No, Automation Isn’t Going to Make Work Disappear – Jacobin magazine

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The death of the working class is an interesting question because one of the main reasons instigating the discourse on the end of work is deindustrialization and the end of blue-collar workers. What this misses is the globalization of value chains, the regionalization of industries, and the fact that to take one prominent industry there are today more auto workers worldwide than there were thirty years ago: far fewer in Italy, France, or the UK, but far more in China, India, and Latin America. Employment in the auto sector rose worldwide by 35 percent between 2007 and 2017. Take China, where employment in the sector rose 68 percent, to roughly 5 million workers in 2017, or Mexico, where employment doubled during the same period. At the same time, employment in the auto industry in France declined from 280,000 to 190,000 in the same period. Thats without taking into account the emergence of a battery value chain, whose effects on industrial employment are to be determined.

So, the death of the working class discourse is a Global North narrative, blind to the economic transformations of world capitalism. I use the theoretical framework of Beverly J. Silver, who says that capital faces two opposing forces. The first is the profitability crisis: capital searches for new countries where the labor force is cheaper, and new industries where it can invest, to counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The second force is working-class organization. Thats why it always seeks out disciplined and peaceful working classes in Global South countries. But it also creates the same contradictions in these other countries. So, while it invests in creating new industries and new working classes in other countries, it also creates new labor conflicts and demands.

In this sense, alongside the deindustrialization of Northern countries, there is an industrialization of Southern and Eastern ones. Slovakia has more production of vehicles per person than any other country in Europe. Then, in northwestern Europe, you have a tendency also to create new hubs of industrial workers; in the book I give the example of logistics, which is one of the fastest-growing sectors of industrial work in the rich countries. There is a small boom in the number of workers in this sector, where jobs are usually manual, very unskilled, and very poorly paid. In France, you have now 800,000 blue-collar workers in logistical hubs in the peripheries of big cities. One can also think of the UPS Worldport in Louisville, Kentucky, with 20,000 employees. This again reflects the idea that where capital invests, labor conflicts emerge. You have seen this in France, and you have seen this in northern Italy, where there was a wave of strikes by migrant workers in logistical hubs. That is a direct consequence of this development of logistics as an industrial sector, as was the auto industry a few years ago.

Alessandro Delfanti said that Amazon is the new Fiat. Im not sure if I entirely agree with that, because Fiat, now Stellantis, still exists. But the configuration of the workforce is somewhat similar. It means that there are young, unskilled, migrant, poorly paid, and highly concentrated workers in these new logistical hubs. And this is an explosive cocktail in a certain sense for the organization of the working class, and it could be a possible source of renewal also for the labor movement today.

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No, Automation Isn't Going to Make Work Disappear - Jacobin magazine