Covid-19, nostalgia and digital work: towards a ‘post-employment’ society?

Higher Seminar in Media and Communication Studies with Alessandro Gandini, University of Milan.

Already before the Covid-19 pandemic, the societal model based on the large-scale availability of permanent, dependent work was in a terminal crisis. Following decades of neoliberal policies and a harsh economic recession, the expectation of a ‘job for life’ had already vanished for many. Particularly, a highly unequal labour market had prospered in the digital economy, where the few corporate jobs available are often ‘bullshit’ ones (Graeber, 2017), while nonstandard, precarious, low-skilled, low-paid, algorithmically-managed forms of work affirmed (Graham and Woodcock, 2019).

In this context, the events of Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016 were characterized by the ‘retrotopian’ (Bauman, 2017) fantasy of a return to ‘old’ ways of working: the revival of manufacturing jobs, the refusal of climate change concerns related to industrial capitalism, a war against migrants as ‘job stealers’. While this nostalgic wave was embracing other parts of the world, Covid-19 struck, changing the state of play but also renewing the (unanswered) concern of the ‘future of work’.

Liaising with the debate on the ‘post-work’ utopia (Srnicek and Williams, 2015), the paper critically discusses the possibility that the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic represents an acceleration towards the ‘postcapitalist’ scenario of a society without work. In so doing, it proposes the notion of an upcoming ‘post-employment’ society (Kendzior, 2016), characterised by the large-scale diffusion of forms of work that deviate from the normatively-codified, culturally-established definitions of work typical of the industrial era, and reflects on the significance of the 2016 events in the present scenario. [This abstract comes as a blurb of the book “Zeitgeist Nostalgia: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/zeitgeist-nostalgia]

This is a higher seminar arranged by the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University. The seminar will take place via Zoom. For more information including Zoom link, please contact saga.hansen@sh.se .