2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
A survey into an emerging pattern of labor instability and uneven global development
Is job insecurity the new norm? With fewer and fewer people working in steady, long-term positions for one employer, has the dream of a secure job with full benefits and a decent salary become just that-a dream?
In Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross surveys the new topography of the global workplace and finds an emerging pattern of labor instability and uneven development on a massive scale. Combining detailed case studies with lucid analysis and graphic prose, he looks at what the new landscape of contingent employment means for workers across national, class, and racial lines-from the emerging "creative class" of high-wage professionals to the multitudes of temporary, migrant, or low-wage workers. Developing the idea of "precarious livelihoods" to describe this new world of work and life, Ross explores what it means in developed nations-comparing the creative industry policies of the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, as well as developing countries-by examining the quickfire transformation of China's labor market. He also responds to the challenge of sustainability, assessing the promise of "green jobs" through restorative alliances between labor advocates and environmentalists.
Ross argues that regardless of one's views on labor rights, globalization, and quality of life, this new precarious and "indefinite life,&" and the pitfalls and opportunities that accompany it is likely here to stay and must be addressed in a systematic way. A more equitable kind of knowledge society emerges in these pages-less skewed toward flexploitation and the speculative beneficiaries of intellectual property, and more in tune with ideals and practices that are fair, just, and renewable.
Industry Reviews
"Economic liberalization, [Ross] demonstrates, has opened up a frenetic global traffic in jobs and migrants, uprooting people in a manner both useful and troubling to the managers of capital. In short, more people are available to exploit, but they are also harder to control... A thorough and thoughtful study of global professional insecurity." The Times Literary Supplement "With admirable timing, [Ross] examines a global workplace infrastructure that's as shaky as the economy would indicate... Though far from uplifting, this is a bold, pointed look at reality as it is, a far more valuable commodity." Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "According to Ross, job insecurity became commonplace long before the current financial debacle. As economies shifted from industry to information, the benefits and securities of the Keynesian era quietly gave way to a workforce of temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants. Ross finds that city fathers are more interested in Olympic bids and stadium projects than in sustainable employment, while corporations spend more on 'social responsibility' public-relations campaigns than on addressing worker complaints, and activists are too focussed on narrow concerns to find common cause with natural allies." The New Yorker "Illuminating... Who knows what will be on the table when the damage of the global crisis is told? At the very least, one may hope for a return to security, sensible financial regulation, and a renewed interest in economic equity. Other worlds are possible, and with luck thinkers like Ross can point the way to imagining them more fully." BookForum "...whereas for Euro-Americans the path is from Keynesian consensus to its unravelling by the savagery of neoliberal capitalism. Ross is one of those keen to point out that now, with historical hindsight, the Keynesian moment where state security (in the form of public pensions, education and so on) offsets the wilder excesses of capital increasingly looks like a historical blip. But he points out that not only did the temporary Fordist truce rely on imperialism, rigid social hierarchies and a reservoir of unpaid domestic labour, but that today is no simple neo-Victorian age: pre- and post-Fordist moments are qualitatively different. For whereas the Great Depression was the result of a collapse of capitalist control, contemporary precarity is the result of capitalist control, as organizations have eagerly embraced the flexploitation of short-term contracts and outsourcing as the new template for work ... As we are encouraged to be entrepreneurial subjects scrabbling over each other for success in a so-called 'meritocracy'." - Radical Philosophy, November 2010 "This excellent and, in places, brilliant book should be read by anyone interested in a timely and astute analysis of the malaise of life and work in neoliberal postmodern society... Highly recommended." Choice
