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In the UK, university staff are engaged in a grading and assessment boycott as part of a long-running dispute over pay, pensions, and precarity. But university administrations are refusing to listen, leaving many students unable to graduate as normal.

Faculty at universities across the UK are engaging in a marking and assessment boycott to demand better pay, leaving many graduates without degrees. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

In 1970, students staged a sit-in in the registry offices of my alma mater, Warwick University. There, they stumbled across shocking files detailing extensive surveillance of students and staff as well as the incestuous relationship between the university administration and big business. The protests, rent strikes, and student occupations of this era earned the university the nickname “Red Warwick.” Acclaimed historian E. P. Thompson gave the institution he once lectured at a rather different name: Warwick University Ltd. In his account of the files affair, Thompson made a much broader point about the trajectory of a marketized higher education system:

The demands of the institution become larger — moving outward from the working life to the private and social life of its employees — and its attempts to enforce loyalties by moral or disciplinary means, by streaming its procedures or by managing promotions and career prospects, become greater. The managers, at the top, need not even see themselves as police-minded men; they think they are acting in the interests of greater “efficiency”; any other course would damage the institution’s public image or would encourage subversion.

In the decades since those words were written, we’ve witnessed the systematic subordination of higher education to the whims of neoliberalism. For staff, that has meant pay cut after pay cut, attacks on pensions, unbearable workloads and growing precarity. And, of course, the disciplinary means to enforce all that Thompson foretold, including pay deductions for staff currently engaged in a grading and assessment boycott. For students, grants have gone, fees have tripled, and the cost-of-living crisis soars. Now graduations are in limbo too.

The grading and assessment boycott by members of the University and College Union [UCU] began on April 20 and is set to continue in the coming weeks, with a significant impact on graduations. It’s part of a long-running dispute over pay, pensions, and precarity that’s seen seventy thousand university staff at one hundred fifty universities repeatedly take to the picket lines over the past few years. Instead of seeking a resolution, more than sixty employers have retaliated with pay deductions of between 50 percent and 100 percent from those taking part, prompting further all-out strikes across a number of universities. With no end in sight, the futures of hundreds of thousands of students remain uncertain.

Collateral Damage

Collateral damage is the phrase that best describes the experience of students in the UCU’s long-running industrial dispute. But educators and students aren’t two sides engaged in a fight against each other. They are two groups of victims harmed by the ongoing marketization of higher education.

“This dispute has been running since I started university. It’s all we’ve known,” says Trisha, an English literature student at the University of Edinburgh. Throughout her degree, she’s had to contend with COVID-19, constant strikes, and a crippling cost-of-living crisis. And now she’s more than £40,000 in debt and her degree has been deferred. “My second year was fully online. The grading system they’re using to navigate the boycott is based on the system they used to deal with the pandemic.  You couldn’t negotiate with the pandemic, but you can negotiate with your own staff. They’re acting like it’s a natural disaster that they can’t stop.”

Students never thought that the final product, their degree certificate, would be withheld by university management because they don’t want to pay staff more.

Trisha is one of more than 160,000 students impacted by the UCU’s grading and assessment boycott — and she’s furious. “Students never thought that the final product, their degree certificate, would be withheld by university management because they don’t want to pay staff more.” Trisha hasn’t received a final degree classification and will be presented with a blank piece of paper at what she describes as a sham ceremony in a few weeks’ time.

Bella, a final-year history and politics student at the University of Cambridge, faces a similar predicament. “We’re going to have fake graduation ceremonies this week. We won’t get our actual degrees. I don’t really know what I’m going to do. I want to apply for a master’s degree, but I can’t do that.” It’s a chaotic and confusing situation as students worry about losing job offers and scholarships. For international students, the situation is particularly bleak as their ability to acquire work visas is shrouded in uncertainty.

“I’m really annoyed they haven’t resolved this yet. I want staff demands met. We also need to graduate. Both of those things can happen and should happen,” says Bella. Trisha sees the UCU dispute as part of a broader battle for the future of higher education and she’s been on the picket lines to show her support. “Their working conditions are our learning conditions.”

