The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

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150 Political-economic capitalist transformationunemployment, rapid destruction and reconstruction of skills, modest(if any) gains in the real wage, (see figures 2.2 and 2.9) and the rollbackof trade union power - one of the political pillars of theFordist regime.The labour market has, for example, undergone a radical restructuring.Faced with strong market volatility, heightened competition,and narrowing profit margins, employers have taken advantage ofweakened union power and the pools of surplus (unemployed orunderemployed) labourers to push for much more flexible workregimes and labour contracts. It is hard to get a clear overall picture,because the very purpose of such flexibility is to satisfy the oftenhighly specific needs of each firm. Even for regular employers,systems such as 'nine-day fortnights: or work schedules that averagea forty-hour week over the year but oblige the employee to workmuch longer at periods of peak demand, and compensate with shorterhours at periods of slack, are becoming much more common. Butmore important has been the apparent move away from regularemployment towards increasing reliance upon part-time, temporaryor sub-contracted work arrangements.The result is a labour market structure of the sort depicted infigure 2.10, taken, as are the following quotations, from the Instituteof Personnel Management's Flexible patterns of work (1986). Thecore - a steadily shrinking group according to accounts emanatingfrom both sides of the Atlantic - is made up of employees 'with fulltime, permanent status and is central to the long term future of theorganization.' Enjoying greater job security, good promotion and reskillingprospects, and relatively generous pension, insurance, andother fringe benefit rights, this group is nevertheless expected to beadaptable, flexible, and if necessary geographically mobile. The potentialcosts of laying off core employees in time of difficulty may,however, lead a company to sub-contract even high level functions(varying from design to advertising and financial management),leaving the core group of managers relatively small. The peripheryencompasses two rather different sub-groups. The first consists of'full-time employees with skills that are readily available in thelabour market, such as clerical, secretarial, routine and lesser skilledmanual work.' With less access to career opportunities, this grouptends to be characterized by high labour turnover 'which makeswork force reductions relatively easy by natural wastage.' The secondperipheral group 'provides even greater numerical flexibility andincludes part-timers, casuals, fixed term contract staff, temporaries,sub-contractors and public subsidy trainees, with even less job securitythan the first peripheral group.' All the evidence points to a veryFrom Fordism to flexible accumulationFIRST PERIPHERAL GROUPSECON DARY LABOU R MARKETNUMERICAL FLEXIBILITYCORE GROUPPRIMARY LABOU R MARKETFUNCTIONAL FLEXIBILITYINCREASEDOUTSOU RCINGooz-1m:tlcl>co0 ,-IFigure 2.10 Labour market structures under conditions of flexibleaccumulation(Source: Flexible Patterns of Work, ed. C. Curs on, Institute of PersonnelManagement)significant growth in this category of employees in the last few years.Such flexible employment arrangements do not by themselvesengender strong worker dissatisfaction, since flexibility can sometimesbe mutually beneficial. But the aggregate effects, when lookedat from the standpoint of insurance coverage and pension rights, aswell as wage levels and job security, by no means appear positivefrom the standpoint of the working population as a whole. The mostradical shift has been either towards increased sub-contracting (70per cent of British firms surveyed by the National Economic DevelopmentCouncil reported an increase in sub-contracting between151
152 political-economic capitalist transformation1982 and 1985) or towards temporary rather than part-time work.This follows a long-established pattern in Japan where, even underFordism, small business sub-contracting acted as a buffer to protectlarge corporations from the cost of market fluctuations. The currenttrend in labour markets is to reduce the number of 'core' workersand to rely increasingly upon a work force that ca quickly be t kenon board and equally quickly and costlessly be laId off when tlmesget bad. In Britain, 'flexible woker' increased b ;:- 16 per cent to 8.1million between 1981 and 1985 whIle permanent Jobs decreased by 6per cent to 15.6 million (Financial Times, 27 ebruary 1987). ?.verroughly the same time period, nearly one thIrd ? f the,ten mIllIonew jobs created in the USA were thought to be III the temporarycategory (New York Times, 17 March 1988) :This has not, evidently, changed very radIcally the problems thatarose in the 1960s of segmented or 'dual' labour markets, but has reshapedthem according to a rather different logic. While it is t r:u ethat the declining significance of union power has reduced the SII gular power of white male workers in monopoly sector markets, Itdoes not follow that those excluded from those labour markets, suchas blacks, women, ethnic minorities of all kinds, have achieved suddenparity (except in the sense that many traditionally privileged whitemale workers have