Disappearing Work

Deindustrialization

Analyses of deindustrialization accompanied scholarly meditations on a broader shift to a postindustrial society characterized by the weakening of identities, forms of socialization, culture, and solidarities rooted in regular, direct production jobs. The decline of welfare states in Europe and the rollback of public programs in the United States contributed in many of such views to turn labor market competition into a precarious, anxiety-ridden reality, which hardly defines work as a meaningful site of personal fulfillment. Classic studies of deindustrialization, like Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's, focused on its adverse impacts not only on workers’ subjective well-being but also on the very social fabric of communities hit by widening poverty and social inequality. William Julius Wilson discussed the effect of dwindling work opportunities on American inner cities as the propagation of all sorts of social pathologies related to crime, poverty, and the disintegration of families. Focusing on African American communities as the most affected, he concluded that deindustrialization amounted to a new form of racism. Wilson's work became controversial as critics accused it of embracing the “work first” logic of antiwelfare policies that erode the public provisions and safety nets from which the unemployed and the working poor greatly benefit.

Globalization

The emergence of globalization and neoliberal economic reforms as sociological problems shifted to some extent the focus of debates on disappearing work. Scholarly discussions of deindustrialization moved from representing it as a devastating event befalling communities and societies to studying it as a matter of strategic choice by companies and employers. More attention was then paid to the restructuring of production, facilitated by the liberalization of trade and investment and by the delocalization and outsourcing of work toward low-income countries where workers have fewer collective rights and statutory protections. The disappearance of decent, regular jobs in older capitalist countries was then combined with rapid industrial growth in parts of Central America, China, post-communist eastern Europe, and emerging economies in south and southeast Asia. Polemical views of corporate restructuring saw the industrial decline of western Europe and the United States as going hand-in-hand with the explosion of highly exploitative sweatshops, maquiladoras, and “special economic zones” in the global south in a race to the bottom aided and abetted by the global deregulation of economies and labor markets. Because employment growth in low-income countries took place in poorly paid jobs, it could be seen as a cause of the erosion of protected, better remunerated occupations elsewhere and as an incentive for workers in developed societies to relinquish trade unions and collective bargaining while accepting more contingent and precarious jobs.

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