Abstract
While Beck’s theories of insecure work have been subject to sustained critique for over two decades, his analysis offers two enduring insights into the scale and structure of employment insecurity.
First, while Beck sometimes overstated the extent of insecurity, it is by no means clear that the alarm he raised about the scale of insecurity was a false one. As is well known, Beck predicted a new era of insecure work: an ‘age of insecurity’ (1992) and ‘Brazilianization of the West’ (2000). These ideas attracted their strongest critiques in more recent years, with influential texts by Doogan (2005, 2009) and Fevre (2007) challenging Beck’s contention that work is becoming more insecure. For example, Doogan (2005: 66) argued that Beck’s account is ‘devoid of statistical evidence’ and contradicts evidence of labour market stability across a range of European nations. To this statistical inaccuracy, Doogan (2009) added a charge of political naivety: he claimed that theorists like Beck have stoked an unjustified fear of insecure employment or unemployment that undermines resistance to neo-liberal policy regimes.
While Beck’s prediction of a ‘Brazilianization’ of work – the collapse of permanent employment into a patchwork of insecure jobs – is an empirical overstatement, counter-narratives of employment stability can also be misleading. Insecure work did rapidly expand in some regions (see e.g. Campbell, 2004) and employment classes (see e.g. Conley, 2008). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s – the period Beck identified as the most dramatic expansion in employment insecurity – the proportion of temporary jobs almost doubled in the Netherlands, and more than doubled in Spain (Campbell, 2004: 97) and France (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2002: 224). In Australia, casual employment – an especially insecure form of employment (Tweedie, 2013) – grew rapidly during this time (Campbell, 2000: 71), and has remained high at around one in five employed persons. Recent data reveals six Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations with over 20 per cent temporary employment; and ten with over 15 per cent (OECD, 2015: 281). Thus, while ‘patchwork’ employment is not the new norm, the attention Beck drew to employment insecurity still matters.
Beck’s second legacy is his analysis of novel structures of insecurity, which draws more nuanced links between patterns and politics of insecurity than critics of Beck’s ‘Brazilianization’ thesis typically acknowledge. Beck (1992: 97) argued that employment insecurity was not only spreading, but also taking on new forms, with risks like insecure work spilling across old boundaries, generating ‘novel patterns of upward and downward mobility’ and ‘new hierarchies and differentiations which are internal to social classes’. A paradigmatic example is the spread of insecure working conditions into traditionally secure middle class occupations in Australia (Chan, 2013). While most insecure work is still clustered in low-skilled occupations, a relatively recent phenomenon is the growth of insecurity in high-skilled professional occupations, affecting teachers, nurses, lawyers, journalists, translators, academics, community workers and public sector employees. A similar spread of employment insecurity into high-skilled work has been identified among health professionals in the USA (McKeown, 2005) and public servants in the UK (Conley, 2002, 2008). While these jobs often have professional status, they drive downward social mobility because they lack key rights and entitlements, such as paid sick leave or holiday pay, and are generally poorly represented within union structures.
Beck’s (2007: 686) concept of ‘a capitalism without classes’ links this type of shift in how employment risk is distributed to a decline in conventional public-political means for challenging employment insecurity. For instance, Beck’s essay ‘Beyond Status and Class?’ (Beck, 1992: 91–102) suggests that contemporary capitalism simultaneously generates novel inequalities and undermines the collective means for challenging these inequalities. Thus, Beck argues that contemporary societies individualize the responsibility for coping with risk in new ways. Chan (2013) documents this process among newly insecure professionals in Australia. These workers not only lack the security and benefits of conventional professional roles, but also internalize responsibility for their predicament, which undermines either their aspiration or capacity to mobilize collective resources to challenge their working conditions.
Beck’s concept of ‘capitalism without classes’ also prompted strong criticism. Class theorists produced a succession of qualitative studies that compared the work trajectories of individuals with low social and economic resources with those of individuals with high social and economic resources. These studies concluded that employment insecurity conforms to typical, rather than novel, class patterns. In the new economy, these authors argue, highly educated workers are still the winners or ‘ideal risk subjects’ (Cooper, 2008: 1232), and low-skilled workers are still the losers (Atkinson, 2010). Yet despite their wealth of empirical evidence, class theorists tended to methodologically exclude high-skilled but precariously employed workers as anomalies, rather than seeing them as everyday examples of otherwise large scale economic change. In doing so, rather than exposing a lack of conceptual rigour, these studies tended to reinforce Beck’s contention that key sociological categories need to be sensitised to the novel forms of inequality that contemporary insecurity can create.