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ABSTRACT
2020 emerged as a ‘crisis in the world of work’. Reflections upon how the pandemic would accelerate pervasive joblessness and changes in the workplace abounded, while academics and technocrats alike have translated its predicaments as a catalyst for a rapidly coming postwork future. Using illustrative vignettes from our own work on labour in South Africa and Romania, we discuss how the current labour/technology crisis has moved along structural axes of inequality and disempowerment in the world of work. We suggest that, as historians documenting the shifting nature of work and its relationship with technology, we should go against the grain when chronicling the current pandemic as a series of dramatic shifts and spectacular snapshots, and affirm non-eventful ways of writing history.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
2. Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work; Altenried, The Digital Factory; Delfanti, The Warehouse; Schaupp, “Cybernetic Proletarianization”; and Chigbu and Nekhwevha, “The Extent of Job Automation in the Automobile Sector in South Africa.”
3. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, viii.
4. Kalb and Tak, Critical Junctions, 2–3.
5. Fogelson, “The Ethnohistory of Events and Nonevents,” 133–147; and Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis.
6. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History.
7. Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem”; Osborne, “On Comparability”; and Fabian, Time and the Other.
8. Romania held its first free elections after the fall of the state socialist regime in 1990, and South Africa held its first post-Apartheid elections in 1994.
9. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
10. Stewart, Ordinary Affects.
11. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment.
12. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10.
13. See note 3 above.
14. Williams, Marxism and Literature.
15. See note 10 above.
16. Les Trente Glorieuses refers to the particular experience of several countries in Western Europe and Japan during the first three decades after the World War II: rapid economic growth and a solid social contract between labour, capital, and the state, which linked high productivity with high consumption levels and wages, as well as a strong welfare system. The term was coined by Jean Fourastié in his book, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. See also Gordon, “Full Speed Ahead?”
17. Cucu, “‘It Was Quiet’,” 10.
18. Ibid, 11.
19. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism.
20. ”Covid-19: The Impacts of the Pandemic on Inequality,” by Richard Blundell, Robert Joyce, Monica Costa Dias, and Xiaowei Xu, briefing note, 11 June 2020, https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14879.
21. Public Health England, Disparities in the Risk and Outcomes of COVID-19. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/892085/disparities_review.pdf.
22. Anna Stansbury, Inequality and Social Policy Scholar, Harvard University, interviewed for BBC. “Coronavirus: How the World of Work may Change Forever,” https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201023-coronavirus-how-will-the-pandemic-change-the-way-we-work.
23. Adams-Prassl et al., “Inequality in the Impact of the Coronavirus Shock,” 189; “Hispanic Women, Immigrants, Young Adults, those with Less Education Hit Hardest by COVID-19 Job Losses,” Kochhar, 9 June 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/09/hispanic-women-immigrants-young-adults-those-with-less-education-hit-hardest-by-covid-19-job-losses/
24. Elliott, “Slack Launches the Future Forum to Create a Better Way to Work: Helping Companies Reimagine Work in the New Digital-First Workplace,” VP of Future Forum, 1st September 2020. https://slack.com/intl/en-de/blog/collaboration/workplace-transformation-in-the-wake-of-covid-19.
25. Ibid.
27. Krentz et al., “Easing the COVID-19 Burden on Working Parents,” 21 May 2020. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/helping-working-parents-ease-the-burden-of-covid-19.
28. World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2020, https://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2020/.
30. Kenny, “Coronavirus Conjunctures.”
31. In 2015, South Africa had a Gini coefficient of 0.65, http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=12930.
32. Katie Trippe, “Pandemic Policing: South Africa’s Most Vulnerable Face a Sharp Increase in Police-Related Brutality,” Africa Source, 24 June 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/africasource/pandemic-policing-south-africas-most-vulnerable-face-a-sharp-increase-in-police-related-brutality/.
33. Bruce, How to reduce police brutality in South Africa. Most notoriously, police shot (with live ammunition) and killed 34 striking mineworkers in what became known as the Marikana Massacre in 2012.
34. Sara Jerving, “South Africa Data Shows Higher COVID-19 Death Rates for People with HIV, TB,” devex, 10 June 2020, https://www.devex.com/news/south-africa-data-shows-higher-covid-19-death-rates-for-people-with-hiv-tb-97447.
35. “Countries obstructing COVID-19 patent waiver must allow negotiations to start”, 9 March 2021.
https://www.msf.org/countries-obstructing-covid-19-patent-waiver-must-allow-negotiations; and see “Poor Countries are Fighting with Drug Companies Over Vaccines. Now Biden Must Pick a Side,” Politico, 21 March 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/21/coronavirus-vaccine-wto-477272.
36. ”South Africa’s recession deepens as first quarter GDP sinks 2 percent,” BusinessTech, 30 June 2020,
37. Nic Spaull et al., “NIDS-CRAM Wave 1 Synthesis Report: Overview and Findings,” NIDS-CRAM Working Paper, July 15, 2020, p. 4. https://cramsurvey.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Spaull-et-al.-NIDS-CRAM-Wave-1-Synthesis-Report-Overview-and-Findings-1.pdf.
38. The “riots” in July 2021 were a complicated set of events that have to be understood within a range of causal factors, including orchestrated political sabotage in the context of internal ruling party battles, which itself is an outcome of longer-term relations defining South African political economy at the present. However, most commentators also argued that participation by large numbers of ordinary South Africans had to be understood within the COVID-19 conjuncture, with some describing it as also being a ”food riot”,? see Ngwane, “Mall Attacks.”
