Lost in Work , livre ebook

Lost in Work
A brilliant, searing expos of the lies underpinning work.
-Owen Jones
Fascinating and absorbing ... a corrective to the widespread view that anyone can find fulfilment through their job, if they just work hard enough.
-Grace Blakeley, editor of Futures of Socialism
Amelia Horgan is, in the words of organiser Fred Ross, a social arsonist. Her book will set your world on fire. Somewhere in our bones, we know that work is getting worse. But with this book, Horgan has provided the match and the kindling we need to burn the whole thing down.
-Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won t Love You Back
At last, a book that helps us appreciate the long history of the working-class challenge to the tyranny of work that puts class struggle in the workplace firmly back on the agenda.
-John McDonnell, former Shadow Chancellor of the Labour Party
An excellent and important book. It combines sharp political insight with nuanced analyses ... an invaluable resource to those with an interest not just in better understanding labour and exploitation, but also in the possibilities of freedom and collective joy.
-Helen Hester, Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics, University of West London, author of Xenofeminism
I can t think of a more succinct and elegant expression of what work does to us and, in turn, why it s never been more urgent to shape our work.
-Will Stronge, Director of Research at Autonomy and author of Post-Work
An incisive analysis of the contemporary crisis of work - and a ringing call to reimagine it.
-Amia Srinivasan, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, and author of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century
Outspoken by Pluto
Series Editor: Neda Tehrani
Platforming underrepresented voices; intervening in important political issues; revealing powerful histories and giving voice to our experiences; Outspoken by Pluto is a book series unlike any other. Unravelling debates on feminism and class, work and borders, unions and climate justice, this series has the answers to the questions you re asking. These are books that dissent.
Also available:
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A Story of Migration
Leah Cowan
Behind Closed Doors
Sex Education Transformed
Natalie Fiennes
Feminism, Interrupted
Disrupting Power
Lola Olufemi
Split
Class Divides Uncovered
Ben Tippet

First published 2021 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Amelia Horgan 2021
The right of Amelia Horgan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4091 3 Paperback ISBN 978 1 78680 699 4 PDF ISBN 978 1 78680 700 7 EPUB ISBN 978 1 78680 701 4 Kindle


This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Work s fantasy
1. Work, capitalism and capitalist work
2. Contesting work
3. The paradox of new work
4. What does work do to us as individuals?
5. Jobification nation: When play is serious business
6. What does work do to society?
7. Phantoms and slackers: Resistance at work
8. Getting together: Organised labour and the workers dream
9. Time off: Resistance to work
Conclusion: Getting to work
Acknowledgements
While writing this book, I became very ill. After having Covid-19 in March 2020, I spent most of that year in bed, too weak to get up, struggling to think, and struggling to write. This period of illness meant that this book could only be written in fits and spurts; a few sentences one day, a paragraph or so the next. This means that this is a slightly different book than the book I had imagined it would be. Despite this, I hope it lives up to the promise of theory, of what theory can and should do - take what is assumed to be natural, fixed, insurmountable and show it as contingent, mutable, and surmountable. In short, that most fundamental prerequisite for action, hope. Hope for better work, hope against work as we know it, hope for a better world.
When I was ill, I saw quite how much people wanted to care for each other and how much those desires for care were frustrated by the way our society is set up. After an initial (and impressive) flurry of mutual aid activity, older patterns established themselves. Rather than collective, transformative effort, the continuance of day-to-day life was secured through unpaid women s work in the home, and by poorly paid service and logistics work outside of it; the more things change, the more they stay the same. We might be wary of making claims about what people are fundamentally like, but it is striking how much effort is required to interrupt the kindness and care that people desperately want to share with each other.
With that in mind, thanks are due to those friends and comrades who supported me with so much care, and in particular to Gabriel (Constantin) Mehmel, Hareem Ghani, Huda Elmi, Martha Perotto-Wills, Jenny Killin and Sean O Neill.
Special thanks are due to those who read, commented on and vastly improved drafts of chapters: Daisy Porter, Freddie Seale, James Elliott, James Greig, Josh Gabert-Doyon, Orlando Lazar, Neha Shah, Robert Maisey, Sarra Facey, Sam Dolbear, Steffan Blayney and particularly to Lorna Finlayson. Any errors or omissions are my own.
Thanks too to Neda Tehrani for patience and care in editing and support throughout the process of writing this book.
And, to Richard, thank you for everything.
Introduction: Work s fantasy
There s a comforting narrative of progress about work: the bad old days of horrible jobs - of children working in mines, of cotton mills, of workplace injuries, of cruel bosses - are gone. Instead, the only problem of work that we have left is that not everyone has the right kind of job for them, or that barriers prevent particular groups - women, people of colour, disabled people - from accessing particular kinds of jobs. For many, though, the reality of contemporary work is rather different. Against this narrative of progress, we might first point to the continued existence of hazardous work around the world. While most of the extremely dangerous and hyper-exploitative work in extractive industries has been exported to the Global South, in the Global North there are persistent problems of ill health and poor conditions associated with work, and many examples of tyrannical bosses exercising arbitrary power over their employees. In Britain, there were at least 1.4 million workers suffering from work-related ill health in 2018/19. 1 While the number of people who become ill because of work had been decreasing for many years, it briefly increased in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and has plateaued since.
The Covid-19 crisis has shown that risk of harm to health at work is not evenly distributed. While the lack of PPE, long hours, and offensively low pay that NHS workers faced received rightful condemnation, the risks faced by workers in the low-pay and low-protection service sector were less often remarked upon. 2 Partly, this was because of something of a cover-up by employers: thanks to a loophole that allowed them not to report cases that were, on their judgement, transmitted within the community rather than at work, employers were in practice able to decide for themselves if cases of Covid-19 in their workplace were reported as such. 3 This was a particular problem in the food processing sector, where media reports found at least 1461 cases of Covid-19 and six deaths, yet official reports only declared 47 cases and not a single fatality. 4 At one food processing plant, secret filming revealed that workers were threatened with redundancy for taking sick leave. Similarly, in call centres, workers were expected to continue coming into work, even as other workplaces closed their doors, and even for work that was not essential , like debt collection or selling new phone deals. 5 Essential , perhaps, not to collective survival in the face of a dangerous new virus, but to profits.
The first stage of the crisis has shown that workers are exposed to very different levels of risk; some of us have been able to work from home, uncomfortable and difficult as that can sometimes be, while others have had no choice but to risk exposure to a potentially deadly virus. Despite the rhetoric about essential workers and key workers , those who had to continue to work in person were not only those whose jobs could reasonably be deemed essential . Just over half of people continued going to work. While essential might conjure up images of supermarket shelf-stackers or of nurses and doctors, in reality, apart from the few sectors that were actually shut down, it was up to employers to declare whether their companies did essential work. 6 When shops were reopened, the risk of death for retail assistants rose to 70% higher than average for men and 65% higher for women. 7 The virus, it turns out, does discriminate. In a society that is highly unequal, like the UK, the conditions under which people will experience the same health problem will be vastly different. These differences are not secondary; rather, they can define the likelihood of becoming sick and the severity of the illness itself. Different workers were exposed to different levels of risk and when combined with structural risks, those subject to them were even more likely to become sick, even more likely to die. In particular, the combinat