Starving University Staff Out

Abi is both a PhD student and a casualized member of staff at the University of Liverpool. “We don’t have contracts. You often don’t know how much you’re getting paid and it often takes six months to receive payment for your teaching.” Casualization is one of the key reasons UCU members are in dispute. One of its most pernicious manifestations is the lack of standardization on pay and conditions. As a result, staff like Abi are not entitled to protections like sick pay, and when they take industrial action, they are far more vulnerable.

In order to mitigate the impact of the grading and assessment boycott, universities are increasingly turning to PhD students to do the work of full-time staff. Abi herself was contacted by a university in the North West last month. “They emailed me saying I was on their list of people who had previously expressed an interest in teaching, asking if I could mark scripts. I don’t know any of their courses. I’ve never even been to their university,” says Abi. “That shows universities were never prepared to negotiate. They were always going to do to students what they’re doing now.”

Many students were totally unaware that a grading boycott was going on as universities stayed silent. “It wasn’t until Thursday that our university actually sent students an email to say they might not get their marks back. The fact that they haven’t even been communicating with students shows how much they really don’t care.”

During a recent open day, students at the University of Liverpool, independent of the UCU branch, gave out flyers to prospective students and visitors in support of staff. There’s also been visible student support on the picket lines.

You often don’t know how much you’re getting paid and it often takes six months to receive payment for your teaching.

“Students get our fight, particularly the issues on casualization and pay. They are people that work in the gig economy. They are underpaid, undervalued, and on insecure contracts. Every student I spoke to said that they understand why we’ve taken action and that they know we’re not to blame. No one enjoys losing half their wage or their entire wage while they’re still expected to do all the other work.”

One colleague, Abi says, had just one paper to grade, but she’s been deducted 50 percent of her wages for more than two months over an essay that would have taken her less than an hour of her time.

Nikki joined Cardiff University on a permanent contract as a history lecturer in February after three years working at the University of Cambridge. She’s been on strike throughout her time in academia. “I’ve seen my job get harder and harder and my pay go lower and lower.” Amid the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, the last few years have been particularly intense. “I was supporting my students through something atrocious, but we had so little support. I was working way into the night recording lectures.”

Nikki only met her colleagues in person a year and a half into the job. On campus, she took on an additional role as the director of student experience, a responsibility she describes as two years of firefighting, supporting students with issues like housing and mental health. On top of that, staff like her were told they had to revamp the entire curriculum every single year. This meant additional time spent on designing new modules and writing lectures from scratch. “The workload hasn’t slowed down. It is never ending. We’re getting more and more students. Clearly, they’re making a lot of money out of us.”

Nikki is facing a 50 percent deduction from her pay going back to April 20. “I’m being deducted from when I was first assigned the [grading] even though we don’t usually [grade] papers until later as we have multiple other tasks. I think it will put me below the minimum wage.” Nikki is a grade six lecturer, which means she’s at the bottom of the pay scale.

“I’m so exhausted and so fed up with striking. I just want the university management to sort it out. They’re constantly forcing us to strike by underpaying us and cutting our pensions.”

Abi has taken a year longer to finish her PhD because she’s had to work two to three extra jobs to make ends meet. She’s now decided to quit academia altogether. “It’s hemorrhaging people. I’ve seen three resignations in the last few days from some of the best scholars that I know. I know friends using food banks. We hear horror stories of staff living in tents.”

Students, too, are feeling the pinch. Abi has noticed a growing problem with attendance amongst her students. When she inquired further, she was told they are working thirty hours a week on top of their studies. “They’re struggling too. They get it. The very idea that a vice chancellor earning half a million pounds can wade in and say to the students that they are on their side and staff are against them is just ludicrous.”

