The Creativity Hoax: Precarious Work and the Gig Economy

The changes in work and working life are well known but it is worth restating them here. Contemporary Western societies (Watson et al., 2003) have seen a decline in manufacturing-industry and blue-collar work, especially in the manual trades that were the bedrock of working-class communities. For a period in the mid-twentieth century, large Fordist employers offered relatively stable and abundant jobs such that Western societies experienced something approaching full employment. It was around such stability that the citizenship and welfare arrangements of social democracy were built. Those who suffered two world wars and the Great Depression agreed to perform repetitive manual work in return for a good wage, with a welfare safety net to cover them against misfortune. This was only a fleeting moment (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008; Campbell, 2013), however, in the history of labour. In the West, the process of deindustrialization began in the 1960s and has continued inexorably over 50 years. Although blue-collar work continues to be important – especially the building trades – there has been a shift in the occupational profile towards employment based on services, knowledge, creativity and technology. In 2005, The Economist reported that less than 10 per cent of the workforce was employed in manufacturing, down from 25 per cent in 1970.1 In New York City, only eighty thousand people work in manufacturing where once a million did. Governments face the challenge of mitigating the effects of long-term decline in employment, a trend that has hit workers particularly hard. This tale of economic restructuring can also be told in the register of working-class post-industrial melancholy. It is captured in numerous ballads of rustbelt decline and is symbolized most poignantly by cities like Detroit, where the car factories rot to the ground and many downtown architectural reminders of mid-century prosperity lie derelict, along with the dwellings that once housed the workers. The narrative of the flight of capital is familiar: the factories have moved to the developing world and in the West we no longer make things anymore; capitalism has succeeded in globalizing the mentalmanual division of labour and so the old skills learned by apprentices on the job, and the communities of labour built around those skills, are no longer required