Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

The Future Of Work In The Transatlantic Alliance

Steven Hill 11th February 2016

Steven Hill

Steven Hill

What is the future of work, and the future of jobs? For the last several decades, the workers of Germany, the US and Europe have been the most productive and wealthiest in the world. But now that prosperity is in danger.

Where is this danger coming from? Is it from hordes of immigrants arriving from distant lands? Or foreign competitors stealing jobs? No, ironically the threat is self-inflicted.

The situation is most advanced in the United States, but it’s heading to Germany and Europe. The US workforce is undergoing an alarming transformation. Millions of workers are finding themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, contractors and temps, with inadequate wages and a weaker safety net. Even many full-time and professional jobs are experiencing this shift. America is heading toward a “freelance society.”

During the weak economic recovery, nearly half of new jobs created pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Even as corporate profits are at an all-time high – with much profit parked in overseas tax havens – three-fourths of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck, with little emergency savings.

Now a mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is driving the latest economic trend: the so-called “sharing economy.” Companies like Uber, Upwork and TaskRabbit are allegedly “liberating workers” to become “independent entrepreneurs” and “their own CEOs.” In reality, workers are hiring themselves out for ever-smaller part-time jobs (called “gigs”), with no safety net or assurances of future work, while the companies profit handsomely.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

What is equally alarming is that US corporations themselves are being redesigned. The vertical, industrial powerhouses of the post-cold war era, in which all operations were performed under a single company roof, yielded in the 1980s to companies like Nike and Apple, in which production was outsourced to low wage countries, while design and marketing remained in-house.

But now that business model is yielding yet again to companies like Uber and Upwork, and their precursor Amazon. These companies are little more than websites and an app, with a small core of executives and employees who oversee an army of freelancers, temps and contractors. In the vision of the libertarian CEOs of Silicon Valley, they want a “fractured” labor force they can turn off and on like a water spigot.

Upwork, for example, is a website where 10 million freelancers and contractors scrounge for work. Upwork draws globally, putting U.S. and German workers in direct competition with counterparts in India, Thailand and elsewhere. The result is predictable: cheap, Third World labor undercuts developed-world wages.

As “independent contractors” these workers also do not receive safety net benefits, and have no guarantees of future employment. They must constantly search for their next gig – the search itself is unpaid — in this “share the crumbs” economy. The “good jobs” of old are an endangered species. Welcome to the Freelance Society.

While these economic trends are most advanced in the US, Germany and Europe display similar tendencies. I am a visiting scholar in Germany at the American Academy in Berlins, here to research a few things. First, is it possible that this sharing economy could work better in a place where the welfare state, labor unions and the “visible hand” of government are more developed? Or might the current differences prove to be temporary, as the pressures of global competition tend to homogenize nations over time? Can we preserve transatlantic prosperity if our economies are based on fractured, unilateral employer-employee relationships? Or does prosperity require more co-determination between all the players?

These are the great questions before us. Fortunately there are solutions, but it will take a reimagining of the social contract, and careful regulation of these new ways of doing business.

This contribution is part of our project on the future of work and the digital revolution.

Steven Hill

Steven Hill is the former policy director at the Center for Humane Technology and author of seven books, including Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers and The Startup Illusion: How the Internet Economy Threatens Our Welfare.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

You are here: Home / Politics / The Future Of Work In The Transatlantic Alliance

Most Popular Posts

Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic
Orbán,Hungary,Russia,Putin,sanctions,European Union,EU,European Parliament,commission,funds,funding Time to confront Europe’s rogue state—HungaryStephen Pogány

Most Recent Posts

reality check,EU foreign policy,Russia Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a reality check for the EUHeidi Mauer, Richard Whitman and Nicholas Wright
permanent EU investment fund,Recovery and Resilience Facility,public investment,RRF Towards a permanent EU investment fundPhilipp Heimberger and Andreas Lichtenberger
sustainability,SDGs,Finland Embedding sustainability in a government programmeJohanna Juselius
social dialogue,social partners Social dialogue must be at the heart of Europe’s futureClaes-Mikael Ståhl
Jacinda Ardern,women,leadership,New Zealand What it means when Jacinda Ardern calls timePeter Davis

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

ETUI advertisement

The EU recovery strategy: a blueprint for a more Social Europe or a house of cards?

This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The winter issue of the Progressive Post magazine from FEPS is out!

The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—'polycrisis', for example, even 'permacrisis'. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?

This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube