Book Reviews
Alysia Blackham, Miriam Kullmann and Ania Zbyszewska (editors)
Theorising Labour Law in a Changing World – Towards Inclusive Labour Law, Hart Publishing:
Oxford, 2019; 304 pp.: 9781509921553, US$117 (pbk)
Reviewed by:Silvia Rainone, Researcher, ETUI, Brussels
Theorising Labour Law in a Changing Worldoffers a modern, eclectic and, in the best sense of the term, unconventional contribution to the academic literature on labour law.
The main aim of the authors is to contribute to the elaboration of normative and, above all, ethical paradigms with which to rethink labour law and redirect it towards the value of inclusivity. Inclusivity is thus the guiding thread of the book, and from many points of view.
First of all, inclusivity is the guiding principle with which the various authors propose their critical and constructive reflections on the world of work. The question that the editors (Black- ham, Kullmann and Zbyszewska) ask, and to which the authors specifically respond, is, para- phrased, ‘how to delineate labour law that is genuinely inclusive?’ And it is only right that the editors have chosen inclusivity as the keystone, since, in an almost heretical but necessary way, the choice of this concept permits a contestation of the neoliberal perspective which for years has propagated the narrative whereby a deregulated labour market is perhaps precarious, but at least it isinclusive.
Theorising Labour Law in a Changing Worlddeparts from that narrative as it embarks on the search for a labour law that is more inclusive while openly challenging the neoliberal model. For this reason alone, the book has the great merit of enabling the social and ‘human’ approach to labour law to regain the semantics of inclusiveness. This achievement, while rhetorical, repre- sents a necessary step to break the false truth, successfully imposed by the neoliberal doctrine, according to which, in the context of labour policies, the protective and emancipatory rationales must be abandoned in order to achieve the goal of inclusivity.
Secondly, ‘inclusivity’ pertains to this book insofar as inclusive is the approach towards the normative, theoretical and philosophical solutions that are proposed. The overarching market rationale of labour law is addressed and critiqued through a multiplicity of perspectives, which complement and reinforce each other. Knegt, Smit and Dias-Abey propose a historical perspective, Rodgers traces the EU governance of the crisis, Zahn, Zbyszweska and Routh draw on feminist theories, Eleveld relies on Republican theory, Iossa on anarchist theories, and multidisciplinarity characterises the propositions of Inversi and Rogowski.
Similarly, inclusive is the approach towards the actors whose involvement may lead to a better labour law. Among the protagonists of this transition for a fairer and more democratic world of work are national and international rule-makers and standard setters, as proposed by various authors. At the same time, Rodgers and Pietrogiovanni remind us of the importance of the
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courts as possible catalysts for regulatory change. Going beyond the institutional reality, Vergis discusses the crucial role of trade unions and collective bodies, and warns of the risk that the logic of markets also contaminates the reality of collective representation. Reflections on trade union representation are also offered by Novitz and Zahn, who agree with Vergis on the need for a paradigm shift. Zahn, Dias-Abey and Iossa, on the other hand, draw attention to other examples of collective representation alongside those of traditional trade unions, and note that, in some cases, the results achieved are remarkable. Examples of these alternative forms of collective representation range from small, independent unions of mainly low-paid migrants and non-standard workers, to grass-roots organisations that have succeeded in devel- oping an autonomous system for regulating labour costs in the agricultural sector, and to workers’ collectives based on a horizontal concept of labour relations and the direct involve- ment of workers in decision-making. Blackham, Inversi and Rogowski go even further and reflect on the role of social and relational dynamics in regulating working conditions using the normative tools offered by reflexive law theory. The regulation of working conditions is thus discussed in the light of the limits of the law and, in parallel, of the often insufficiently explored role of non-legal regulatory sources, such as work councils, collective bargaining, or management practices.
Through this multiplicity of doctrinal points of view,Theorising Labour Law in a Chang- ing World offers epistemological tools to deconstruct and then reconstruct labour law, going beyond the paradigms and objectives proposed by the prevailing and traditional approach to the subject.
Finally, the value of inclusivity also emerges from the method by which the editors have chosen to address the themes discussed. It is a collective work, involving authors who are experienced and authoritative but at the same time open to dialogue, confrontation and debate. No single theory and reflection prevails over the others. The various contributions are proposed in the manner of a chorus, almost like a concert, rich but never dissonant, of ideas and proposals. This approach is also reflected in the format of the publication, which alternates essays and commentaries, and also includes an engaging conversation between two of the authors.
