Abstract
The past several decades have brought drastic changes to the labor market in the form of new technologies, regulatory and policy changes, and the significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. How workers, businesses, and government agencies respond to these changes will determine whether as a society we build toward a more equitable and productive future, or if inequality and exploitation will define the working world. In this moment of transition, the contributors and editors of The Many Futures of Work take seriously the project of rebuilding a sustainable workforce that fulfills the worker and enriches the private sector through responsible governance. The authors provide thorough research and practicable policy recommendations, but stop just short of imagining a transformative future for workers and the economy.
The book is a compilation of 18 essays by prominent academics, researchers, and practitioners in the labor field including Darrick Hamilton, Saru Jayaraman, and Eileen Applebaum. Most of the essays focus on a discrete topic and provide a survey of the research in the field and policy proposals to address identified issues and achieve more equitable outcomes. These essays are grouped by topic into five sections: The Impact of Bias and Structural Inequality; Rising Economic Inequality: The Elephant in the Room; The Platform Economy and Gig Workers: Expectations, Challenges, and Opportunities; The Role of Labor Activism in the Twenty-First Century; and Paths to the Future. These sections each have three to five essays that isolate a particular area and focus on that author’s work and perspective. The focus of the book is primarily on the American economy, but international perspectives are brought in through a few of the essays including one on NAFTA and references to Uber’s regulatory troubles in Europe. Academic research is central to each topic, but there is an emphasis on actionable policy proposals.
The first two sections establish systemic inequality as one of the biggest challenges currently faced in both the labor market and in the economy at large. The essays in these sections analyze employment data and economic trends beginning in and around the mid-twentieth century to identify the causes of inequality and recommend policies to address these issues. The next two sections, on the gig economy and labor organizing, further explore the current landscape and how employment relations and labor participation are changing rapidly. These two sections highlight technological advancements that for better or worse are influencing the idea of the workplace, and efforts that are underway to make change that empowers workers. Written before the widespread introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into multiple industries, these chapters do not grapple with the more existential concerns of automation, however they describe structural employment changes that are important for understanding how technology companies view labor and can inform an understanding of the current AI adoption. The final section contains four essays that present bigger ideas for addressing economic inequality through better opportunities for workers. These include Phyllis Moen’s advocacy toward a more holistic approach to career development and life planning, Thomas Croft and Annie Malhotra’s description of commonwealth companies where workers co-determine business strategy, a review of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) by Christopher Mackin, and William A. Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton’s proposal for a Federal work guarantee program.
Built as an extension of a 2017 conference held by the Institute for Work and the Economy, The Many Futures of Work has a conference-like feel to it. There are many big ideas digested into eighteen-page bites, giving you just a taste of the interesting and thorough research on these topics. This format has its benefits and its drawbacks. The editors are able to present a broad range of topics with knowledgeable and practical information. However, the analysis can seem shallow with so little room, and there is no effort to synthesize the information. The reader is left to fill in the blanks and create dialogue between the pieces on their own.
The first section, for example, is about the ways bias and structural inequality impact workers and has five discrete essays based on geography, gender, disability, immigration, and race. With this structure, there is little room for intersectionality in the analysis. Even as the pieces acknowledge intersectional biases, the authors are focused on their main topic and do not directly relate to the other chapters. This does create a comprehensive picture of structural inequity in the labor market, but it does not provide a cohesive picture.
This format allows the reader to synthesize the information on their own and establish interesting connections that were not obvious before. Like many conferences, there is a benefit to bringing together focused individual perspectives in exposing a collective problem and hopefully opening the door to more research. In book form, though, it can be disappointing to have an apparent gap in analysis. Four of the five essays in the first section mention how the decline of middle-skill jobs negatively impacts workers in the various subsections of the population that these essays focus on. Missing middle-skill jobs, however, are never addressed on a policy level in these or later essays. I wanted to know if these jobs were worth creating and protecting in their own right, and if so, how could government policy and business practices better align workers’ existing and potential skills with employment opportunities. Reading the first section highlighted the impact of missing middle skills jobs across a broad range of the workforce, and the later subject areas, such as technology and worker organizing, would be well used in tackling the issue.
If there is one essay that approaches a working thesis for the book, it is William Lazonick’s “The Investment Triad and Sustainable Prosperity.” This essay appears in the second section of the book on economic inequality and sets up the conversations about worker empowerment and regulatory proposals that are to follow. Lazonick establishes the investment triad as three equally important economic actors—household units, government agencies, and business firms—whose inputs and investments enhance the productivity of the other sectors. Their mutual investments lead to growth in all of the sectors and to what he calls sustainable prosperity, or ongoing and equitable growth. The US economy following World War II is his prime example of how the investment triad leads to sustainable prosperity.