“We’re not getting a fair deal at all,” says Bella. “Universities treat us as cash cows. They have our money already, so they can do whatever they want. Everyone’s fuming. We put in three long years of hard work and we have nothing to show for it. We joined during COVID when it was illegal to socialize and went straight into a lockdown. This is entirely on the shoulders of UCEA [the Universities and Colleges Employers Association] and university management thinking they can just fob off students and staff. They’re willing to throw us under the bus to maintain their stubborn position. It’s extraordinary the lengths they’ll go to not negotiate.”

Bella has worked with students at other universities to build solidarity. And pressure from students like her looks like it’s beginning to work. “Cambridge was one of the first universities to publicly call for UCEA to resume negotiations. We started the campaign to get them to do that. We are seeing more and more universities calling for negotiations to resume.”

UCEA seems determined to prolong the dispute and grind staff into submission, but both students and staff are fighting back.

As E. P. Thompson wrote decades ago:

The managers drive headlong towards confrontation after confrontation. Because neither efficiency nor productivity were ever, in the long run, achieved by the manipulation of people, by limiting their rights, by defrauding them of their own initiatives, by denying to them participation in the control of their own affairs.

In 1997, the central slogan of the Teamsters’ UPS strike was “Part-Time America Won’t Work.” Today, as the Teamsters weigh another UPS strike, part-time workers at the company say their pay and working conditions are still unbearable.

An employee sorts packages going out for delivery on Cyber Monday at a UPS distribution facility in New York on November 30, 2015. (John Taggart / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In late August 1974, thousands of Teamsters Local 804 members in New York went on strike against their employer, United Parcel Service (UPS), for the third time in six years. A decade earlier, UPS had begun laying off full-time package sorters in its distribution warehouses and hiring part-time workers, who were paid roughly the same wage but lacked fringe benefits like pensions or vacation days, as their replacements. UPS wanted to expand the practice, but workers saw the demand for what it was: an existential threat to their good-paying, full-time union jobs.

Led by their charismatic, thirty-eight-year-old local president Ron Carey, Local 804 members hit the picket line after contract negotiations broke down. By the end of the bitter walkout, a Teamster from a nearby New Jersey local had plowed their truck through 804’s picket line, killing one of Carey’s closest friends, and the federal government was called in to mediate a settlement. But in the final agreement, Local 804 successfully slowed, though they could not completely stop, the proliferation of part-time work in UPS facilities. That would soon change — for the worse.

In 1982, the national Teamsters union agreed to a “two-tier” system that divided the pay of part-time and full-time UPS workers. The company permanently cut part-timers’ starting pay nationwide by 25 percent, down to $8 an hour, which would be raised only fifty cents over the next thirty years. The company steamrolled ahead in its expansion of part-time work, building a package empire on the back of a workforce that, by the mid-1990s, was 60 percent part-time workers.

By the 1990s, UPS workers looked to halt the backsliding. With the support of reform-minded forces like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Carey won the presidency of the international Teamsters union in 1991, taking over the union after federal anti-corruption measures produced the union’s first-ever direct democratic election; after the contract expired in 1997, 185,000 UPS workers hit the picket line nationwide, declaring that “Part-Time America Won’t Work.”

The strike was a resounding victory: the union won a commitment from the company to create ten thousand full-time jobs by combining tenty-thousand part-time positions. But shortly afterward, Carey and his reform-minded, militant leadership was chased out of the union by the old guard on trumped-up (and later dismissed) charges, and the corrupt, antidemocratic unionism of the old guard soon returned in the form of President James P. Hoffa, son of legendary (and legendarily corrupt) Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa.

But today, militancy has once again risen in the union under Sean O’Brien, elected general president of the union in 2021, again with the help of groups like TDU. And the unfinished battle for part-timers at the company has been rekindled.

In what could be the most important labor fight in a generation, over 340,000 UPS Teamsters are poised to launch the largest single-company strike in US history in August. UPS workers voted 97 percent in favor of strike authorization earlier this month. In ongoing negotiations, the Teamsters have pressured UPS to present their last, best, and final offer on economic proposals by July 5; otherwise, the union says a strike is “imminent.”