As in the opening of this review, Theorising Labour Law in a Changing Worldcan thus be connoted with three adjectives.
‘Modern’, as the book seeks normative paradigms to deal with the contemporary and future challenges of labour law. The issues raised by the prevailing market rationale, as well as the crisis of trade union representation and the emergence of platform work are what bring the authors together in this collective reflection on how to rethink and improve labour law.
‘Eclectic’, as there is no presumption to outline a unique point of view, a unique approach, a unique solution. There are not absolute certainties, but numerous proposals that invite the reader to broaden the normative and doctrinal horizon by which to face the changing world of work.
Finally, ‘unconventional’. It is difficult to be constructive without breaking out of traditional canons, pre-established truths and prevailing viewpoints. Stepping out of the conventional is perhaps risky, but it can be a noble and necessary act. This publication convinces the reader that creating a fairer and more inclusive world of work requires new ways of thinking.
In conclusion,Theorising Labour Law in a Changing Worldis a rich, innovative and, there- fore, indispensable book for all those who want to broaden their view of labour law and obtain intellectual tools to participate in the construction of a more inclusive and, therefore, better future.
Jake Alihmahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (editors)
The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, Pluto Press: London, 2020; 300 pp.: 978 0 7453 4147 7,
€28
Reviewed by:Stan De Spiegelaere, Senior Researcher, ETUI, Brussels and Guest professor, Ghent Uni- versity, Ghent
While half of the European economy was grinding to a halt and millions of employees were facing (at least temporary) unemployment or were condemned to work from home, the richest man on this globe – and probably in history – became even richer. And not just by a little, by a lot.
That man is the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Previously an online bookstore, Amazon is now a vast company, with activities ranging from selling and distributing seemingly everything under the sun online, including food, to developing apps and software and providing cloud computing infrastructure, and even launching rockets into the sky. The company employs close to a million people all over the world and almost none of them, unfortunately, are unionised.
How do employees go about organising and putting pressure on such a massive company? This is the central question posed in the recently published volumeThe Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy’, edited by Jake Alihmahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese and published by Pluto Books.
The book contains 17 chapters covering a wide range of fields and topics. Obviously, there is no space here to discuss all the different chapters and their conclusions, so in what follows I shall focus on: (i) Amazon’s sheer size, (ii) working conditions at the company, (iii) the vulnerabilities identified by the authors and (iv) what the labour movement can do to confront this giant.
The first thing that impresses the reader is that Amazon is really a corporate giant with activities in many different sectors and fields. Peter Olney and Rand Wilson (Chapter 16) compare it with ‘the Octopus’, a fable published in 1902 about an all-powerful corporate giant.
There is some truth in this. Amazon started as an online bookstore in 1995, but developed into a much broader online store, which also provides space for third-party sellers, and owns massive distribution centres (called ‘fulfilment centres’) and the necessary transportation infrastructure, such as planes and trucks. In several chapters it is compared to that other US giant, Walmart, with the distinction that Walmart has shops, while Amazon has dispensed with them and delivers to the customer’s door. In 2017, Amazon also bought Whole Foods, giving it an extensive network of bricks-and-mortar shops and food delivery. These are Amazon’s more traditional activities, very similar to conventional logistics, with a strong focus on data management.
The less visible and tangible part of Amazon, however, is equally impressive. Besides the huge crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk, it has the e-reader Kindle and the virtual assistant Alexa, as well as Amazon Pay, the face recognition software Rekognition and, most importantly, Amazon Web Services (AWS). This part of the company is a cloud computing platform that represents more than one-third of the world’s cloud infrastructure. Its clients include the CIA, ICE and many other government agencies. Bezos also owns theWashington Post(Chapter 2, p. 40).
What makes Amazon distinctive in all these areas is its heavy reliance on data to optimise processing, sales and its tax profile, as it is still officially a tech company.
The sheer size of the company makes it difficult to make generalisations about how it treats its workforce, a task that becomes well nigh impossible in relation to its multiple outsourcing. The book discusses at length the situation of warehouse workers (Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17), delivery workers (Chapter 4) and tech workers (Chapter 14). The first two groups face similar problems of
excessive managerial oversight, work pressure and an anti-union climate. In most countries Amazon pays a little more than the minimum wage, enhancing its attractiveness as an employer at least at the financial level. Employees’ principal complaints concern the constant surveillance. Amazon contin- ues to claim that it is a tech company, and indeed technology is everywhere. Warehouse workers have scanners that dictate their tasks and measure everything. The drivers have their ‘rabbits’, which prescribe their next delivery and, again, register their movements (Chapter 4).
