"The United States is the only advanced country where productivity has constantly risen over the past twenty years, while the income of most of its citizens (eight out of ten) has either stagnated or declined. Companies merge, collapse, form and reform, often at the expense of their workers.įear and economic insecurity prevail among the middle-class majority as well as the underclass, writes Beck. Skills can be suddenly devalued, jobs obliterated, social and welfare safety nets eroded. Work has become unstable throughout the modern world, writes Beck, a professor of sociology at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. We see stories all the time about employment rates, but most people have little or no sense of the radical changes affecting the nature of work. Down the road, he argues, this new kind of work society may actually be good for the world, creating a new kind of civil transnationalism, and enhancing our freedom and our civic lives.īeck has written a surprising and provocative book about how working is changing radically under our very noses with little serious discussion in our media or political communities. The idea of the "job for life" has disappeared, temporarily creating a political economy of insecurity. Work here and in much of the West is increasingly resembling labor patterns in the Third World - fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed. The idea of middle-class security is eroding, and so - Beck believes they are related - is worker enthusiasm for democratic practices like voting. In the United States, all the but the highest-level workers are now unsure of their jobs and incomes.
More and more people are ousted from their jobs by smart technologies.
In the The Brave New World of Work, Ulrich Beck argues that the work society as we've known it is coming to an end.
0 kommentar(er)
