The Problem with Waged Labour
Waged labour is often seen as a given for most of us. Worth reflecting on why this is, and who is being left behind.
The settler Australian nation was built on the norm that waged labour is fundamental to be counted as a productive member of Australian society. This expectation of waged labour was bought to Australia as part of British colonialism. Yet political philosopher Karl Marx exposed sharply the unfreedom of this idea. He talked about what he called a double freedom of waged labour[i] – the freedom to labour or the freedom not to labour. The latter being the freedom to die, revealing how unfree we really are when economic security is tied to work. We are made to feel free to work, but at the same time if we don’t work, we are discarded from society.
Most of us don’t really see this as an issue. We have accepted that labour is what we do. Near enough is good enough as long as you are winning. And there are people that enjoy their waged labour.
I am one who says, “I love my job”.
But I am part of the lucky few. Not the majority.
I say this for five reasons.
1. The working life: a mirage of freedom
For most of us secure and dignified wage labour is a mirage. Just by look at unemployment rates we can see that there isn’t enough work for everyone. Even before the COVID recession, unemployment was growing overall.
These numbers are often rebutted by governments saying that they are fixing this with their ever present mantra of “we are creating jobs”[ii].
But what is the quality of these jobs? There is a big difference in economic security between an ongoing position to GIG, casual and contract work.
Your employment rights, ability to have sick leave, holiday pay, and superannuation all differ depending on your work type. GIG workers aren’t even treated as employees, instead under law they are registered as their own business and their GIG bosses escape having to pay any entitlements.
Research by the Australia Institute finds that over half of Australian workers are in one of these precarious employment types[iii].
Also, by just looking the number of people unemployed overlooks the fact that underemployment has also grown dramatically: about 1.1 million Australians would take more paid work if they could get it[iv].
To put it another way, in the 2016 census, 8.8% of the population indicated they “would like more work but cannot find any more work”.
That number was 2% in the early 1980s.
It’s worse if you are a young person. A recent report from the Brotherhood of St Laurence shows that for those aged fifteen to twenty-four, unemployment is 13.5% and underemployment 18%[v]. This means that almost a third of Australian young people are subjected to employment precarity – simply because there isn’t enough paid work to go around[vi].
While many Australians suffer from underwork and insecure work, a great deal endure overwork and bullshit work. Long hours take people away from their families and leisure time. Work demands can increase stress, affecting health and wellbeing.
Working more doesn’t mean people are necessarily more fulfilled either.
Rather, we are often working in what the late David Graeber has termed “bullshit jobs” – paid jobs, “so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince themselves there is a good reason for them to be doing it[vii]”.
People can spend hours of their lives in meetings, writing reports, stacking shelves or entering data, but with no meaning.
The vibrantly coloured building in Docklands designed and inhabited by the National Australia Bank is striking against the concrete city skyline. I used to visit colleagues there for work.
It was here I really started to think about the meaning of work. I remember waiting in the café downstairs for my meeting and watching the endless stream of black, grey, blue and brown suites stream down the escalator.
I wondered what they did with their days in there.
Part of the answer to my question is about people making a living. Actually, a bit more of a living; those working in banks, unless working in the call centres, make well above the median wage in Australia.
At the very least, the bank workers are also just trying, like the rest of us, to get by (but with a bit of extra than most). They have families to support, home loans to pay off, food to buy and taxes to pay.
To lose their job would be stressful just like anyone else.
Some may even enjoy their work. They may get to travel, work in teams of good and interesting people, be put in positions that are thrilling or draw admiration that makes the ego feel good. But the actual point of the job, you know, its measure towards not just towards the greater good, but also how much it contributes to kids in closets through foreclosing on people’s houses and farms or investing in offshore detention, mining and land grabs overseas and here, requires serious reflection. In 2018 and under the Haynes Royal Commission into Banking, it was revealed that banks, including NAB made a business out of charging dead people fees and charging alive people made up fees[viii]. People lost their savings, people lost their houses and the bank’s managers and shareholders got richer[ix].
No one went to jail for this either. People’s lives were ruined but it wasn’t criminal enough to prosecute.
This is not to say the banks don’t ever have a social function. They can mind people’s money. They can lend money so we can get a loan for a home. The profits made from the loan interest could be owned by the public if the banks were owned by the public.
But our governments sold off our public banks and now banks make money for individual shareholders, not the people.