In what could be the most important labor fight in a generation, over 340,000 UPS Teamsters are poised to launch the largest single-company strike in US history in August.

The national negotiating team has already made headway on several key demands: the abolition of the two-tier wage system among drivers that created a kind of second-class, lower-paid worker classification; protections from forced overtime on workers’ days off; Martin Luther King Jr Day as a paid holiday; and lifesaving heat protections, including air conditioners, heat shields, and ventilation in new package cars. Still to be negotiated are wages, pensions, health and welfare benefits, and ridding the company of nonunion subcontractors and gig workers.

But perhaps the biggest question mark is what will happen with the company’s largest classification of workers, part-timers. Substantially increasing part-timers’ pay and creating more full-time warehouse jobs, known as 22.3s per language in the national master agreement, would be the most costly demand for the company to meet. And decades of concessions under Hoffa Jr have left part-timers feeling like second-class Teamsters.

“There’s a general sentiment among part-timers that we’ve kind of been forgotten about in the last few contracts,” said Jenny Bekenstein, a part-time preloader and shop steward with Teamsters Local 396 in downtown Los Angeles. “But I think it’s the number one issue for this contract, and I know a lot of the drivers agree too.”

“A Different Breed of Cat”

As Carey told journalist Steven Brill in 1977 for his book The Teamsters, UPS part-timers are “a different breed of cat” from the full-time drivers. These part-time workers — mostly “package handlers” in warehouses, sorting small and large parcels, unloading and loading package cars and trailers — are the backbone of the company but rarely acknowledged. The hidden majority of UPS, they comprise over half of the workforce. While CEO Carol Tomé boasts to the press that “[UPS] drivers make $93,000 a year . . . and they pay nothing for health care,” part-timers often make less than half their full-time counterparts — as low as $15.50 per hour in some areas.

“That’s poverty wages,” says José Francisco Negrete, a part-time small package sorter out of Local 952 in Anaheim, California, who has worked at UPS since 1998.

With low pay, high inflation, and only three to four hours guaranteed per shift, many part-timers work multiple jobs while living in their cars, Negrete said — or worse, in homeless shelters. “We saw with COVID in 2020, and we see right now with inflation and interest rates being so high, not even $20 [per hour] is going to cut it.” According to TDU, if part-timers’ wages had risen with inflation since 1982, starting pay would be over $25 an hour.

UPS package car drivers, the public face of UPS, have rightfully garnered public sympathy over the past year working on the frontlines of the pandemic and climate crisis. But part-timers have received little media attention, despite performing work that is just as “essential” and can be just as dangerous. The extreme heat full-time drivers endure, for example, has recently grabbed nationwide headlines, but the lack of air conditioning and sufficient ventilation in warehouses means heatstroke and even death are also fixtures of life on the inside.

Interior of a Boston UPS warehouse. (Local 25 part-time UPS worker)

Wearing their personal clothes rather than the iconic brown uniforms worn by drivers, part-timers, who are made up of more women than any other job classification at UPS according to TDU, work shifts at all hours of the day and night, hidden from the public eye in warehouses that workers allege are plagued by managerial harassment, unsafe equipment and work paces, unbearable summer heat, and noxious truck exhaust. Workers say the intensity of their three-and-a-half-hour shifts can make them feel like an eight-hour day.

“I would get off work at 8:30, 9:00 a.m., and I would go home and sit down, and that was it,” Holly Baca, an eleven-year part-timer out of Local 886 in Oklahoma City, said of her nine years working “sunrise” shifts preloading package cars. “That was all the energy I had. . . . I wasn’t even cooking.”

UPS’s replacement of full-time workers with part-timers accelerated in the 1980s and ’90s as the company expanded rapidly. As activist and former UPS worker Joe Allen wrote in The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS, “The ‘savings’ in part-timers’ wages was an important factor in subsidizing the company’s massive expansion.”

