‘Post-work’ visions for 2030
The future could realise the dream of Marx and Keynes for a society beyond work—or a populist nightmare of worklessness.
The future could realise the dream of Marx and Keynes for a society beyond work—or a populist nightmare of worklessness.
The pandemic has accelerated teleworking in the public sector—but with inadequate planning have come mixed results.
Most discussion of gig workers has focused on their material insecurity. More attention also needs to be paid to what goes on in their heads.
Funda Ustek-Spilda, Fabian Ferrari, Matt Cole, Pablo Aguera Reneses and Mark Graham
We can’t go back to a world without labour platforms, so their proprietary digital infrastructure must be recreated as a public good.
Standard employment is not simply being replaced by non-standard work. But work is becoming more diverse and policy must accordingly become more tailored.
The transformation of work is not simply from jobs to automation. Its complex, variable character demands a matching policy portfolio.
Pressure is growing within the European Parliament for an EU directive.
Digitalisation is a key issue in public services. Workers must have a role, via their unions, to maximise its benefits and minimise its risks.
Impossible hours carved out by apps have often been presented as if self-determined ‘flexibility’ on the part of workers.
Cross-border social dialogue could pave the way to international regulation of a key feature of the 21st-century world of work.
Unless the platform economy becomes embedded in social norms about decent work, it threatens to rewrite society in its own image.
Action is needed at European level to ensure workers enjoy democracy at work, particularly in the context of digitalisation.
The potential benefits of new technologies for workplace health and safety are being vitiated by a profit-focused approach.
Amid the 1970s economic crisis in Britain, Lucas Aerospace workers, threatened with redundancy, developed a plan for socially useful work. It’s an idea whose time has come.
The centenary of the International Labour Organization saw publication of a major report on the future of work. Action on its recommendations is now even more urgent.
The digitalisation of work, despite its potential, risks becoming an impersonal means by which employers tilt the balance of power.
‘Industry 4.0’ may be neither so extensive nor advanced as those in whom it arouses hopes and fears.
Despite increasing criticism of Big Tech, the business models of leading digital companies are still widely admired. That’s a problem.
There’s time to avoid the carnage of employer-led restructuring following the pandemic—but only if workers and unions set the agenda.
Algorithmic systems are a new front line for unions as well as a challenge to workers’ rights to autonomy.