The rise of shareholder supremacy has warped the investment triad since about the 1980s, according to Lazonick. Instead of reinvesting profits back into the business, firms are incentivized to increase short-term stock prices over every other metric for success, effectively extracting the value input by households and governments and giving it to shareholders, the financial sector, and, through lucrative executive compensation packages, to executives. This has led to growing wealth inequality, a siphoning off of social resources, and degrading long-term prosperity for everyone, including the businesses themselves. Lazonick argues that in order to return to the investment triad, we have to implement sound regulations that restrict exploitative business practices, empower workers, and harness public resources to create a better economy that works for everyone.
This framework structures much of the analysis in the book with the authors looking at how workers, employers, and public oversight relate to each other and providing solutions to the problems workers face today. These ideas are echoed in both the introduction and conclusion by Peter Creticos, as well as the foreword by Peter Georgescu of Young & Rubicam. One of the concluding essays, Thomas Croft and Annie Malhotra’s “Commonwealth Companies” is an extension of the investment triad to align the interests of workers as stakeholders with shareholders and make employees active participants in critical business decisions. Responsible investment and a focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance practices are methods for greater accountability, and Croft and Malhotra advocate for these practices to be more widely spread. Editor Peter Creticos neatly summarizes this philosophy when he writes in the conclusion, “Both businesses and workers are winners when we put workers first” (347).
This analysis has limitations in that it relies on private corporate interests to willingly share in their profits with their employees and other stakeholders. As compelling as the authors’ arguments are, it’s not clear if they are persuasive enough to convince businesses to relinquish their power or give up easy capital and little accountability. Even should businesses adopt co-governance or face clearer regulations, there are inherent tensions between working conditions and profit making that cannot be resolved through mutual gain. If workers do not create their own center of power, they will still be beholden to profit motivation and increasingly exploitative business practices.
Many of the authors argue for workers to reclaim their power or for a return to the business practices that preceded the deregulation and stagnation of the 1970s and 1980s. This is not advocating for the future of work so much as a return to an idealized past. The positive employment relationships in the postwar years were extended predominantly to white men and relied on unpaid domestic labor by women. Racial discrimination was not only permitted but statutorily required for many years during this period, and there were no workplace protections for people with disabilities or other now-protected classes. In order to really solve the problems of current economic instability and insecurity, we must do more than re-create the past.
When the book does look toward the future in the section on the platform economy and gig workers, it exposes how dated the triad philosophy is in the modern workplace. New technology companies like Uber, and the Silicon Valley venture capital firms backing them, are actively hostile to the power of workers, and their business models are largely built on subverting existing regulations, let alone implementing new ones. Both of the substantive chapters in the section take a neutral stance on technology, foreseeing the possibility of positive outcomes from technological adoption, but focusing on the negative impacts of specific practices that are being implemented in a growing number of organizations.
Chris Warhurst, Christ Mathieu, and Sally Wright in chapter 10 describe Uber’s regulatory avoidances, mainly in the United Kingdom and Europe, as a primary example of how platformization exploits workers through loopholes, like categorizing drivers as independent contractors, and failing to deliver on the promise of a true sharing economy. In chapter 11, Martin Kenney and John Zysman expand on the difference between the sharing economy on which these companies are premised, and the VC-funded platform economy that has come to dominate Silicon Valley. Kenney and Zysman are primarily concerned with the financing and business models of these companies. They are designed to reach monopolistic positions and squeeze out incumbent businesses while discouraging new entrants, and achieve this primarily through skirting regulations and using unfair labor practices. Kenney and Zysman criticize these moves as anticompetitive, and question if this is even a smart business model. After all, platform tech companies are not posting profits like the traditional companies they are putting out of business. They propose antitrust and financial regulations to curb the worst business practices.
Both sets of authors give space for techno-optimism and the possibility that technological advancement could lead to more productivity and worker autonomy. Warhurst, Mathieu, and Wright even discuss the idea of a basic income and automated work leading to a radical redistribution of wealth. While they rightly point out the failures and flaws of specific business practices, the authors only recommend regulations and neither set goes far enough in questioning the need for these businesses. In chapter 6, Eileen Applebaum introduces the concept of rent-seeking behavior as an extractive practice of firms. This concept would be well applied in these essays, leading to much sharper criticism than the authors provide, and it feels like another missed opportunity for dialogue.
The two concluding chapters on ESOPs and a Federal employment program provide interesting and innovative solutions to current challenges by breaking from a mold that relies too heavily on private enterprise doing the right thing. However, even ESOPs are a short measure for true Worker Cooperatives, which are only mentioned briefly. Given their increase in popularity, more should have been said about how this model of worker ownership can achieve the goals of sustainable prosperity. Throughout the book the authors provide solid policy recommendations for regulations, tax incentives, and labor organizing, but there are few ideas that upset the labor relations we are accustomed to.
These limitations feel harsh when applied to the individual essays, most of which are full of rich research and thoughtful policy proposals that, if implemented, would lead to improved conditions and less economic inequality. Creticos and his coeditors gather important research, and the book is an effective survey of research and policy proposals to address structural inequality and increase worker power. The Many Futures of Work provides many good ideas to ensure that workers have a say in their own futures in the face of a continually changing economy, even as it falls short of reimagining a future where workers can have full control over their working lives.