A report released by the Teamsters research department leading up to the 1997 strike, “Half a Job Is Not Enough,” found that 83 percent of the 46,300 workers UPS hired between 1993 and 1997 were part-time, and that creating full-time jobs was a top priority for the rank and file. Public polls found overwhelming support for the strikers’ demands. UPS was seen as a leader in the broader “lean and mean” trend of corporate restructuring, which included trimming down full-time work.

In place of reliable full-time jobs, part-time, temporary, gig, and other contingent labor was on the rise. According to Rand Wilson, a TDU organizer and a communications coordinator of the 1997 UPS contract campaign, the slogan “Part-Time America Won’t Work” was used precisely for that reason.

“We saw that it was resonating as a public message,” he says. “It tapped into a sense of the deterioration of job quality in America and growth at that time.”

Striking UPS employees at the downtown Chicago processing center, August 6, 1997. (Jeff Haynes / AFP via Getty Images)

That deterioration has continued since 1997. While the total number of US workers working part-time who want a full-time job has declined significantly in the past two years, involuntary part-time workers have nearly doubled from 3.2 million in 2000 to 6.1 million in 2021. Meanwhile, the rise of the pro-business leadership of James P. Hoffa meant concessions became the norm at UPS again.

UPS’s promise of ten thousand full-time warehouse jobs (and ten thousand more from the 2002 agreement) went partially unfulfilled. According to union reform activists, per secret memoranda of understanding with the company signed by Teamsters general secretary-treasurer Ken Hall in 2008, the union allowed UPS to renege on nearly six thousand of the promised twenty thousand full-time jobs inside the warehouse. And the five thousand full-time inside positions promised in the 2018 contract were mostly diminished by a loophole left open by Hoffa.

“I used to want to go full-time” inside a UPS facility, says Baca of Local 886, who now works part-time as a preloader. “I had my name on several bid lists, but of course, being part time, I never won any of them.” Baca says that most part-timers have a tough time winning full-time inside jobs because drivers get priority for the few that exist. But like many of her warehouse colleagues, for personal or physically restrictive reasons, Baca wanted a 22.3 job precisely because she didn’t want to be a driver.

For decades, UPS has profited handsomely from the “flexibility” part-timers have afforded it. Many even work full-time schedules, but for part-time wages and benefits.

As sociologist Jamie K. McCallum has pointed out in Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream, the irony of the expansion of part-time and other contingent labor in recent decades is that, because pay remains low, workers are working substantially more hours as they are forced to take on multiple jobs.

It’s no wonder then that while winning more full-time jobs is a top priority for the Teamsters, the union’s loudest demand for part-timers in 2023 is a substantial increase in pay.

Poverty Pay

From 1997 to 2013, part-time base pay only increased by $1.50 per hour to $10, reaching $12.50 by the contract’s end. And in 2018, pressured by TDU and New York City Fight for $15 movement activists, UPS raised the floor more quickly to $13.50, eventually reaching the current starting pay of $15.50. While the Teamsters have not yet publicly announced a concrete contract demand, TDU is pushing for $25 per hour starting pay for part-timers and ten thousand full-time inside jobs.

“They’ve been sold out in previous agreements,” said John Palmer, a longtime TDU activist and the international Teamsters’ vice president at-large and deputy director of organizing. “They deserve $25 per hour.”

With six years under her belt, Jess Leigh, a Local 728 part-timer in Griffin, Georgia and a single mother of two, makes $17.85 per hour and works roughly thirty hours a week. “I have to have other streams of income,” she says. “You can’t raise kids on an income like that.”

UPS provides decent benefits to part-timers, including health care and a pension, if they stick it out for nine months. Baca, who is the primary caretaker of her grandmother, noted that a lot of mothers and people with caregiving responsibilities appreciate the benefits and part-time hours.

“But at the end of the day, your healthcare doesn’t pay your bills,” Leigh said.

