Precarul, noul proletar

Scriam, nu cu mult timp în urmă, asta: "România este o ţară precară, cu un stat precar, condus de nişte inşi precari, cu o cultură precară, cu o educaţie precară, cu o morală precară, în care totul este sub semnul precarităţii: viaţa cetăţenilor, pensiile şi salariile, legile şi Constituţia, justiţia, economia, munca, totul."  

Nu era o izbucnire de moment. Era o rezumare a unei realităţi pe care încă nu suntem gata s-o conştientizăm, s-o acceptăm, şi, ca urmare, nu suntem pregătiţi s-o schimbăm. Noul Cod al Muncii nu este unul al "sclaviei", deşi în multe cazuri aici se va ajunge, ci un instrument al legalizării precarităţii. Asta este cea mai periculoasă, şi mai costisitoare social, consecinţă a adoptării lui.

Beranger semnalează, pe blogul său, o abordare interesantă a acestei evoluţii, de fapt involuţii. A apărut pe un blog găzduit de "The Guardian", specializat pe probleme de sociologie. Vă invit să vedeţi filmuleţul, durează vreo 10 minute. Şi dacă nu aveţi starea necesară  să-l  vedeţi, puteţi citi ce-i mai jos:

"Western Europeans and Americans are about to suffer a profound shock. For the past 30 years governments have explained that, while they can no longer protect jobs through traditional forms of state intervention such as subsidies and tariffs, they can expand and reform education to maximise opportunity. If enough people buckle down to acquiring higher-level skills and qualifications, Europeans and Americans will continue to enjoy rising living standards. If they work hard enough, each generation can still do better than its parents. All that is required is to bring schools up to scratch and persuade universities to teach “marketable” skills.(…)

But the financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent squeeze on incomes is slowly revealing an awful truth. As figures out last week from the Office for National Statistics show, real UK wages have not risen since 2005, the longest sustained freeze in living standards since the 1920s. While it has not hit the elite in banking, the freeze affects most of the middle class as much as the working class. This is not a blip, nor the result of educational shortcomings. In the US, which introduced mass higher education long before Britain, the average graduate’s purchasing power has barely risen in 30 years. Just as education failed to deliver social democratic promises of social equality and mobility, so it will fail to deliver neoliberal promises of universal opportunity for betterment.(…)

We are familiar with the outsourcing of routine white-collar “back office” jobs such as data inputting. But now the middle office is going too. Analysing X-rays, drawing up legal contracts, processing tax returns, researching bank clients, and even designing industrial systems are examples of skilled jobs going offshore. Even teaching is not immune: last year a north London primary school hired mathematicians in India to provide one-to-one tutoring over the internet. Microsoft, Siemens, General Motors and Philips are among big firms that now do at least some of their research in China. The pace will quicken. The export of “knowledge work” requires only the transmission of electronic information, not factories and machinery. Alan Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has estimated that a quarter of all American service sector jobs could go overseas.

Western neoliberal “flat earthers” (after Thomas Friedman’s book) believed jobs would migrate overseas in an orderly fashion. Some skilled work might eventually leave but, they argued, it would make space for new industries, requiring yet higher skills and paying better wages. Only highly educated westerners would be capable of the necessary originality and adaptability. Developing countries would obligingly wait for us to innovate in new areas before trying to compete.(…)

It suggests neoliberals made a second, perhaps more important error. They assumed “knowledge work” would always entail the personal autonomy, creativity and job satisfaction to which the middle classes were accustomed. They did not understand that, as the industrial revolution allowed manual work to be routinised, so in the electronic revolution the same fate would overtake many professional jobs. Many “knowledge skills” will go the way of craft skills. They are being chopped up, codified and digitised.

Brown, Lauder and Ashton call this “digital Taylorism”, after Frederick Winslow Taylor who invented “scientific management” to improve industrial efficiency. Call centres, for example, require customers to input a series of numbers, directing you to a worker, possibly in a developing country, who will answer questions from a prescribed package. We are only at the beginning; even teaching is increasingly reduced to short-term, highly specific goals, governed by computerised checklists.

Digital Taylorism makes jobs easier to export but, crucially, changes the nature of much professional work. Aspirant graduates face the prospect not only of lower wages, smaller pensions and less job security than their parents enjoyed but also of less satisfying careers. True, every profession and company will retain a cadre of thinkers and decision-makers at the top – perhaps 10% or 15% of the total – but the mass of employees, whether or not they hold high qualifications, will perform routine functions for modest wages. Only for those with elite qualifications from elite universities (not all in Europe or America) will education deliver the promised rewards...

Governments will then need to rethink their attitudes to education, inequality and the state’s economic role.”

O ultimă remarcă: taylorismul digital(eu scriam despre noul taylorism acum câţiva ani, din păcate am tot pierdut materiale, din prostia mea!) este o realitate. Cătălin, fiul meu, este un astfel de proletar al lumii digitale. Discutam cu el asta, acum vreo două săptămâni: o hală mare, plină de cubicule, unde oameni ca el, cu studii de calitate în IT, îşi scriu bucăţelele lor de programe, pe care nişte tipi le asamblează câteva cubicule mai încolo, după care alţii le testează peste alte câteva cubicule, şi aşa mai departe. Banda e acolo, doar că locul cheilor fixe a fost  luat de tastatură şi de maus. Condiţia socială e cam aceeaşi cu a celor care lucrează la bandă, la Mioveni.