The shift to the right in liberal democracies fuels inequality among working people and incites hatred against those who come from other countries or are dependent on government benefits. In doing so, politicians and their allies in business and the media act in accordance with the logic of the capitalist system, which is based on difference and competition. Still, Nicole Mayer-Ahuja argues, there are considerable potentials for politics of solidarity.
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‘That’s just the way it is.’ When employees talk about their work, this phrase often comes up. You have to do everything you can to keep your job or find a new one. There is a shortage of staff, yet ever more performance is demanded. The next project is, again, calculated too tightly because you cannot negotiate with the market or customers. Digitalization, transformation, global competition, and the current armament race are descending on humanity like forces of nature, arguably creating ‘objective’ constraints that must be accepted. ‘There is no alternative’ has been the sound of our times since Margaret Thatcher. In order to overcome this powerful restriction on thinking, we must understand the society in which we live, how wage labor is changing under these conditions, and what steps can be taken toward a different, more humane world of work.
Inequality and competition are the ruling principles of capitalism
Since Helmut Schelsky proclaimed a “leveled middle-class society” in the 1950s, the ‘old’ Federal Republic of Germany has been portrayed as classless. The “elevator” that Ulrich Beck spoke of seemed to be carrying everyone upward in the wake of the economic boom and full employment. However, since the 2008 financial and economic crisis at the latest, this image has become deeply fractured. Amid rising unemployment, politically promoted precarious employment conditions, mounting pressure on workers, and dashed expectations of advancement, notions of a class society seem to appear more and more convincing – even though they had been almost extinct for decades. Whether in literary autobiographies, academic studies, political debates, or surveys (e.g., post-election polls), factory workers, retail employees, logistics center workers, and kindergarten teachers are describing themselves as part of the working class. Such statements are typically provoked by the observation that socioeconomic inequality is becoming more and more significant and that it is painfully limiting people’s life chances.
The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. In Germany, the richest one percent of the population currently owns around 30 percent of the total wealth. Only in the USA is this deep divide more pronounced, and it runs largely parallel to the familiar one between capital and labor: between those who can buy and use the labor power of others to increase their wealth and those who have no other option than to sell their labor power to secure their livelihood.
The working class (i.e. all those who sell their labor power for a living), has grown steadily since the 19th century. Currently comprising over 90 percent of the working population, they all share a fundamentally similar experience with wage labor: they cannot afford to lose their jobs because they lack the assets necessary to make ends meet otherwise. Through their work, they contribute to the profits and wealth of others. They work under external control in companies where decisions about what, how, and for what purpose they should work are not made democratically, but are the preserve of management and company executives.
At the same time, however, this working class is clearly not homogeneous. It includes assembly line workers and engineers in industry, as well as supermarket cashiers, programmers, and cleaning staff. As British social historian E.P. Thompson has argued, this has been the case since the very beginning of capitalism. Paradoxically, however, just as almost everyone gradually became dependent on wages, the differences between these groups of employees turned more significant. Wage labor united working people – and deepened the lines of division between them. Additionally, the generalization of wage labor goes hand in hand with the generalization of competition. Companies compete with each other for markets and resources, nation states compete for investment and geopolitical influence, and wage earners – i.e., working people, men and women, young and old, locals and immigrants – compete with each other for jobs, promotions, or interesting projects. In short, they compete for jobs that provide material security and satisfaction, for chances and perspectives in their professional as well as their private lives. In marked contrast to neoliberal rhetoric, which only recognize individual success or failure, the results of this omnipresent competition and their effects on working people are closely linked to the constraints of class society.