Decades of low pay at UPS come despite consistent growth at the company, including record-breaking profits at the height of the pandemic’s e-commerce boom.

Decades of low pay at UPS come despite consistent growth at the company, including record-breaking profits at the height of the pandemic’s e-commerce boom. Part-timer frustration came to a head last year when, without warning, UPS slashed thousands of workers’ market rate adjustments (MRAs), the noncontractual wage increases offered to some new hires in an attempt by UPS to remain competitive in the market. Some workers saw their pay decline by up to $6 an hour, according to the Guardian, prompting protests around the country.

“If they can afford to just arbitrarily decide to raise everyone’s wages without even having it in the contract, then that tells me that they have the money to pay us,” said Baca.

Harassment and a Breakneck Pace

Corporate restructuring at UPS not only meant slashing wages and hours. The “leaning” of production over the decades also meant that warehouse working conditions deteriorated, and UPS’s management, already known for its militaristic style, turned tyrannical.

Workers say yelling, ridicule, and pressure to pick up the pace is a way of life in the warehouse. “Flow it hard! Flow it hard! Come on!” Leigh mimics her supervisors during a shift. If a conveyor belt is turned off, she says, they will begin shouting, “Who’s got the belt off?” But the question is rhetorical. “You can literally look and see the massive package with yellow tape, where somebody’s trying to get a hundred pound package off the belt. . . . What they’re really saying is, ‘hurry the hell up.’”

In roughly four hours, preloaders are instructed to fill up to four package cars, totaling seven hundred to a thousand packages. Workers say that supervisors will keep facilities on skeleton crews, sending people home early or laying people off no matter how slight a decline in volume or delay in package flow.

“People are getting slammed because UPS wanted to save thirty bucks or whatever by getting a handful of people off the clock,” says Leigh.

Workers told me that the physical stress of the job deteriorates the body. A 2019 Bloomberg Law investigation found scores of injuries and ailments may go unreported at UPS due to a “culture of fear” of retaliation. “I developed plantar fasciitis,” says Baca of her time as a sunrise preloader. “I could barely stand up long enough to take a shower, my feet hurt so badly. . . . It’s because of how hard they work people, and the working conditions of the building itself.”

According to Baca, outbursts on the shop floor are also common. “[Supervisors] don’t communicate in an understanding tone of voice,” she explained. “They talk to you like you’re stupid, you’re lazy, and you need to just work harder to get this shit done. That’s what drives people over the edge.”

Indeed, the Guardian reported that some workers at UPS’s massive Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky believe that the dire working conditions and constant hounding by supervisors helped drive one pregnant part-timer to take her own life at the facility in October last year.

Organizing Part-Timers

Strategically, UPS workers understand that part-timers may be both the union’s greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. If the union does decide to strike, will these precarious, low-wage workers hold the line alongside full-time workers? The answer lies in the degree to which they are organized. But the task isn’t easy.

If the union does decide to strike, will these precarious, low-wage workers hold the line alongside full-time workers? The answer lies in the degree to which they are organized.

While all full-time drivers generally start at the same time, part-timers work multiple shifts in a diversity of positions and work areas, making meetings and actions logistically arduous. The low wages and harsh working conditions on the shop floor ensure that turnover is sky high, and part-timers’ low pay makes saving money for a strike difficult.

For those that do stay, a concessionary Teamsters union under previous leadership has produced cynicism and feelings of abandonment. Meanwhile, workers believe that widespread layoffs and schedule adjustments across the country this year are a deliberate ploy by UPS to put workers on edge. During the height of the pandemic, many part-timers worked full-time schedules, but now they struggle even to receive their minimum guarantee.

“I do think that some of it is a way to make people feel so broke that they have to cross the picket line,” Baca said.

Despite the challenge, over the past month, the Teamsters union, TDU, and rank-and-file UPSers of all classifications have ramped up their organizing around part-time issues. Much as they did during the 1997 contract campaign, Teamsters are holding parking lot meetings targeted to inside workers, distributing contract-campaign toolkits, holding online and in-person trainings, collecting thousands of signatures for a number of part-timer demands, and hitting the gates at all hours to rally their coworkers. In the past week, locals have set up practice pickets around the country to organize the ranks.

