The Workers Are No Longer In Factories
On “Sleeping Giant” by Tamara Draut
By Nicolas Colin (Co-Founder & Director) | The Family
What does a politician do when they want to talk about jobs? They head to a factory and put on a hard hat. And yet most workers aren’t in factories: industrial workers represent barely 20% of jobs in France. It’s true that images of the assembly line continue to dominate our visions of the working world. But this blue-collar nostalgia is a problem, in that it blocks us from understanding today’s economy.
In her book Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (Doubleday, 2016), the American activist Tamara Draut invites us on a stunning journey into the new working world — workers who aren’t found in a factory, but in the domains of proximity services. As she explains, the function of yesterday’s workers was most often to “manufacture things”. Today, it’s more about “taking care of people and serving them.”
The current paradigm shift explains what changed. Industrial jobs disappear because they’re easy to move offshore or automate. Their disappearance, accelerated by digital technology, is the logical consequence of scientific management — that which long made workers ever more productive and allowed them to continually improve their lot in the post-war years. Workers in proximity services, on the other hand, are not threatened by the digital transition since the heart of their work lies in interactions with other people. And it’s almost impossible to offshore or automate those innumerable daily interactions among humans.
Why is this new working class not yet recognized and properly valued? If our politicians had read Tamara Draut, rather than lurking around factories they would go talk about jobs in the places where today’s workers are found: in childcare facilities and hospitals, in retail shops, in restaurant kitchens, or at Uber’s driver training facility in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis) — all those service sectors, mostly based in cities, that now hold jobs. But there are three problems.
The first is that the jobs in those sectors are still of a very poor quality. Salaries are low, management is abysmal, hours are odd and labor laws do little to protect workers. And so our leaders are quite reticent to sing the praises of proximity services. No one wants to endorse the (usually miserable) ways in which companies treat their employees in sectors such as restaurants or cleaning services.
The second problem explains the first. Contrary to industrial workers, proximity workers have never been organized in a way that would rebalance the power structure with their employers and thus obtain better working conditions. Lacking adequate representation, they remain invisible to government authorities. How can one improve the conditions of employees in the restaurant industry if they themselves rarely express their demands?
And the third problem grows out of the first two. Since these jobs are of poor quality, they continue to be occupied by marginalized individuals, those who are less well-represented and less politically influential. Tamara Draut also explains this paradox: we are all served, every day, by proximity workers; but those in power, typically older white men, do not see those workers and do not identify with them, as they are so very different from themselves: women, young people, immigrants…
Notwithstanding these problems, it is vital that we update our vision of the world. In today’s more digital economy, the workers are no longer in factories. It’s up to our leaders to realize this and act accordingly!
(Originally published in Le Monde (in French), January 14, 2019.)