39. StatsSA, “How Unequal is South Africa?” http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=12930. Please note that the terminology employed below for racial categories in South Africa is both used in everyday language and in official census terms. Thus, the “population groups” used by the state for census reporting include: “black Africans”, “coloured” (referring to historically “mixed race”), “Indian/Asians” (referring to those historically coming from India to South Africa either through indentured labour or other forms of migration), and “whites”. These are derived from classifications under apartheid that designated differential access to residence, jobs, and citizenship. For a critique of ongoing racial classification in the post-apartheid period, see Maré, Declassified.
40. StatsSA, “How Unequal is South Africa?” http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=12930.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ashman et al., “Amnesty international?”; and Barchiesi, Precarious Liberation.
44. Kenny, Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa
45. The Fairwork Project. 2020. Gig Workers, Platforms and Government during COVID-19 in South Africa. www.fair.work.
46. Sarah Smit, “Possible Lockdown Retrenchments are Already Soaring,” The Mail & Guardian, 29 June 2020, https://mg.co.za/business/2020-06-29-possible-lockdown-retrenchments-are-already-soaring/; Michael Rogan and Caroline Skinner, “The COVID-19 crisis and the South African Informal Economy: “Locked Out” of Livelihoods and Employment,” NIDS-CRAM Working Paper, 15 June 2020, https://cramsurvey.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Rogan-Covid-crisis-and-the-South-African-informal-economy.pdf.
47. Oluseye Jegede, “South Africa’s capacity to deploy Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies post-COVID-19,” 20 November 2021, https://www.unido.org/stories/south-africas-capacity-deploy-fourth-industrial-revolution-technologies-post-covid-19.
48. Ibid; and Kenny, “The New ‘Arcadia’?”
49. For example, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, https://www.csir.co.za/centre-fourth-industrial-revolution-south-africa; and see Naledi Ngqambela, “South Africa must bridge digital divide to best benefit from 4IR,” Mail & Guardian, 10 November 2022
50. ”Reserve Bank Warns Loadshedding Likely to Negatively Impact Economic Activity for at Least Next 12 Months,” TimesLIVE, 30 May 2023, https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/business/2023-05-30-reserve-bank-warns-loadshedding-likely-to-negatively-impact-economic-activity-for-at-least-next-12-months/; and Nicole McCain and Na’ilah Ebrahim, “Load Shedding has led to Job Shedding for Township Businesses, Report Finds,” 11 April 2023, news24, https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/load-shedding-has-led-to-job-shedding-for-township-businesses-report-finds-20230411
51. Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”
52. Between March and August, several legislative measures were adopted as a frame for the emergency measures required by the spread of SARS-CoV-2: Decree 195/2020, which instituted the state of emergency, MO, I/212/March 16, 2020; Emergency Ordinance no. 30/2020, MO 231, March 21, 2020; Decree 240/2020, MO 311, April 14, 2020; Emergency Ordinance no 70/2020, MO 394, May 14, 2020; Decision no 394/2020, MO 410, May 18, 2020; Law 59/2020, MO 416, May 19, 2020; and Emergency Ordinance no. 92/2020, MO 459, May 29, 2020.
53. Cornea, “Cea mai dură perioadă pentru angajaţi din 2009 încoace: 400.000 de locuri de muncă au fost şterse din economie în numai 67 de zile,“ Ziarul Financiar, May 21 2020, https://www.zf.ro/profesii/cea-mai-dura-perioada-pentru-angajati-din-2009-incoace-400–000-de-19163962.
54. ”Racism in the Flesh. German Meat Industry and East European Migrant Labor,” June 28, open letter written by FemBunt, a Bulgarian feminist collective based in Berlin, in response to the outrageous declarations of Mr. Laschet, the prime minister of North Rhein-Westphalia that stated that Bulgarian and Romanian workers are responsible for the Coronavirus outbreak at the meat processing plant Tönnies, https://www.transnational-strike.info/2020/06/22/racism-in-the-flesh-german-meat-industry-and-eastern-european-migrant-labor/.
55. Cucu, “Go West.”
56. Grigoras, “Gov’t Economic Measures on Coronavirus Crisis: Aid for SMEs, the State will Cover the Employees’ Technical Unemployment,” 19 March 2020, https://www.romaniajournal.ro/business/govt-economic-measures-on-coronavirus-crisis-aid-for-smes-the-state-will-cover-the-employees-technical-unemployment/.
57. In March 2020, the European Commission praised the effectiveness of short-time work (STW) schemes, and committed to financially bear some of the burden for the public support offered to those firms who had to temporarily reduce the number of working-hours for their employees but still pay them. The debates and proposals led to the adoption of a financial instrument – Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE) – that allows the member states access up to €100 billion in cheap loans, contracted by the European Unions on behalf of its members on the international financial markets, and guaranteed by the European Investment Bank.
58. The European Union adopted as a policy guidance the International Labour Organization predictions that the pandemic would affect the less developed states of the continent worse than the 2008–2009 financial crisis. The ILO foresaw a loss of 7.8 percent of Europe’s total working hours in the second quarter of 2020, equivalent to 12 million full-time workers).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?reference=EPRS_ATA(2020)649375.
59. Emergency Ordinance no. 92/2020, MO 459, May 29, 2020.
60. See note 55 above.
61. Cucu and Jones-Imhotep, “Labor and Technology”.
62. Ibid.
63. Fischer, Capitalist Realism.