Some people know this already and have broken out to do something else, leaving the rat race behind. Others can’t for various reasons and have to contend daily that there is no deep or substantive meaning in their paid work.
It is just bullshit demands on people’s precious time.
And time is precious. We are not here forever. Yet we have limited control over what we use the limited time we have in our lives, because we have to work.
2. Employment and global exploitation
Do you remember Rana Plaza on 24 April 2013 where 1,138 people died?[x] The building had reportedly been unfit for people to work in but, to meet the demands of international clothing brands including Just Jeans, Jacqui E, Jay Jays, Portmans, Peter Alexander, Dotti and Smiggle, the factory owners and managers continued production. On the 24th, the managers coerced their workers back inside after many again raised concerns about the building, threatening them with their jobs. Twenty minutes later, the building collapsed on their heads.
The brands will be quick to point out they have now all signed global accords to secure better labour conditions. These so-called better conditions, however, don’t stop the wearing down of bodies through long workdays, machine injuries, poor health and the heartbreak of leaving children behind to be looked after by someone else. These workers still face a slow death that goes unnoticed and is rebutted with excuses like “well, at least they have work”.
But is this the best capitalism can offer? A choice between a slow death or destitution?
The point is that many jobs in the Global North rest on inequalities in the Global South. We have a global economy which is more like a global factory in that the formal economy relies on the informal economy. I won’t go over what has been written earlier, but just to point out that many jobs here in Australia rely of the informality or workers elsewhere. Just think about global supply chains of consumables – the head offices of these companies may comply with worker’s rights here in Australia, but their whole business model is based on the exploiting informal labour to make their garments and shoes.
3. Waged labour and settler colonialism
The institution of waged labour has, and is being used to legitimise the oppression and dispossession of First Nations people. From rations, blackbirding, indentured labour, to domestic slavery and abuse; First Nations labour has been expropriated to build settler Australia.
All the while, First Nations ‘willingness to work’ is what people have and are been made to live and die by. We can see this in the current examples of the community development program (remote work for the dole), and income management which are all use punishment and sanctions First Nations behaviours into those more amendable to taking on work.
This is a form of assimilation.
Still today there is an assumption that people are unproductive but heaps of research shows not only that there aren’t enough jobs – particularly in remote parts of Australia, but also that people undertake all sorts of work across the remote Australia. This includes care of country – which has a different ontological basis that settler work, and also care of children, care of the elderly and care of community – all of this is unpaid work but extremely productive.
4. Waged labour and exclusion
Since Federation, employment has always been used to define people as deserving or undeserving.
It has been a key metric in constructing borders between bodies and to create social hierarchies. People not working or unable to work – often because of poor functioning labour markets, are subject to social exclusion. If you appear to be failing at this Australian life, you are targeted through the cruel welfare system. The display of cruelty to people on welfare operates as a spectacle for those in waged work – a constant reminder of what will become of us if we too don’t comply.
A person’s role in the formal labour market is a key instrument in defining who matters and who doesn’t – often with racialised, gender and ableist implications. Australia’s policies have shown this through history - from eugenics to now welfare conditionality.
For example, waged labour has been a driver of ableism where non-abled bodies are defined by their ability to be productive for the labour market. It used to be that eugenicists, many who held important public roles in Australia, lobbied for policies to support the breeding out of what they called ‘unfitness’. Today, disability is still too often defined by bodies that cannot work, or where abilities to take on waged labour are eroded.
This situation overlooks and systematically excludes the range of productive abilities people have. Indeed, it’s our conception of productivity driven by norms underpinning waged labour is what disables bodies – not some individualised condition which its often made out to be.
5. The gendered division of labour
Often, women have two jobs, one paid through formal employment and one unpaid – looking after the children and taking on other caring roles. This latter work ensures we continue to exist. There is simply no society or indeed life without ‘social reproduction’ - what feminist political philosopher Nancy Fraser describes as:
“the work of birthing and socialising the young, the caring for the old, maintenance of households, building communities and sustaining the shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation”[xi].
The capitalist economy relies on this unpaid work - or as Nancy Fraser states, “free rides on” this work. Unpaid social reproductive labour is valued in so far as it is a condition of our functioning, yet no monetairsed value is given, and this work is treated as if it is free.
Gender norms regulating the roles of men and women have meant that women undertake a larger proportion of this unpaid work[xii].
As Silva Federici says, we do the “cooking, smiling and fucking[xiii]” that capitalism requires to function.