Current dynamics of class formation
The deep divide between capital and labor may be stable, but the social relationships between these two groups, as well as between different groups of employees are not. After all, wage labor in capitalism is a deeply contradictory affair. It is always based on difference and competition but can also have unifying effects, thus bringing employees together, across all dividing lines. Consider classic factory work, for example. There is traditionally a clear line separating management from employees, which is particularly evident ‘from below.’ Yet, with the introduction of group work in the wake of Toyotist reforms, more responsibility was transferred ‘downwards,‘ to automobile workers on the shop floor. This inspired hopes for more self-determined work, but these were generally disappointed. Nevertheless, the idea that a different standard of cooperation is actually possible lives on in the minds of many workers. Hence the statement of one interviewee that ‘group work implies that everyone supports each other’ is no exception. As a matter of fact, group work was used to intensify work and fuel competition between groups, departments, and locations. And still, it has also strengthened the belief that expertise lies with the workers, not the executives. Hence many workers‘ sentiment that they could do better without administration and management. Even if the same workers may accept references to the market and international competition and be willing to make concessions, many of them share the experience that a ‘good product’ or ‘decent work’ have to be defended against a management that can envisage competition on the basis of cut-throat-prices only, rather than on the basis of superior quality.
Moreover, the relationships between different groups of workers are inherently ambiguous. This can be studied particularly well if tasks or parts of the workforce are outsourced. On the one hand, precarious peripheral work forces serve as a buffer. In times of economic crisis, companies tend to lay off agency workers and staff on temporary contracts. In hospitals, for instance, the outsourcing and privatization of canteens, cleaning, and bed transport served the same purpose of maintaining and securing a stable permanent workforce in many cases. However, workers of this core workforce must cooperate closely with their colleagues in the precarious fringes in order to secure production or service provision on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, both groups experience increasing pressure due to precariousness, and even ‘stable’ employees worry that temporary work or fixed-term contracts could affect their children, even despite having invested so much in their education. In short, despite the fragmentation of corporate structures, it is possible to envisage projects that bring different groups of working people together, based on experiences of cooperation and common interests. The agreements between the bargaining committees for nursing and outsourced cleaning services in Berlin hospitals may demonstrate this potential.
Even across (and despite the differences between) economic sectors and companies, working people may share the same experiences, such as the impossibility of doing ‘good work’ according to professional standards. This problem occurs in very different settings, from project work to work on the assembly line, from university teaching and research to professional cleaning, where cleaners have to put up with ‘round angles,’ because there is not enough time for finishing their tasks properly. When professional ethics collide with companies’ profit expectations, it is usually the quality of work and product that suffers. In some cases, competition between workers escalates, if management sets high targets, but does not provide adequate resources in terms of time and manpower, thus provoking employees to pressurize their colleagues to exceed their limits. But still, the pride with which many working people point to their skills and to the importance of their work for society, may well indicate some potential for resistance.
What is more, experiences shared among different groups of wage earners can also be observed with regard to working hours that are incompatible with private life. While some employees (mostly men) work full-time and do excessive overtime, others (mostly women) are stuck in part-time or ‘mini-jobs’ because full-time positions are scarce in many ‘female-dominated industries’ (such as retail and professional cleaning). Many full-timers state in surveys that they would prefer to work significantly shorter hours, while many part-timers would rather work longer hours in order to earn more money today and avoid poverty in old age. At first glance, full-time IT specialists seem to have little in common with the migrant woman who cleans their apartments, based on a (often semi-legal) ‘mini-job’. One could even argue that excessive and flexible working hours (which increasingly affect highly qualified women as well) are only possible if other employees (often their ‘poor sisters’) take on cleaning or childcare for low wages. However, men doing excessive overtime are often living in a relationship with a woman who works ‘only for a few hours.’ Moreover, the experience of jeopardizing one’s labor power, either by way of working beyond exhaustion or by way of earning sub-subsistence wages, brings together very different groups of working people. This could be a starting point for developing projects that might be in the common interest of all of them, such as a new standard working time of 25 to 30 hours per week (‘short full-time for all’).
