial relationship between work and the household, what are the second-order effects on friendships, associations, and investments in durable relationships?
We typically see fragments of the future distributed throughout the present. Organizational, cultural, and technological lenses come together in contentious debates today over the gig economy versus the sharing economy. I will use the less loaded term, “platform economy.” We are in the midst of a reorganization of the economy in which the owners of the monopoly platforms are developing power that outreaches that of the factory owners in the early Industrial Revolution (Kenney and Zyman 2020; Vallas and Schor 2020). And just as the factory system remade the fabric of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life, today’s world is being reorganized around digital platforms, creating a world of work that parallels the nineteenth century putting-out system more than either the twentieth-century factory or bureaucracy. These online structures, whether public ones like Amazon or Etsy or Uber or Zoom or more private digital service tools provided by firms like Salesforce, enable and control an enormous array of human activities. Some pundits imagine a future of mini-entrepreneurs working on flexible schedules and pursuing their own initiatives. That may be the case for a fortunate minority who will have successful, albeit precarious careers as app developers or YouTube stars. But for many others, the platform economy creates irregular work schedules and part-time work without employment-related benefits. What balance will there be among jobs as the digital wave flows through our society and economy, and who bears the costs as jobs are replaced or reconfigured? Even though the algorithmic revolution and cloud computing are the cornerstones of the platform economy, the contours of it can be shaped by national policies and investments and political will. How do we create a social safety net that cushions and meshes with the new economy of platforms and digitization, a program that addresses the costs of health care, housing, and education?
Kalleberg’s thoughtful analysis points to Denmark and its policy of flexicurity as one advanced democracy that has mitigated some of the effects of precarity better than most countries. Danes are, indeed, among the world’s happiest people, and for many good reasons. But Denmark is also a very homogeneous society averse to immigrants. Is it a model for larger, more heterogeneous countries? Portable social security, retirement benefits, and health care not tied to specific employment contracts are central aspects of the Danish system that could and should be adopted by others.
Building a political coalition in support of policies that mitigate employment insecurity is a considerable challenge. A universal basic income was not on many people’s radar screens when this book was written. But cities from Stockton, California to Helsinki, Finland have experimented with it, and a variety of scholars studying how to create a new social ethics in an era of AI now take UBI very seriously. The pandemic has given many displaced workers and their families a type of experience with it. Whatever its limitations, it carries the term universal, and it opens discussion of a social wage, as opposed to a market wage. This impressive book enlarges the conversation about how six countries are coping with the harsh winds of precarity. But nothing is preordained about how precarity remakes work and lives: its consequences will be the result of organizational, legal, and political choices that socities must make.