Inventing the Future - Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams.

                              

                                   Image: Margaret Bourke-White (1941). Russian women during the hay harvest on a collective farm. 

Proposing the idea of a post-work future is described as an agenda that encompasses sentiment from the social democratic to the neoliberal and Srnicek and Williams argue for mobilisation of a post-work consensus. 

Outlined like a manifesto, there is firm belief that this is not “only achievable, given the material conditions, but also viable and desirable.” Strategy for the realisation of this is provided by full-automation fo the economy, reducing the working week, implementing a universal base income (UBI), and a paradigm shift in what constitutes work.

Full automation - the productions of goods and services - would release humanity from the bondage of production and labour. In the late nineteenth century agriculture became mechanised, smallholders gave way to larger farm enterprises. Craftwork was transformed also and labour that was typically undertaken by workers with tool was replaced by machines. The latter half of the twentieth century saw further acceleration of this mechanisation with the widespread use of computers, reprographic technologies and the microprocessor. 

Furthermore, full automation can be realised with roboticisation - some 150,000 professional service robots have been sold in the past fifteen years. This roboticisation - the trialling of driverless cars caused a stir locally in Melbourne - has meant a polarisation of the labour market; the advancements of the last twenty years are set to 'decimate the low-skilled, low-wage end of the labour market.'

This access to a reserve of cheap labour hinders an investment in new technologies and thus raises the argument for a universal increase in wages to allow facilitate this; the 'most detailed estimates' of the current labour markets testify to the fact that 'between 47 and 80 percent of today's jobs are capable of being automated.' 

Two obstacles identified include that machines are generally incapable of generating highly flexible/affective and creative work and a the second being certain tasks can already be undertaken by machines, but the cost of that machine exceeds the cost of the equivalent (human) labour. When considering the persistent lack of recognition of women's labour and the view of them a figure of nurture we can turn to machines and assisting technologies that would, instead, fold clothing, clean the house and undertake other such chores. 

Reduction of work hours

The 'resistance to normal working hours' is provided by today's 'widespread slacking off', with workers often surfing the internet. I would have to argue that this is affordance for many but not all. In my personal experience working within a customer contact centre, my employer publishes an electronic schedule that makes me aware of break times and tracks my activity whilst logged into my digital workspace. In addition to close surveillance of work time, non-work (but scheduled) time is also subject to this scrutiny. Paul Lafargue argues for limiting work to just three hours per day, Maynard Keynes argued for the same outcome, calculating by 2030 we would all be undertaking a fifteen-hour working week. Conversely, the US full-time clocks up some forty-seven hours of work for the week much of which is unaccounted for in official statistics.

The reduction of work would be supplemented by the UBI; a remuneration not based on ability but on essential need. Those that are underemployed (underwaged), and unemployed are not able to enjoy the time that is at disposal; instead focus is on scraping by and trying manage the need for capital with the drudgery of labour/measured output. The moral imperatives of labour and hard work as instilled via Calvinist doctrines and religious devotion, ensuring a seat in heaven have been replaced by the contemporary concept that work is the ultimate in defining self-expression and identity within society. 'Overcoming the work ethic' is described as 'needing to overcome ourselves.' 

The centrality of work to contemporary life must, according to Srnicek and Williams, be combated. The choice is between is "glorifying work and the working class or abolishing them both." Full automation magnifies the potential for reducing the working week and therefore the need for a supplementary UBI. The result would be the reduction in the marginal cost of labour as companies utilise machinery to expand. "The traditional battle cry of the left, demanding full employment, should therefore be replaced with a battle cry demanding full unemployment."