The Brave New World of Work

Rating:
Summary: Bobos in purgatory
Review: As Beck observes in his chapter on the US, Americans and Europeans see the world very differently. If, like many Americans, you think that life in US is good and getting better you may have some trouble connecting with Beck's perspective.

Beck takes up John Gray's idea (from False Dawn) that America is in the grip of the religion of free market utopianism. Spreading the faith across the globe has become America's historic mission. But there's trouble in paradise. Productivity in the US is disturbingly low -- a tenth lower than Germany. There's rising income inequality as well. Wages for unskilled workers have fallen and, and despite increases in GDP, eight out of ten workers earn the same or less than they did twenty years ago. Middle class Americans also face a frightening lack of job security and must live without the kind of social safety net taken for granted in most developed nations.

On top of all this Beck says that Robert Putnam is right -- civil society is coming apart at the seams. Beck blames the decline on America's under-performing labor market. To maintain their standard of living the average unproductive American need to work two or more jobs. There's simply no time for voluntary work or democracy anymore.

Of course the US unemployment statistics seem to be far lower than Europe's but this is obviously an illusion. American governments hide their otherwise unemployed workers by building prisons. Quoting Jeremy Rifkin he explains that jail is an American's answer to the social safety net.

So, far from being a source of well-being and riches, the American free market (neo-liberal) path is "a program for the break-up of society." Neoliberalism is leading to the 'Brazilization' of work society. Secure full-time work is no longer the norm, it's being replaced by a patchwork of paid and unpaid activity. Beck concludes the book with some ideas on how Europe might respond positively to the sweeping changes taking place in the world of work.

While there are some interesting ideas here too much of the book is devoted to a fairly uncritical recitation of the conventional wisdom of the popular European intellectual left. Beck pieces together a lot of his story with quotes and ideas taken from other writers like Jeremy Rifkin, Andre Gorz and John Gray.

Rating:
Summary: Across the Great Divide
Review: When he's good, he's great. Some passages in this book, especially those dealing with Beck's idea of a new civil society that must be forged out of the remains of the social welfare contract, are inspiring. When he's not so good, it's because he's repetitive, or because he's speaking so generally about the effects of the global economy that he veers into vague abstraction at the expense of driving his thesis home. Because it's a challenging thesis -- the idea of paid civil work as a way to (re)create a truly democratic society -- and because it's articulation is at least partially supported through data, it's easy to forgive the sometimes too-general perspective.

Read as a companion "The Global Age" by Martin Albrow, which is quoted in The Brave New World of Work, and interestingly, has the same strengths and weaknesses: an interestingly theory (we've moved past the post-modern age into the "global age" wherein the interconnectedness of humanity belies old national boundaries and notions of class), and a sometimes too abstract style.

Rating:
Summary: Across the Great Divide
Review: When he's good, he's great. Some passages in this book, especially those dealing with Beck's idea of a new civil society that must be forged out of the remains of the social welfare contract, are inspiring. When he's not so good, it's because he's repetitive, or because he's speaking so generally about the effects of the global economy that he veers into vague abstraction at the expense of driving his thesis home. Because it's a challenging thesis -- the idea of paid civil work as a way to (re)create a truly democratic society -- and because it's articulation is at least partially supported through data, it's easy to forgive the sometimes too-general perspective.

Read as a companion "The Global Age" by Martin Albrow, which is quoted in The Brave New World of Work, and interestingly, has the same strengths and weaknesses: an interestingly theory (we've moved past the post-modern age into the "global age" wherein the interconnectedness of humanity belies old national boundaries and notions of class), and a sometimes too abstract style.