Most of us spend most of our time at work, mostly unhappily. There are some lucky souls for whom work is rewarding, satisfying, balanced and lucrative. For the rest, it is fraught with uncertainty, anxiety and never quite enough reward. The recent example of sacked P&O workers being marched off ships exhibited not just the worst of employment practices, but spoke to the sense of insecurity too many people feel about work today.
For decades the political conversation has been dominated by distributing wealth through tweaks to taxes and benefits, and seldom the work through which wealth is made. The human component of work has been neglected, along with the fundamentals of how, where, and why we work.
Since spring 2020, a crash course in enforced furlough and remote working for those in some occupations changed the public conversation about work. A renewed sense that work is a thing you do, and not a place you have to be, forced us to rethink work from the ground up. Some of the digital and technological conditions for these shifts were there already, but Covid-19 undoubtedly accelerated the shift away from the office.
Remote working may have granted a privileged few benefits in the form of family time and improved mental health. But it also exacerbated the rise of an “always on” culture, obliterating boundaries between home and work. As areas of our homes were handed over to employers, surveillance technologies enabled bosses to keep tabs on our every move.
But what media coverage about remote working conceals is that for millions of frontline workers, there was no choice to work from home. Covid-19 forced us to recognise the vital contribution to our wellbeing made by previously undervalued jobs such as delivery drivers, cleaners and shop workers, not to mention caregivers, teachers and healthcare workers. The pandemic highlighted our dependence on a hidden economy of low-paid, precarious and sometimes stigmatised work. It also exposed weaknesses in our regional economies, riven with divisions between towns reliant on older industries and cities driven by younger, more diverse populations.
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Just as at previous junctures of conflict and change, Labour can develop a new politics of work responsive to these global shifts. This would focus not only on redistribution through fiscal measures such as taxes and benefits, but also the conditions under which wealth and value are created in the first place.
Labour has already made a start, with Sir Keir Starmer foregrounding work and security in his conference speech last year. Last autumn, Angela Rayner outlined plans for setting minimum standards in key industrial sectors.
These Fair Pay Agreements resonates with legislation introduced by Jacinda Ardern’s government in New Zealand this week which aims to “lift incomes and improve working conditions of everyday kiwis”. Labour needs to build on these beginnings, translating ambitions into practical solutions and learning from centre-left movements in government elsewhere.
Making good and rewarding work central to our shared future is a key task for progressives, including a new role for workers and unions in economic decision-making. We need to create ownership over the future by rejecting inevitabilities. We speak of climate crisis, hollowing out of the labour market, or the gig economy as though these things are pre-determined. We are beguiled by the apparent novelty of robots but forget the importance of community, kinship and place. In this, we deny ourselves agency over how to shape work’s future. But Labour has always been at its best when it has been about helping people get on in life, not just get even when things go wrong.
Labour must regain the confidence that led to the creation of labour parties and unions across the industrialised world in the first place, propelling the transformation of everything from working hours, safe conditions, and the right to work for all. Progressives shaped the 20th-century world of work — we must do the same in the 21st.
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That is why we are launching a new project with Progressive Britain this week, bringing these different strands together. Working with progressive partners in Europe and beyond, we will map and understand the centrality of work to shaping wider ambitions. By placing work at the heart of Labour’s thinking and its offer to voters, progressives can shape a new world of work where everyone is safe, rewarded, valued and productive. That must be Labour’s promise: work you enjoy, at times that suit, and a payslip you feel is fair. What is needed now is the inspired thinking to make it happen.
Andrew Pakes is deputy general secretary and research director at Prospect Union. Frederick Harry Pitts is lecturer in work, employment, organisation & public policy at the University of Bristol School of Management. They write in a personal capacity.