Tech workers among Amazon’s staff enjoy much better working conditions, and accordingly their complaints mainly concern work content. While their activities are framed as part of a mission to improve the world through technology, their daily reality involves ‘unfulfilling, meaningless and ethically dubious work, and ongoing sexism and racism in the industry’ (Chapter 14, p. 229).
But the book also identifies a number of vulnerabilities to which Amazon is exposed. Kim Moody (Chapter 1) identifies four key vulnerabilities. The first is possible disruption of the supply chain. As Amazon’s logistics pillar depends on speed, a minor interruption in the supply chain (whether at a fulfilment centre, a distribution centre or in ‘the last mile’) can easily cause delays and therefore affect the company’s bottom line (Chapter 4). The same applies to its web services, in which a small glitch might have serious consequences (Chapter 14, p. 225).
A second vulnerability is competition. While Amazon is a giant, it is not the only player on global or local markets. In many countries, local competitors have strong positions that are difficult to break. At the global level, there are several competitors on the digital market (such as Google, Apple and Microsoft), the logistics market (such as Walmart) and the online sales market (such as Alibaba).
The third vulnerability concerns Amazon’s capital-intensive and strongly localised investments.
Building a fulfilment centre, for example, is expensive and difficult to delocalise expediently. This might give workers some leverage.
Indeed, workers are the fourth vulnerability. While Amazon is supposed to be a tech company it has thousands of employees working under similar conditions and sometimes in collective spaces such as fulfilment centres. There is indisputably some organising potential there.
Other chapters look at further, equally important vulnerabilities. Many of the chapters on orga- nising among European workers clearly show how institutional frameworks can make a difference.
Given the strong workers’ participation laws in Germany, Amazon was obliged to depart from its anti-union policy, establish works councils and even engage in collective bargaining with the unions (Chapter 7, 13), as was also the case in Italy (Chapter 8, 13) and France (Chapter 8, 13).
Other legal phenomena have also come to the fore, including privacy laws in Germany (Chapter 7, p. 123), as a result of which Amazon had to soften its staff surveillance.
A number of chapters (such as Chapter 15, p. 242) discuss Amazon’s movement into the realm of public services by providing services for government agencies (such as the CIA, ICE and the NSA). It is also becoming a logistics partner for the distribution of COVID-19-related materials (Chapter 15, p. 242). While this is obviously worrying, it also creates another vulnerability as such services obviously need to be regulated strictly, given their key importance.
Finally, the local community is put under the spotlight in Chapters 9, 10 and 11. The story is mixed, however. Community opposition has so far failed in Seattle (Chapter 9) and succeeded in New York (Chapter 10), while the situation in California remains unresolved (Chapters 11 and 12).
The fourth topic of interest in this review is what can be done to alleviate the conditions of Amazon’s workers. The reader gets the impression that the editors explicitly asked the authors to consider this question, as most chapters end with at least some paragraphs containing recommen- dations for labour.
The vulnerabilities we have highlighted already hint at what might be done, but tackling such an octopus-like corporate colossus is far from straightforward. Many of the authors refer to the potential
for worker mobilisation and strike action. Amazon is indeed an exception among tech firms in that it employs many blue-collar workers, who are concentrated in fulfilment and sortation centres (Chapter 12, p. 196). Many chapters therefore discuss the organising and mobilising efforts of these workers.
The effectiveness of this strategy has been seriously limited, however, because of ‘network redun- dancy’, as Chapter 7 explains very well. Given the number of fulfilment centres and the strongly data-driven processes, a strike or disruption in one centre will have little effect on customer services overall, as orders are easily rerouted to other centres. To really put pressure on Amazon, coordinated action is therefore required. The need for such (international) coordination is underlined in many of the chapters in this book (for example, Introduction, p. 12; Chapter 2, p. 46; Chapter 7, p. 126;
Chapter 13; Chapter 16, p. 259; Conclusion), but none of them really go deep enough into the immense challenge of internationally organising a blue-collar workforce with a high turnover rate.