Alternatives to to the omnipresent war of all against all
The capitalist system in which we live is based on inequality and ubiquitous competition. Companies exploit this, for instance, by way of deliberately hiring women or migrant workers in order to lower wages and worsen working conditions. It is thus very difficult to promote politics of solidarity, which might contribute to strengthening what working people have in common, at least for some time. Solidarity is necessarily exclusive, since it always implies mutual support, based on common interests – and a shared stance against those who pursue conflicting or even contradictory interests. If capitalist logics have their way, division and a lack of solidarity will always prevail. Right-wing parties are successful because they preach inequality and unequal value, stir up competition between employees, and incite hatred against those who come from ‘outside’ or who depend on state benefits. In doing so, they act entirely in line with the system’s logic.
Countering this, instead, is laborious and tends to be successful in the short term only. It happens when solidarity among working people can be expanded, and when they become aware that the coercion implied in wage labor unites all those who need to sell their labor power, regardless of migratory or employment status.
What can be done?
How can a different world of work come into existence? The conditions for politics of solidarity are are constantly changing because the structures of class society are far from stable. It is obvious, however, that first of all, we need to overcome notions of ‘objective necessity’ and lack of alternatives, and to redirect our focus towards social actors and their conflicting interests. Only if it is acknowledged that decisions are being made, is it possible to decide differently. This is the precondition for extending the scope of democratic decision-making, even in the world of work, and with regard to (systemically undemocratic) private companies.
Secondly, politics of solidarity that might contribute to uniting working people must imply a struggle to defend and to extend collective rights, since they constitute a powerful means to reduce competition between workers. Currently, the German government challenges the eight-hour workday and the chancellor demands that ‘all of us’ must work longer and more effectively. This further ‘flexibilization’ of working time would imply that the question of how, when and how long employees work would be resolved even more frequently in bilateral negotiations between them and their superiors. Without binding collective standards for working time, it is very likely that personal interests, responsibilities for children, or care for the elderly, would play an even more negligible role than they already do today.
What is more, if public budgets are concentrated on armament, while the state withdraws elementary public infrastructure and services, competition for resources increases. Cost-cutting on social insurance, public health or education, however, must intensify the struggle of working people for work and life perspectives even further. What we need is the opposite: Social property, such as affordable housing, adequate public health care and transportation need to be expanded. This would reduce the pressure on working people to secure their livelihood by all means through wage labor.
Moreover, politics of solidarity imply the need to defend social security and extend it to all wage earners. It also means to abolish precarious employment in the low-wage sector as systematically as it has been created since the 1980s, thus preventing a further escalation of competition between workers. This list can easily be continued. It is crucial to note, however, that a change of politics will not ‘just happen’ – instead, it must be fought for and achieved, for example, by trade unions. This is especially true because, as E.P. Thompson rightly points out, solidarity can only be experienced in practice – just like the working class itself, it must be present at its one making.
Thirdly, politics of solidarity must be based upon the actual experiences of working people. Denying objectively existing differences and competition is not a solution. Instead, we need to identify the unifying potentials contained in everyday experiences with the coercive force of wage labor, but also in the social relations between working people, for instance, in the labor process.
Given the immense pressure faced by many, it is not unusual to hear the wish that things should simply stay as they used to be. However, it would be too easy to discard such attitudes as conservatism. Workers’ reports about having been able to work with less pressure, about having enjoyed higher esteem for their performance and competence, or about having experienced more cooperation and support among colleagues in the past should not be taken at face value. But even if they usually do not represent concise historical accounts of earlier work realities, such ‘legends of better days’ may indicate a ‘moral economy’ of working people, fundamentally challenging the notion that there is no alternative to the capitalist war of all against all. Let us discuss these alternatives. Let us establish collective rights that strengthen the fundamental links between wage labor and social security, in order to keep competition within tolerable limits. Let us engage in the conflicts necessary to create a more humane world of work. There are alternatives to the brutality of class society – let us search for them together, in the workplace and beyond.