It’s no secret that since the 2008 financial crash, work has also entered a crisis. We are working more, in worse jobs, and doing it for less pay. Underemployment, precarity and bogus contracts, alongside a neoliberal heritage of crippled unions and withered collective bargaining has created the perfect storm. Manufacturing remains in decline and the future of our much vaunted service sector feels increasingly precarious amid fears around Brexit. The UK seems to be in near-continuous flirtation with recession – if, indeed, the previous one ever ended.

Looking at statistics, however, one might be forgiven for thinking all is fine. The Tory government boasts 3.8 per cent unemployment – the lowest rate in forty-five years. At best, this figure expresses a partial truth. As unemployment steadily declined in the years following the crisis, the use of zero-hour contracts rapidly grew from around 200,000 to nearly a million, stretching across multiple sectors from care work to higher education. At the same time, the bogus ‘self-employment’ status pioneered by platforms like Deliveroo and Amazon has robbed workers of the contracts, rights and routine they legally deserve. A TUC report reveals that the number of people working on such platforms doubled in the last three years, rising to nearly ten percent of the population, one of the highest numbers in Europe.

Dangerous, often entailing in-work poverty and with no proper rights, the ‘jobs’ the UK has to offer are hardly better than the petty work that passes for employment in the Global South’s informal sector. Too many workers are currently marooned in a liminal space between employed and unemployed, forced to endure the worst of both worlds, putting in all the hours god sends, while experiencing all the miseries that go with being jobless. 

Thankfully, Labour’s manifesto pledges to ban zero-hour contracts and unpaid internships as well as provide a ‘new single, “worker” status, covering all but the genuinely self-employed’. Far beyond this, the manifesto recognises that these symptoms are part of a wider pathology that begins with the disempowerment of unions under Thatcher’s Tory Government. What we have witnessed over the last ten years is the culmination of a process that began in the 1980s: the erosion of long-term, secure employment. By smashing the unions and deregulating labour markets, Thatcher made an already asymmetrical relationship between the worker and capital disproportionately favour the latter. In doing so, she effectively opened the door to a job market where work has been emptied of the few benefits and rights once enjoyed by labour.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this represented a hegemonic shift. Thatcher fast-tracked deindustrialisation, creating widespread unemployment, which she used to provoke the miners’ strikes, cause disruption, and stoke up tensions between ‘workers’ and ‘shirkers’. This allowed her to smash the post-war consensus and rebuild a world of work where widespread suspicion of trade unions, the welfare system and working-class culture more generally, became the norm – a world sustained by the New Labour government as well as Thatcher’s Tory successors.

That is why Labour’s manifesto pledge in this election to repeal anti-trade union legislation, strengthen and extend the influence of unionisation and remove restrictions on industrial action is so important. If the game had not been rigged by successive Conservative governments to prevent unions operating in an effective manner then it is highly unlikely that zero-hour and bogus ‘self-employed’ contracts would have flourished to the degree they have, not to mention unpaid internships, workfare and ‘microwork’.

Not only has work become more precarious since the 1980s, we are also doing more of it. The world Thatcher created is one where we live to work, where working hours have been steadily creeping up to levels not seen since the early twentieth century. We have heard a great deal about Labour’s pledge to reverse this trend by bringing in a four-day working week; but we have heard less about the not-so sexy but equally important plan to end the UK opt out provision for EU working time directives. As it stands, UK employers can decide whether they obey regulations on minimum holidays, paid breaks, rest periods, and the upper limit on weekly hours. Crucially, Labour will take this decision away from employers, and fully enshrine the regulations in UK law. 

At the same time, the explosion of flexible and temporary contracts under successive Tory governments has meant we are doing increasing amounts of unpaid, extra work, what the philosopher Ivan Ilyich called ‘shadow work’ – job applications, commuting, cultivating a LinkedIn profile, tweeting – the activities necessary to patch together our fragmented working lives. Growing out of a volatile and disjointed job market, this endless ‘work for labour’ will only disappear if the precarious conditions that underwrite it also fade away.

There are many future challenges to this problem. Artificial intelligence and automation hover menacingly behind the worker’s back; Brexit threatens the viability of many sectors; while climate catastrophe has the potential to disrupt everything in absolute terms – not least the world of work, over the coming decades.

Yet, Labour has its eye to the future. A Green Industrial Revolution not only tackles the greatest challenge of our age, it does so by bringing about an intensive and far-reaching transformation of our industries and infrastructure, a transformation that, in turn, will create at least 1 million decent, long-term jobs. Protected by unions and collective bargaining, these jobs will have better pay, benefits and rights and will be at less risk of automation than, say, a temporary warehouse job at Amazon.

The alternative, however, is bleak. Johnson’s cabinet of Brexit fanatics are planning a free market programme so brutal it would make Thatcher herself blush. A ‘no deal’ result at the end of negotiations would allow the Tories to slash workers’ rights and environmental protections, forcing us to work more, for less pay and under worse conditions. The choice between the two parties at this election could not be starker. “We should work to live, not live to work” came the clarion call from John McDonnell some months back at the Labour Party conference. The climate crisis gives this call a literal tenor.

A new green regime of work, where work no longer drives our own destruction, where precarious as opposed to stable jobs are in decline, where automation is managed through collective bargaining, where we work less and with rising wages – this would represent a political and cultural shift more radical and transformational than the one that began in the 1980s. This is the future that Labour envisions, and it is within our grasp.