Given that such a mobilisation strategy might be very difficult to implement, other strategies could focus on other weak points, such as organising the ‘last mile’ drivers or creating disruption among tech workers. Indeed, the book gives examples of successful campaigns among tech workers to change Amazon’s environmental policy. While this clearly shows the potential of organising these workers, it also indicates that the issues that matter to them differ substantially from those important to the blue-collar warehouse workers or drivers.
As a European scholar, I feel the need to stress the obvious impact and importance of legal rules on workers’ participation in this context. While the US stories of organising at Amazon are clearly resource- and time-intensive, and led to local successes, the European stories are about organising a whole series of distribution centres and engaging in coordinated strikes. Europe’s laws on workers’ participation give it a head start: the legal requirement to establish works councils or negotiate with trade unions provide much easier access to workplaces, enabling much more effective organisation drives.
This review does not do justice to all the book’s insights. All in all, it is the perfect introduction for any labour-oriented reader to the world of Amazon. The only points of criticism I would raise are (i) the lack of a more in-depth analysis of transnational unionism and organising, and (ii) the omission of a chapter on Amazon’s union-busting efforts in various countries. The last issue is touched upon in a number of chapters, but given the international criticism the company is currently being subjected to in this area a lot more could be said.
The only thing that you, the reader, must now do is order the book. You can get it fairly cheaply via Amazon, and with next-day delivery if you’re a member of Amazon Prime.
Donna Baines and Ian Cunningham
Working in the Context of Austerity, Bristol University Press: Bristol, 2021; xþ353 pp.: 9781529208672, £64;
€92 (hbk)
Reviewed by:Thomas Klikauer, Sydney Graduate School of Management, Australia and Norman Simms, University of Waikato, New Zealand
In their edited volume Working in the Context of Austerity, Donna Baines and Ian Cunningham elucidate the changes that have occurred under austerity regimes. The book’s 16 chapters were written by 27 contributors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Ireland and the Netherlands. The book is divided into four parts: I. Introduction, II. Trends and Themes, III. Case
Studies of Austerity in Private, Public and Non-Profit Sectors, and IV. Alternatives and Resistance.
The last part includes an ‘afterword’ serving as an overall conclusion to the book. While the book’s Canadian/UK editors focus largely on the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries, it also explores working under austerity in Berlin, as well as in China. One of the highlights of the book concerns
‘trends in collective bargaining’, elaborating on recent changes in collective bargaining in the European Union and North America.
Commonly, austerity is portrayed as an array of ideological, political and economic policies aimed at reducing a country’s budget deficit. This is supposed to be achieved through harsh spending cuts and tax increases – which tend to fall on the working class rather than the rich – or a combination of the two. Austerity policy has a negative impact on the world of work. Despite the warnings of, among others, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Memorial Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, austerity tends to be implemented relentlessly, despite the fact that, as Stiglitz notes, ‘no large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity’ (p. 3).
The ‘initial government responses [to the financial crisis] in 2008–09 were stimulus packages’ (p. 4), overshadowed by an implicit ‘too big to go to jail’ dogma (Grassley and Brown, 2013). Rescuing insolvent banks is one thing, but letting the bankers and other financial actors who caused the crisis get off scot-free is another. The bankers whose actions resulted in the global financial crisis (GFC) were not held to account. Instead, they were rescued and indeed rewarded (Story and Dash, 2009), while almost all the major financial institutions were kept in business. The governments responsible for this misplaced ‘justice’ then tended to introduce three policies:
i. spending cuts in public services;
ii. downsizing, privatisation and marketisation of the public sector; and iii. lowering the cost of public services through ‘wage caps and cuts’ (p. 4).
This had a flow-on effect from government jobs to the private sector, and generally not to the latter’s advantage. Most interestingly, ‘the proportion of employees in permanent jobs has increased’ (p. 5) in many OECD countries. This development did not alter the trend towards short-term tenure, however, as ‘job stability (the length of time individuals spend in their current job) decreased’ (p. 7). Much of what has happened since the global financial crisis can be seen as part and parcel of neoliberalism’s attack on three core themes of post-war eco- nomics (p. 8):
i. rolling back so-called ‘Keynesian’ stimulus packages;
ii. promoting the transfer of blame, ‘shifting from the private sector that caused the crisis to the public sector, and from the public sector to the populace’; and finally,
iii. implementing austerity, whose attached ideology went through a three-stage process:
anticipation, adaptation and acceptance.