All unpaid.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that unpaid childcare is the biggest industry in Australia. It is around three times bigger than the financial industries sector, construction, manufacturing and mining (Australia’s four biggest formal industries[xiv]). If we combine all other unpaid work listed in the census such as volunteering, looking after the elderly, domestic work is together, they are also bigger than these other formal sectors.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2014 found that the value of unpaid care work was worth more - $434 billion dollars or 43.5% of Australia Gross Domestic Product[xv].
Julie Smith estimates that the unpaid work of breastfeeding alone is worth an $3 billion dollars every year[xvi]. All these numbers point to the immense value unpaid care brings to the economy.
Not only do women bear the responsibility for much of the care we enjoy, but women also soak up the additional costs from ecological and economic crises. This is the case, for example, when government’s employ austerity logic and cut social services, the gaps are often absorbed through women’s unpaid work.
All of this freeriding on the work of women takes a toll. Shirin Rai and colleagues say:
“[D]epletion not only to refer[s] to the depletion of natural resources and of the earth’s carrying capacity, but also to the discursive, emotional, bodily, and societal harm which results from the lack of attention paid to the overburdening of women in the sphere of social reproduction[xvii].”
Carers have kept it going for so long, but we now need all of us to take on this crucial and life giving work.
We need to go further than contemporary efforts to get more women into waged labour. This often just adds to the pressure.
Instead, we need to break down gendered norms and challenge how unpaid social reproductive work is expropriated by the formal economy.
These five issues with waged labour show it’s an institution based on, or at least, a contributor to, exploitation and expropriation.
[i] Marx, Capital: Volume 1, see Chapter 6.
[ii] SBS, "Imf Not Buying ‘Jobs and Growth’ Mantra," SBS News April 12, 2016, no. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/imf-not-buying-jobs-and-growth-mantra (2016).
[iii] Jim Stanford, "The Future of Work Is What We Make It, Senate Select Committee on the Future of Work and Workers," ed. Parliament of Australia (2018).https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/theausinstitute/pages/2668/attachments/original/1517531725/Senate_Inquiry_Future_of_Work.pdf?1517531725
[iv] , https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/theausinstitute/pages/2668/attachments/original/1517531725/Senate_Inquiry_Future_of_Work.pdf?1517531725
[v] Brotherhood of St Laurence, "Generation Stalled: Young, Underemployed, and Living Precariously in Australia," (Brotherhood of St. Laurence, 2017).
[vi] Reasons for the failure of work are various, from inherent structural failures in capitalism, to poor economic management at a national level, continued attacks on unions and increases in the gig economy and automation. As discussed earlier, despite rising rates of precarity and limits to labour markets, both Labor and Liberal governments have pursued punitive welfare as a way to distract from structural failures within the economy.
[vii] David Graeber, "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," Strike! 2013.
[viii] Kenneth Haynes, "Financial Services Royal Commission," Commonwealth of Australiahttps://financialservices.royalcommission.gov.au/Pages/reports.aspx (2019).
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Jana Kaspervic, “Rana Plaza collapse: workplace dangers persist three years later, reports find,” The Guardian, 31 May 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/31/rana-plaza-bangladesh-collapse-fashion-working-conditions
[xi] Fraser, N. (2016). ‘Capitalism’s Crisis of Care’. Dissent, 63(4), 30-37.
[xii] Eyben, "The Hegemony Cracked: The Power Guide to Getting Care onto the Development Agenda."
[xiii] Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, 13.
[xiv] Unpaid childcare is 19.9% of the total Australian Economy. All other unpaid work is 7.6% of the total economy. Financial services is 7%, construction is 6.5%, manufacturing 6.2%, mining is 6.1%. 7.6% is all other unpaid care work – volunteering, domestic work and care of elderly. PricewaterhouseCoopers Economics and Policy, "Understanding the Unpaid Economy," (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2017).
[xv] Anne Manne ‘Making women’s unpaid work count, The Monthly, May 2018, https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/may/1525096800/anne-manne/making-women-s-unpaid-work-count#mtr
[xvi] Smith, Julie. “‘Lost Milk?’: Counting the Economic Value of Breast Milk in Gross Domestic Product.” Journal of Human Lactation 29, no. 4 (November 2013): 537–46. doi:10.1177/0890334413494827.
[xvii] Shirin M Rai, Catherine Hoskyns, and Dania Thomas, "Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction," International Feminist Journal of Politics16, no. 1 (2014): 86-105.
October 2020