Permanent employment has become a past relic in the
contemporary world. Companies hire individuals on contracts which form the
basis of their firing with a month's notice only.
Over the recent past, major media houses have
depicted a trend of laying off employees at will. Journalists, who are
white-collar employees, are among the most politically organized and legally
protected professionals in the contemporary society. For more than two decades,
even the most precarious yet organized blue-collar employees have exercised
significant control over remuneration, work conditions and security promises
upon retirement. All this has undergone an irreversible change over the recent
past.
The dramatic changes that happened in the capitalism
structure over the last thirty years can be explained to a larger extent by
technological advancements. This phenomenon has not just rendered major
traditional organizations such as trade unions obsolete. It has also changed
the form and meaning of labor.
Today, permanent employment is a past relic. Labor
and labor relations are increasingly digitized. Workers are hired on
contractual basis which allow employers to fire employees almost at will.
Historically, white-collar workers have been better
off compared to blue-collar workers. The plight of workers who provide menial
labor under “informality” conditions, and the once-powerful class of workers is
now struggling to be acknowledged. Perhaps, a more worrying trend is the
ever-expanding classical divisions between white-collar and blue-collar, menial
labor and mental labor, and so on. These divisions are no longer enough to
facilitate comprehension of the paid work's future.
Digital
labor
The digital labor concept transgresses the
traditional ideas of time and space. Most telecommunication companies are
producing services and goods. These include software applications that the modern
population seems to embrace so well. Although physical labor is
All these confirm the current permanent employment
crisis. The political “working class” lexicon has virtually disappeared. There
no longer exist organizations for menial job workers. This group is no longer
describing itself in terms of class. More educated workforce segments do not view
themselves as part of the working class. In fact, a vast majority of them
aspires to be part of the globalized, glamorous “middle class.”
However, this does not imply that the world is more egalitarian
than it was at some point when the power of the working-class was at its peak. It
simply means that human perceptions of selves and political roles have changed
fundamentally world-over in the past years.
Of course, technology cannot explain these changes
fully since corporations and states are reasserting themselves with an aim of
rolling back gains already made by the organized labor in the 20th
century.
However, to comprehend tectonic shifts that are
taking place in the modern society, including labor and labor relations, we
ought to think about changes in the political economy's structure from a global
perspective.
It is only by doing so that we can best organize
ourselves and resist the capital onslaught and propensity to some of the fetish
technologies.
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