Teamsters told me that while their current leadership has helped breathe new life into part-time demands, some locals’ organizing muscles haven’t fully recovered from old-guard atrophy. Teamsters Mobilize, a grassroots, rank-and-file network of part-time UPSers, was formed by a number of rank-and-file UPSers last summer, many of whom are TDU members, to increase part-timer engagement in the contract campaign. They have been pushing for $25 hourly base pay, 5 percent annual increases, as well as seventy-five-cent raises for each year of part-time service.

A UPS practice picket in Oklahoma City, June 29, 2023. (Zakk Flash)

Following the lead of Minneapolis Teamsters from Local 638, Teamsters Mobilize successfully encouraged locals around the country to adopt Red Shirt Fridays, acknowledged by members in a UPS contract update by the national union, to display worker unity in the contract campaign. Less visible have been the months of members trading organizing strategies and informational campaign materials, as well as tips on holding supervisors accountable.

Winning for inside workers may be the most consequential task of the Teamsters’ contract campaign at UPS. The union will have a rough time organizing nonunion companies, particularly Amazon, which employs thousands of warehouse workers, if they have nothing to show for better standards among the majority of the UPS workforce.

Still up in the air is whether, come August 1, part-time America won’t work again. Regardless, “the bill is due,” said Negrete. “And it will be paid.”

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Almost 50 years ago, metalworker and economist Harry Braverman published Labor and Monopoly Capitalism. It showed how bosses use technology to disempower workers — but that by taking control of the labor process, workers can free themselves from drudgery.

A General Motors factory assembly line in Gliwice, Poland, 2015. (Marek Ślusarczyk / Wikimedia Commons)

Only yesterday, artificial intelligence was still the stuff of science fiction; now, it casts a portentous shadow over the future of work. Depending upon which breathless commentator one believes, AI promises to relieve us of the tedious aspects of our work — or threatens to deprive us of our jobs entirely. Seeking historical perspective, I reached for the classic account of the evolution of the labor process under capitalism, Harry Braverman’s 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital.

Braverman’s book ranges further, and sees more deeply, than its blunt subtitle, “The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century,” might suggest. Like his acknowledged model, Marx’s description of the transformation of the production process in Capital, Braverman provides a meticulous investigation of the restless making and remaking of the organization of labor under capitalism. But he never loses sight of the impact of these serial upheavals on the working class.

Braverman rejected simplistic interpretations of Marx as a technological determinist. Rather, he points out that a new invention always presents an array of possibilities. In the near term, the dominant social relations shape which of these possibilities are cultivated and which actively foreclosed. Capitalist relations of production exhibit an “incessant drive to enlarge and perfect machinery on the one hand, and to diminish the worker on the other.” This dynamic reflects capitalism’s larger tendency to separate conception from execution — the work of the brain and the work of the hand. The result is a small stratum of highly trained (and handsomely paid) professionals on the one side and a swelling mass of proletarianized laborers condemned to mindless tasks on the other.

Braverman brought a singular perspective to his investigation. He had apprenticed as a coppersmith and subsequently found employment in the steel industry, earning his living as a craftsman for fourteen years before cofounding a newspaper, the American Socialist. (He spent the remainder of his career in publishing, directing the storied independent socialist imprint the Monthly Review Press until his death in 1976.) Despite the rapid decline of the coppersmithing trade in which he was trained, Braverman bristled at the inference that his criticisms reflected nostalgia for an antiquated past: “Rather, my views about work are governed by nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being.” Braverman’s background in the trades, as well as his decades-long involvement in socialist activism, made him uniquely equipped to take the baton from Marx and extend Capital’s analysis of the labor process into the twentieth century.

