The last few decades has seen a significant decline in the availability of manufacturing jobs throughout the western world. In Young Working-Class Men in Transition, academic Steven Roberts describes the decline from 33% of all jobs in the UK in 1971 to barely over 10% by 2011, with the worsening fortunes and demasculisation of working class men seen as a contributing factor towards both the Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency.
Since both events unfolded, the media has been awash with stories highlighting the risk, especially to relatively low-skilled jobs, from a new breed of AI-driven technologies. A recently published paper explores some of the political implications of these new technologies, and especially of the rise in workplace automation.
The authors argue that events like Brexit, Trump and the gilet jaunes protests in France cannot be viewed as electoral accidents but rather a clear consequences of profound changes in the labor market, many of which have been produced by automation. They believe that most of the technological changes today impact those in middle-skilled routine jobs in both manufacturing and service sectors, which are predominantly held by those in the lower middle class.
This is illustrated in the well-documented hollowing out of the labor market, with the strong decline in routine jobs mirrored by growth in non-routine jobs at both the high and low end of the skills spectrum.
Unfounded fears
These are the fears that have emerged after a number of widely cited reports into the impact of technology on the labor market, but do they match reality? Routine work has historically suffered from repeated turnover that can be characterized by lower entry and higher exit rates, but relatively low numbers of those affected remain unemployed for prolonged periods.
Of course, that isn’t to say that such individuals are in a good place, and economic data does point to the stagnation in their wages compared to those of both high-skilled and low-skilled workers in non-routine roles, both of whom benefit from technological complementaries. It is this stagnation in wages that is the likely kindling for the various political fires to have emerged from, with routine workers forming a large part of the voting demographic for all of the movements highlighted above.
The authors believe that this is a largely unexplored phenomenon because past studies have focused their attention primarily on those at the lowest end of the income spectrum, therefore overlooking the kind of people who are largely being affected by technological changes today. In other words, a lot of the research to date looks squarely at those who are already outsiders rather than those who fear they might become outsiders.
It’s not the fate of those who have always fared badly that has been so transformative in recent years, but rather the decline in those who had historically done okay for themselves. Indeed, the researchers posit that both high levels of social conservatism and support for populist right-wing parties is highest among those most at risk from automation. This group was also precariously positioned, with their incomes on the borderline of sustaining them for the next month and not.
An unexpected swing
Whereas one might have expected such circumstances to have resulted in a resurgence of the left who might offer a degree of economic protectionism, we have instead seen the populist right reborn by promises of turning back the clock. As Roberts argues, this is perhaps largely due to fears of social as much as economic regression, with the loss of social status associated both with their declining economic clout and the growing importance and status of women in the labor market allowing the populist right to strike a distinct social chord.
It’s a battle that the left seem to have struggled to find an angle to compete in, unable to speak in a way that lower-middle class workers can relate to, let alone buy-in to. Roberts suggests that a major part of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the plight of this demographic today.
“The (incorrect) idea that great swaths are struggling to adjust to a shifting gender order seems reliant on studies of young men who openly reject such work – but they are a small minority,” he explains.
He argues that working class men don’t reject education as an affront to their masculinity, nor find non-manual work too effeminate to truly fulfil them, and the depiction of them as deplorables framed in a largely negative context does a grave disservice to the large majority who are anything but the caricature created of them.
“The tendency to use working-class identity as a repository for anti-social attitudes and attributes has scapegoated communities and individuals,” he says. “The alienation that occurs as a result of these tendencies is likely to have implications for democracy.”
The populist right have perhaps been able to surge into this space due in part to their branding as political newcomers or challengers who are not part of the establishment that has appeared to fail the lower-middle classes.
Social worth
Perhaps the key is to try and construct better and more varied means for men to attain social worth. A recent Finnish study explored the outlook of both working class men and women and found that men were more likely to experience a sense of worthlessness than women were.
For men, their sense of work was largely tied to work and money, whereas women were able to attain a sense of worth through a wider variety of non-economic factors.
“Male respondents tended to think that being active generated value. Women’s futures were generally defined by waiting for something better and raising children,” the researchers explain.
It perhaps goes without saying that motherhood is undoubtedly one such route to self-worth for women that helped to craft an alternative narrative during times of unemployment, but the authors provide a crucial reminder of the importance of dignity and self-worth, even when living on a low or minimal income.
“The worst thing about living on a low income is that you feel your dignity diminishing with every penny you do not have in contrast with those who have them in abundance. The most important concern is finding your way and maintaining a healthy state of mind, where you can be as you are, whatever your financial situation,” one respondent in the study wrote.
What’s more, the social welfare systems that ostensibly exist to support the low paid and unemployed often served to further dehumanize them, with officials providing little in the way of care or emotional support, even in circumstances that were evidently unfair. The respondents revealed how this left them feeling voiceless and unrecognized, which is clearly something the populist right have managed to tap into by offering to be that voice for them.
What’s more, respondents also reported withdrawing from social relations to avoid the perceived stigma and shame that such encounters produced, which perhaps paints the portrayal of Trump supporters as deplorable in a new light, especially if the populist right can also engender a sense of community that can also counteract the loneliness that was commonly reported by male respondents.
“Men may feel left alone if they are not able to perform the sole permitted gender contract of a salaried worker and a family supporter. Meanwhile women have more room to move between social motherhood and the working woman,” the researchers explain.
While there is a strong sense that populist politics becomes more popular when the economy is strong, there is an unmistakable feeling that those seeking to oppose such insurgencies need to do a better job of appealing to the disaffected than they currently are. Time will tell just how effective they prove to be.