To ensure that all three stages prevailed, a thoroughly ideological programme was pursued to shift blame away from capital and towards workers. Throughout this process neoliberalism and austerity became ever more dependent on the only transmission mechanism capable of over- coming all obstacles, the media (Smythe, 1977; Fuchs, 2014, 2020). It is the media that can establish toleration of the widening of ‘existing inequality’ (p. 9). For example, the media has relentlessly pushed ‘a narrative of crisis and public sector excesses’ (p. 10). Indeed, over time the
ideology of austerity became even ‘more aggressive and hegemonic than in earlier phases of neoliberalism’ (p. 15).
Most importantly, inMedia control:the spectacular achievements of propaganda(Chomsky, 1991) Chomsky described ‘a shift towards identifying the global financial crisis as a public sector debt crisis [while also] blaming trade unions’ (p. 16). In this context, ‘austerity [is not only] a continuation of an established neoliberal ideology’ (p. 18), but it turbocharges neoliberal ideology.
The ideology of austerity had to be strong enough to disguise four essential pathologies (p. 30):
i. since 1979 at least, real wages have stopped growing for most workers;
ii. the risk of injury and illness, unemployment and old age are increasingly borne by workers;
iii. many employers have abandoned their role in training workers; and finally,
iv. unions are viewed as toxic by corporate apparatchiks, the media and pro-business think tanks.
Camouflaging Adam Smith’s invisible hand, this shows ‘the visible hand of social actors’
(p. 32) at work. Inside the state, private companies and corporations, ‘workers are generally considered profit-limiting liabilities rather than profit-boosting assets’ (p. 34). Joining capital’s choirs are ‘right-wing organisations funded largely by the Koch brothers [and, of course] McKin- sey and the Boston Consulting Group’ (p. 35).
Their advocacy ensures the acceptance of ‘middle-class employment insecurity anxiety [and]
income stress [that is, fears about one’s ability to] keep up with the bills’ (p. 42). Ultimately,
‘austerity is. . .concerned with offloading costs. . .making others pay’ (p. 49). Economists call this anexternality. Seen from the standpoint of managerialism (Klikauer, 2013), this means ‘selective formalisation. . .[in other words] a set of business practices that formalises’ the employment relationship with an emphasis on creating ‘conditions of informality’ (p. 51). This enhances the power of management while adhering to the first rule of managerialism: when things go wrong, workers are to blame; when things go right, management takes the credit.
Simultaneously, the ideology ‘disempowers workers [in other words, affects those] who are expected to carry [much of] the administrative, fiscal, and legal burdens’ (p. 51). In turn, this leads to ‘psycho-social violence’ at work (p. 51). Psycho-social violence of this kind is perpetrated by such means as ‘isolating people, manipulating reputations, withholding infor- mation, assigning tasks that do not match capabilities and assigning impossible goals and deadlines’ (p. 51). For that to work, managers do not need to be corporate psychopaths (Klikauer, 2018). Ordinary managerial nastiness (Schrijvers, 2004) is enough. Beyond the
‘structural domination [of management, the market system also] provides a primary mechan- ism for worker discipline’ (p. 51). Hence, neoliberalism and austerity advocate the market – the great arbiter of all things.
Almost self-evidently, ‘austerity persuades as an ideological frame [in which the] sacrifi- cial labour [force] pulls itself up by its own bootstraps in the hope that hard work and risk taking will pay off’ (p. 52). The hard-work ideology is propagated by those who do not themselves work particularly hard, but who are willing to impose ‘punitive working condi- tions’ for others (p. 57; Sims, 2020). Beyond that, another effect of austerity was that the EU’s ‘Troika [limited wages to] a 9% maximum increase in unit labour costs within a period of three years’ (p. 73). Limiting wages came at a time when collective bargaining coverage was declining in the EU (p. 74).
The propagandistic achievements of neoliberalism and austerity also added to the widely con- cocted ‘hostility to unionism [as] collective bargaining became the focus of much of the blame for
the financial problems of states and individual cities. . .public sector workers were also portrayed as lazy and privileged’ (p. 81). This masked the fact that the bailouts of those who had caused the global financial crisis were funded by the state. This came at the expense of other state respon- sibilities. This shortfall led to a further round of blame-shifting to legitimise ‘three earnings-related trends’ (p. 85):
i. constant low nominal wage growth;
ii. widespread growth in wage inequalities; and iii. declines or very limited rises in real wages.
