Amelia Horgan - Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism

Lost in Work

A brilliant, searing expos of the lies underpinning work.

Owen Jones

Fascinating and absorbing ... a corrective to the widespread view that anyone can find fulfilment through their job, if they just work hard enough.

Grace Blakeley, editor of Futures of Socialism

Amelia Horgan is, in the words of organiser Fred Ross, a social arsonist. Her book will set your world on fire. Somewhere in our bones, we know that work is getting worse. But with this book, Horgan has provided the match and the kindling we need to burn the whole thing down.

Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Wont Love You Back

At last, a book that helps us appreciate the long history of the working-class challenge to the tyranny of work that puts class struggle in the workplace firmly back on the agenda.

John McDonnell, former Shadow Chancellor of the Labour Party

An excellent and important book. It combines sharp political insight with nuanced analyses ... an invaluable resource to those with an interest not just in better understanding labour and exploitation, but also in the possibilities of freedom and collective joy.

Helen Hester, Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics,
University of West London, author of Xenofeminism

I cant think of a more succinct and elegant expression of what work does to us and, in turn, why its never been more urgent to shape our work.

Will Stronge, Director of Research at Autonomy and author of Post-Work

An incisive analysis of the contemporary crisis of work and a ringing call to reimagine it.

Amia Srinivasan, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, and author of The Right to Sex:
Feminism in the Twenty-first Century

Outspoken by Pluto

Series Editor: Neda Tehrani

Platforming underrepresented voices; intervening in important political issues; revealing powerful histories and giving voice to our experiences; Outspoken by Pluto is a book series unlike any other. Unravelling debates on feminism and class, work and borders, unions and climate justice, this series has the answers to the questions youre asking. These are books that dissent.

Also available:

Mask Off

Masculinity Redefined

JJ Bola

Border Nation

A Story of Migration

Leah Cowan

Behind Closed Doors

Sex Education Transformed

Natalie Fiennes

Feminism, Interrupted

Disrupting Power

Lola Olufemi

Split

Class Divides Uncovered

Ben Tippet

First published 2021 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Amelia Horgan 2021

The right of Amelia Horgan to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4091 3 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 78680 699 4 PDF
ISBN 978 1 78680 700 7 EPUB
ISBN 978 1 78680 701 4 Kindle

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

While writing this book, I became very ill. After having Covid-19 in March 2020, I spent most of that year in bed, too weak to get up, struggling to think, and struggling to write. This period of illness meant that this book could only be written in fits and spurts; a few sentences one day, a paragraph or so the next. This means that this is a slightly different book than the book I had imagined it would be. Despite this, I hope it lives up to the promise of theory, of what theory can and should do take what is assumed to be natural, fixed, insurmountable and show it as contingent, mutable, and surmountable. In short, that most fundamental prerequisite for action, hope. Hope for better work, hope against work as we know it, hope for a better world.

When I was ill, I saw quite how much people wanted to care for each other and how much those desires for care were frustrated by the way our society is set up. After an initial (and impressive) flurry of mutual aid activity, older patterns established themselves. Rather than collective, transformative effort, the continuance of day-to-day life was secured through unpaid womens work in the home, and by poorly paid service and logistics work outside of it; the more things change, the more they stay the same. We might be wary of making claims about what people are fundamentally like, but it is striking how much effort is required to interrupt the kindness and care that people desperately want to share with each other.

With that in mind, thanks are due to those friends and comrades who supported me with so much care, and in particular to Gabriel (Constantin) Mehmel, Hareem Ghani, Huda Elmi, Martha Perotto-Wills, Jenny Killin and Sean ONeill.

Special thanks are due to those who read, commented on and vastly improved drafts of chapters: Daisy Porter, Freddie Seale, James Elliott, James Greig, Josh Gabert-Doyon, Orlando Lazar, Neha Shah, Robert Maisey, Sarra Facey, Sam Dolbear, Steffan Blayney and particularly to Lorna Finlayson. Any errors or omissions are my own.

Thanks too to Neda Tehrani for patience and care in editing and support throughout the process of writing this book.

And, to Richard, thank you for everything.

Theres a comforting narrative of progress about work: the bad old days of horrible jobs of children working in mines, of cotton mills, of workplace injuries, of cruel bosses are gone. Instead, the only problem of work that we have left is that not everyone has the right kind of job for them, or that barriers prevent particular groups women, people of colour, disabled people from accessing particular kinds of jobs. For many, though, the reality of contemporary work is rather different. Against this narrative of progress, we might first point to the continued existence of hazardous work around the world. While most of the extremely dangerous and hyper-exploitative work in extractive industries has been exported to the Global South, in the Global North there are persistent problems of ill health and poor conditions associated with work, and many examples of tyrannical bosses exercising arbitrary power over their employees. In Britain, there were at least 1.4 million workers suffering from work-related ill health in 2018/19. While the number of people who become ill because of work had been decreasing for many years, it briefly increased in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and has plateaued since.

The Covid-19 crisis has shown that risk of harm to health at work is not evenly distributed. While the lack of PPE, long hours, and offensively low pay that NHS workers faced received rightful condemnation, the risks faced by workers in the low-pay and low-protection service sector were less often remarked upon. Essential, perhaps, not to collective survival in the face of a dangerous new virus, but to profits.

The first stage of the crisis has shown that workers are exposed to very different levels of risk; some of us have been able to work from home, uncomfortable and difficult as that can sometimes be, while others have had no choice but to risk exposure to a potentially deadly virus. Despite the rhetoric about essential workers and key workers, those who had to continue to work in person were not only those whose jobs could reasonably be deemed essential. Just over half of people continued going to work. While essential might conjure up images of supermarket shelf-stackers or of nurses and doctors, in reality, apart from the few sectors that were actually shut down, it was up to employers to declare whether their companies did essential work.