21 Work
Ulrich Beck
Then there is the zombie-category of “full employment”. The biggest issue in European politics, we are assured over and over again, is how to retain full employment. Yet as the French sociologist Andre Gorz has observed: “Every policy, no matter on which ideology it relies, is false if it does not recognise the fact that there can be no more full employment for all, and that wage labour cannot remain at the centre of life, indeed cannot even remain the principal activity of each individual.”
All over the world the category of work that is growing most rapidly is precarious, fragile work - flexible work, including self-employment and work with short-term or no contracts. To quote the New Statesman headline over an article by Ralf Dahrendorf (15 January): “It’s work, Jim - but not as we know it.”
The speed and scale of this transformation has been remarkable. I was a member of a German government commission on the future of work. We found that, in Germany in the seventies, only one-tenth of the population were “flexiworkers” in the broadest sense. In the eighties the proportion grew to one-quarter; in the nineties to one-third. If this dynamic continues, then in ten to 15 years’ time at least half the employable population in the west will be working under fragile conditions.
So we are living with two models of full employment, which have to be distinguished very carefully. One is the welfare, postwar model of normal full employment, secure work contracts, middle-class careers, jobs for life. The other model is what we would call fragile or flexible employment, which means flexitime, part-time work, short-term contracts, people juggling different types of work at the same time. Women have worked like this throughout history; so have most people in “underdeveloped” countries. So what we westerners are heading for can be called a feminisation or a Brazilianisation of work. As with the family, the exception is becoming the rule.
Has work always had the monopoly of inclusiveness? No; in ancient Greek democracy work was a stigma, the main symbol of exclusion. Those who were forced to work - women and slaves - were not members of society. If the ancient Greeks could listen to our debates about the anthropological need to work in order not only to be an honourable member of society but a fully valued human being, they would laugh. The value system that proclaims the centrality of work and only work in building and controlling an inclusive society is a modern invention of capitalism and the welfare state.
We need to see that there is a life beyond the alternatives of unemployment and stress at work. We need to see that the lack of waged work can give us a new affluence of time. We need also to see that the welfare state must be rebuilt so that the risks of fragile work are socialised rather than being borne increasingly by the individual.
We must, in short, turn the new precarious forms of employment into a right to discontinuous waged work and a right to disposable time. It must be made possible for every human being autonomously to shape his or her life and create a balance between family, paid employment, leisure and political commitment. And I truly believe that this is the only way of forming a policy that will create more employment for everybody.
Basic Income
I would argue for a citizen’s basic income. The decoupling of income entitlements from paid work and from the labour market would, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, remove “the awesome fly of insecurity from the sweet ointment of freedom”.
I am not arguing for citizen income in order to lift the poor out of their poverty, important though that is. My argument is, I believe, stronger: we need a new alternative centre of inclusion - citizen work combined with citizen income as conditio sine qua non for a political republic of individuals who create a sense of compassion and cohesion through public commitment.
With the introduction of self-organised citizen work, there comes into being a new centre of inclusion in addition to waged work, an alternative source of activity and identity, which not only gives people satisfaction but revives everyday democracy. The French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, has characterised the politics of the Third Way with the sentence: “Market economy yes, market society no.” In this sense, citizen work is state-sanctioned withdrawal from the market economy. Here, space is created for democratic society through all kinds of self-organised activities.
My vision, then, is of a society in which people gain sovereignty over their own time instead of a society fixated by waged work.
Representative democracy contradicts the self-determination of the individual. It is founded upon the rule of the common will against the individual which, as Kant says, is a contradiction of the general will with itself. The alternative to national majority democracy is what I call a cosmopolitan republicanism. By this I mean the revaluation of the local and the self-responsibility of civil society - an active society where political processes are not simply organised in parliament and in the government but at a local and everyday level of the citizen, too. Civil society is in poor repute among politicians because it does not meet their standards of efficiency. The technocratic speech of so many politicians is a cancer on democratic belief. We need a society which is not simply centred on waged work but willing to finance citizen work and income - forms of self-organisation, and experimental life forms and politics, which are already going on. Such a democratisation of democracy needs to happen on a transnational European level.