In the United Kingdom, for example, ‘real wages in 2019 were 5% below their 2008 levels’ (p. 87), a trend that Brexit will only worsen. Brexit, neoliberalism and austerity will also heighten the trend towards privatisation. In the care sector, for example, privatisation has taken on seven forms (pp. 99–105):
i. ownership: the traditional form of privatisation;
ii. cost-shifting: families pay for private care workers;
iii. stealth cuts: the shrinking of public capacity to fund care;
iv. management: non-profit management behaves like for-profit management;
v. responsibility: shifting towards unpaid care workers and families;
vi. decision-making: decisions taken behind closed doors legitimised as ‘corporate confidentiality’;
vii. services: care for those who can pay to access needed ‘extras’.
In the fast-food industry there is a long history of aggressive anti-unionism: ‘head-offices of fast-food corporations widely pursue the carrot strategy to counter unions: they promise to improve pay and working conditions in anti-union meetings and sometimes even hold employee parties to win over staff. If the carrot does not succeed, then the stick is employed: sympathisers are harassed and intimidated. They have their hours shortened or denied, they have their shifts changed to times when they cannot work, and/or they are given unpleasant duties to fulfil’ (p. 118).
Such strategies are often paired with two ideologies: ‘efficiency gains’ (p. 152) and doing
‘more with less’ (p. 152). Needless to say, these two ideologies are never applied to CEOs (Clifford, 2017). For workers, it all too often means ‘austerity-related downsizing’ (p. 154),
‘restructuring’, which can lead to ‘7% of job losses’ (p. 154), and ‘an increase in managerial scrutiny’ (p. 161), also known as aggressive micro-management (Nogushi, 2017). Micro- managerial control is exercised ‘through bureaucratic procedures and intensified’ (p. 162) work arrangements, as well as the infamous KPIs or ‘key performance indicators’. As one worker said,
‘we’re a slave to the KPIs’ (p. 162).
It also means ‘getting e-mails about missed paperwork and. . .not ticking a box’ (p. 164; Sims, 2020). Meanwhile, a Scottish fire fighter said we ‘do not have enough bodies. . .to do the job’, leading to a question no fire fighter should ever ask, ‘will I take the risk?’ (p. 165). In other words, austerity creates a ‘strong incentive to reduce costs as far as possible’ (p. 173), even when this means that people will die.
In many countries, austerity has shown that it ‘disproportionally impacts on the most disad- vantaged and vulnerable’ (p. 176). When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, it was entering countries with already debilitated ‘human-service programmes’ (p. 197). Such programmes still accounted for 5.1 per cent of GDP in the 1980s, when neoliberalism took off; by 2019, however,
their share was ‘less than 3%’ (p. 197). It is hard to save lives when human-service programmes have been reduced by 41 per cent.
Undeterred, austerity advocates promote ‘lean and mean management, increased productivity [and an] intensification of organisational control’ (p. 198). This leads to what Siegrist calls ‘effort- reward imbalance’ (p. 208; Siegrist and Morten, 2016), which is a ‘mismatch between high work- load (high demand) and low control over long-term rewards’ (p. 208). This becomes even more severe as austerity’s ‘on-going race to the bottom on pay’ continues (p. 243). This race is ideologically-framed as the ‘freeing up of labour markets’ (p. 261). In reality, this means ‘mini- mum commitment from the employer demanding maximum flexibility from employees. You can see that this is a one-way system [advantaging] the employer’ (p. 270).
Set against all this is ‘union activism framed as a moral project’ (p. 293). Linking unions to morality is ‘appealing to workers and [it makes it] more difficult to attack or discredit the union’
(p. 293). Yet unions are locked into atwo-against-onebattle, with trade unions on the one side, and capital and corporate media on the other side. As a consequence of capital-media’s combined power, trade unions have been on the losing side for decades. Hence, ‘trade union membership in OECD countries has dropped by 16%’ (p. 303).
Austerity will further this decline. In the ‘period since 2010, when Austerity mania took over government policies fuelled by Media calls to balance the books’ (p. 321), the capital-media alliance has been a winning ticket. What is to be done? Perhaps the much acclaimed ‘universal basic income’ (p. 328) will offer relief. Yet, the universal basic income remains a system- stabilising instrument that, if introduced, will only sustain capitalism. In the end, Frederic Jame- son’s dictum (2003) remains valid: ‘It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’
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