been marginalized alongside them). While somewomen and some minorities have gained access to more privilegedpositions, the new labour n. l rket c nditions have for the most partre-emphasized the vulnerabIlIty of dIsadvantaged groups (as we shallshortly see in the case of women).The transformation in labour market structure has been paralleledby equally important shifts in industrial organ ation. Organize?sub-contracting, for example, opens up opportunItles for small bUSInessformation, and in some instances permits older systems ofdomestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and paternalistic ('godfather','guv'nor' or even mafia-like) labour systems to revive ndflourish as centrepieces rather than as appendages of the productlonsystem. The revival of 'sweatshop' forms of production in cities suchas New York and Los Angeles , Paris and London, became a matterfor commentary in the mid-1970s and has proliferated rather thanshrunk during the 1980s. The rapid growth of 'black,' 'informal,' or'underground' economies has also been documented throughout .theadvanced capitalist world, leading some to suggest that ther IS .agrowing convergence between 'third world' and advanced capItalIstlabour systems. Yet the rise of new and the revival .of o .lder forms ofindustrial organization (often dominated by new ImmIgrant groupsin large cities, such as the Filipinos, South Koreans, Vietnamese,From Fordism to flexible accumulation 153and Taiwanese in Los Angeles, or the Bangladeshis and Indians inEast London) represents rather different things in different places.Sometimes it indicates the emergence of new survival strategies forthe unemployed or wholly discriminated against (such as Haitianimmigrants in Miami or New York), while in others it is moresimply immigrant groups looking for an entry into a capitalist system,organized tax-dodging, or the attraction of high profit from illegaltrade that lies at its basis. But in all such cases, the effect is totransform the mode of labour control and employment.Working-class forms of organization (such as the trade unions),for example, depended heavily upon the massing of workers withinthe factory for their viability, and find it peculiarly difficult to gainany purchase within family and domestic labour systems. Paternalisticsystems are dangerous territories for labour organizing because theyare more likely to corrupt union power (if it is present) than unionpower is likely to liberate employees from 'godfather' dominationand paternalistic welfarism. Indeed, one of the signal advantages ofembracing such ancient forms of labour process and of pettycapitalistproduction is that they undermine working-class organizationand transform the objective basis for class struggle. Class consciousnessno longer derives from the straight class relation between capitaland labour, and moves onto a much more confused terrain of interfamilialconflicts and fights for power within a kinship or clan-likesystem of hierarchically ordered social relations. Struggling againstcapitalist exploitation in the factory is very different from strugglingagainst a father or uncle who organizes family labour into a highlydisciplined and competitive sweatshop that works to order for multinationalcapital (table 2.3).The effects are doubly obvious when we consider the transformedrole of women in production and labour markets. Not only do thenew labour market structures make it much easier to exploit thelabour power of women on a part-time basis, and so to substitutelower-paid female labour for that of more highly paid and less easilylaid-off core male workers, but the revival of sub-contracting anddomestic and family labour systems permits a resurgence of patriarchalpractices and homeworking. This revival parallels the enhanced capacityof multinational capital to take Fordist mass-production systemsabroad, and there to exploit extremely vulnerable women's labourpower under conditions of extremely low pay and negligible jobsecurity (see Nash and Fernandez-Kelly, 1983). The Maquiladoraprogramme that allows US managers and capital ownership to remainnorth of the Mexican border, while locating factories employingmainly young women south of the border, is a particularly dramatic
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The Conditionof PostmodernityAn Enq
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PrefaceI cannot remember exactly wh
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Introduction 5theatre, a series of
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Part IVThe condition of postmoderni
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21Postmodernism as the mIrror ofmIr
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Table 4.1 Fordist modernity versus
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27Cracks in the mIrrors, fusions at
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ReferencesAglietta, M. (1979): A th
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364 ReferencesJacobs, J. (1961): Th
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Index 369Adorno, T. 13Aglietta, M.
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372IndexSoja, E. 284Sorel, G. 34Spe
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376IndexIndex 377jouissance 57-8, 9
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