Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 13:56:50 +0000
Subject: AUT: Re: intellectuals: job mobility



Hi

I've been reading The Individualised Society by Bauman
(see a few quotes below). In it he worries that increased job
mobility has meant that it is impossible to build the types
of relationships over time that are necessary to create the
solidarites that will eventually lead to organisations (specifically
trade unions) that are capable of resisting capitals excesses and
regulate work relationships in the interest of the worker.
I just wondered if anyone can recommend any articles
that discuss this issue.

In particular I am interested in
whether the fundamental change Bauman refers
to really has occurred. For instance Bauman cites as an example
the ford worker, one who has a live long commitment
to one workplace. But I would have thought that many
women works, to cite another example, would have had
very little long term employment in a workplace. So
perhaps its not that there is more job mobility now, but
that job mobility is now seen among male skilled workers
(which ties into the discussion on intellectual labor/
computer programmers we have been having).

Also I wonder if he is correct in arguing that permanence
of employment is a prerequisite for collective organization. Dockers
traditionally are among the strongest trade union organizations
and also had extremely unstable employment conditions.

Finally, the only concrete measures of job mobility he cites
are from the US.  But the US/UK is not the world. Would anyone
know where I might find mobility information for other places.

Anyhow, I'd greatly appreciate any of your inputs or recommendations,

all the best

Aileen




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Quotes from The Individualised Society by Bauman
Whoever as a young apprentice took their first job at Ford could be pretty
sure to finish their live of work in the same place.  The time horizons of
the =91heavy modernity=92 era were long term. For the workers, the horizons
were drawn by the prospect of lifelong employment inside a company which
might not be immortal but whose lifespan stretched well beyond the
expectations of its workers =85
To put it in a nutshell: the =91long term=92 mentality amounted to an
expectation born of experience, and amply corroborated by that experience,
that the respective fates of the people who buy labour and the people who
sell it are closely and inseparably intertwined for a long time to come, in
practical terms forever  and that, therefore, working out a bearable mode
of cohabitation is just as much =91in everybodies interest=92 as the
negotiation of the rules of neighbourly fairplay would be among
house-owners settled on the same estate=85
As long as staying in each other=92s company was assumed to last, the rules
of that togetherness were the focus of intense negotiations, sometimes of
confrontations and showdowns, at some other times of truce and compromise.
Unions reforged the impotence of individual workers into collective
bargaining power and fought to recast the disabling regulations into
workers=92 rights and to refashion them into constraints imposed on the
employers=92 freedom of manoeuvre=85
The situation has changed now, and the crucial ingredient of the change is
the new =91short term=92 mentality which came to replace the =91long term=92 one.
Marriages =91till death us do part=92 are now a rarity: the partners no longer
expect to stay long in each others company=85
[Bauman, 2001 #281: 23].

=91Flexibility=92 is the slogan of the day, and when applied to the labour
market it means an end to the job =91as we know it=92, work on short-term
contracts, rolling contracts or no contracts, positions with no inbuilt
security but with the =91until further notice=92 clause.
One may say of course that there is nothing particularly new about that
situation, that working life has been full of uncertainly since time
immemorial; but the present-day uncertainty is of a strikingly novel kind.
The feared disasters which may play havoc with one=92s livelihood and its
prospects are not the sort which can be staved off or at least resisted and
mollified by joining forces, by making a united stand, jointly debating,
agreeing and enforcing measures.  The most dreadful disasters strike now at
random, picking their victims with a bizarre logic or no logic at all,
scattering their blows capriciously, so that there is no way to anticipate
who will be doomed and who saved. The present day uncertainty is a powerful
individualizing force. It divides instead of uniting and since there is no
telling who might wake up in what division, the idea of =91common interests=92
becomes ever more nebulous and in the end becomes incomprehensible. Fears,
anxieties and grievances are made in such a way as to be suffered alone.
They do not add up, do not cumulate into =91common cause=92, have no =91natural
address=92. This deprives the solidary stand of its past status as a rational
tactic and suggests a life strategy quite different from the one which led
to the establishment of the working-class defensive and militant organisations
[Bauman, 2001 #281: 24].

When the employment of labour becomes short term, having been stripped of
firm (let alone guaranteed) prospects and therefore made episodic, and when
virtually all rules containing the game of promotions and dismissals have
been scrapped or tend to be altered well before the game is over, there is
little chance of mutual loyalty and commitment to sprout up and take
root.  Unlike in the times of long-term mutual dependency, there is hardly
any stimulus to take a serious, let alone critical, interest in the
arrangement which is bound to be transient anyway.

=85to an extent never achieved by the =91absentee landlords=92 of yore, capital
has cut itself loose from its dependence on labour through a new freedom of
movement undreamt of in the past. Its reproduction and growth has become by
and large independent of the duration of any particular local engagement
with labour.

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