The pivotal figure in Labor and Monopoly Capitalism’s narrative is Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), the eccentric founder of the scientific management movement. From his childhood, Taylor showed signs of extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder, counting his steps and seeking ever-more efficient ways to perform the most mundane activities. “These traits fitted him perfectly for his role as the prophet of modern capitalist management,” Braverman deadpans, “since that which is neurotic in the individual is, in capitalism, normal and socially desirable for the functioning of society.”

So long as workers directed the labor process, Taylor maintained, they would never perform “a fair day’s work” — which he defined, naturally, as the maximum amount that they could perform without injury. Therefore, capitalists must not rest content with owning the means of production and the commodities labor produced: they needed to control the labor process itself. Taylor tends to be remembered for squeezing greater productivity out of workers by prescribing their every movement in accordance with the dictates of his “science.” But, Braverman suggests, his more important feat was to systematically compile the craft knowledge that had hitherto belonged to labor and transfer it to management.

Soon, workers were left performing simplified detail work that had been decontextualized from the production process as a whole; meanwhile, management enjoyed a monopoly on the technical know-how that, historically, had been the patrimony of the skilled trades. The ongoing separation of the conception and execution of labor that characterizes production under capitalism had reached a new threshold. This process subsequently repeated itself in management, creating a handful of corner-office executives and an army of deskilled administrative assistants and middle managers.

Labor and Monopoly Capital tells a sobering story, but by no means an unhopeful one. Braverman detected signs of capitalism’s historical limits in the fact that new technology frequently reunites and automizes the steps of the labor process that the division of labor had fragmented. In his final lecture, delivered in the spring 1975, Braverman urged that “Workers can now become masters of the technology of their process on an engineering level and can apportion among themselves in an equitable way the various tasks connected with this form of production that has become so effortless and automatic.” Liberated from the drudgery of repetitive tasks thanks to automation, a team of associated producers might reclaim the unity of the production process once enjoyed by craftworkers on a higher plane.

AI holds out a similar possibility of reuniting, in automated form, many of the skills and bodies of knowledge that the capitalist division of labor has pulverized in its relentless quest for control and efficiency. If predictions that AI will inaugurate an age of universal leisure are wildly optimistic, the prospect that socialized workers might direct the entirety of the production process with its assistance seems less so.

But we will have to fight for it. Capitalism customarily takes advantage of technological advances by firing workers and demanding greater productivity from the few it does not cull. Braverman informs us that the verb “to manage” “originally meant to train a horse in his paces, to cause him to do the exercises of the manège.” Management has always viewed the labor process as a site of struggle, and it is determined to keep hold of the reigns. If we want AI to improve rather than replace or further degrade our jobs, a reading of Braverman suggests that we must be prepared to carry the battle into the very labor process itself.

An astonishing update was reported by the Texas Center for the Missing on Sunday, revealing that Rudy Farias, a 25-year-old Houston man who had been missing since he was 17, was discovered alive on Saturday with cuts and bruises all over his body.

Farias vanished in 2015 while he was walking his two dogs in the vicinity of his family’s house. The dogs made it back home, but Farias did not. Subsequently, a search was launched by Texas EquuSearch. At the time, the organization noted that Farias was suffering from depression, as well as PTSD and anxiety, and speculated that he might have been disoriented due to the lack of his medication. His family shared that he had witnessed his brother’s fatal motorcycle crash.

When he was found, it was reported that good Samaritans spotted him outside a church, unresponsive, and called the authorities. His mother told KTRK that he had cuts and bruises, and blood in his hair. She also said that he was in a bad condition, both mentally and physically, but she was thankful to have him back.

Commenting on the event, Texas EquuSearch’s director Tim Miller, called it a miracle, saying there are still many questions to be answered. He noted that there is much to investigate regarding the circumstances of Farias’ disappearance.

Initially, authorities believed no foul play was involved when Farias went missing. No additional information was available on Sunday night.

The UK is ‘very cautious’ about seizing Russian cash. But it could be used as leverage when it comes to reparations

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