Employability in Real Time

1
Employability in Real Time

• 15th November 2007
• Phoebe Moore

2
My research

• What is work in contemporary everyday life?
  Resistance?
• Employability
• Relationship between state and citizen
• Citizen and everyday life
• Education toward employable subject
• International dimensions, divisions of labour,
  impact on persons (SK labour struggle)
• Subjectivity in neoliberal capitalism selfwoven
  safety nets (Moore 2006)
• International Political Economy of Employability
  Skills Revolutions, East and West
• (EU Lisbon process, ongoing East Asian
  restructuring)

3
Presentation outline

• The incurable learner
• Employable subject
• Influence on policy and curricula
• Free software production emancipation? Or
  neoliberal capitalism?

4

• Instability of the market in the information age
  dispels all fixity and security in the situation
  of the labourer it constantly threatens, by
  taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch
  from his hands his means of subsistence, and by
  suppressing his detail function, to make him
  superfluous i K. Marx, Capital, Volume I
  (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 292.

5

• Marx prophetically envisaged a time when the
  accumulation of knowledgethe general productive
  forces of the social brain would be absorbed
  into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence
  appears as an attribute of capital, and more
  specifically of fixed capital. a time when
  machinery replicated not only the motive action
  of the worker, but the activities of the
  intellect an era in which general social
  knowledge has become a direct force of
  production, and the conditions of the process of
  social life itself have come under the control of
  the general intellect and been transformed in
  accordance with it. (Marx 1973 706).

6

• The citizen
• has become a political fiction the externality
  of the citizen in relation to his own everyday
  life becomes a necessity projected outside of
  himself in models, in fanaticisms, in
  ideolisations, in fetishisms. Wherever it
  appears, the cult of personality has a political
  sense and can never be reduced to a peripheral
  ideology it is bound up with the nature of the
  State the externality of the citizen and his
  projection outside of himself in relation to his
  everyday life is part of that everyday life
  (Lefebvre 1958/1991, 89).

7
Lifelong, incurable learner

• To remain employable, one must be a self-imposed
  lifelong, incurable (Harding 2000) learner.
  Could this be the link toward emancipation from
  the drudgeries of everyday work and production?
• Will workers become entitled to producing works
  rather than products?
• Or is it another feature of the ongoing survival
  of capitalism (Lefebvre 1973) in its invasion
  into peoples everyday lives?
• Is this characteristic of the subsumption of
  lives to capitalism (Negri 1994)? Is this
  campaign not a criticism of life choices and
  personal decisions on the way to manage ones
  personal time and space and energies?
• The latter appears to be the case, considering
  the recommendations toward private sector
  involvement into education, as work becomes less
  and less separate from life.

8
New Labours modern welfare reform project
within the Budget 2007, entitled Employment for
All

• In the UK, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and
  Principals as well as the Department for
  Education and Employment attempted to express
  employability in terms of knowledge, skills and
  attributes that graduates are expected to be able
  to demonstrate that they have acquired in higher
  education (Committee 1998, quoted in Ibid.).
• This preceded New Labours modern welfare reform
  project within the Budget 2007, entitled
  Employment for All, which is in effect, a
  modified version of Keynes vision for full
  employment that promises to deliver all the
  support that citizens need to find, retain,
  and progress in work, and adapt to a benefit from
  a global labour market (HM Treasury, Budget
  2007).

9

• New Labours principles of welfare reform were
  set forward in the Budget as two related goals
• To ensure employment opportunity for all, giving
  everyone the opportunity to fulfil their
  individual, social and economic potential.
  Achieving this requires effective labour market
  policies set against a background of
  macroeconomic stability.
• To foster a world class skills base, equipping
  everyone with the means to find, retain and
  progress in work, and the ability to adapt to and
  benefit from a globalising labour market.
  Integrating the employment and skills agenda is
  central to achieving this (Ibid., 84).

10

• These goals are underpinned by several key
  principles, including the traditionally
  conservative mantra of rights and
  responsibilities (Ibid.), which apparently means
  that everyone should have the opportunity to
  work and for this to be effective, reform needs
  to be supported by access to appropriate
  training, information and advice these
  responsibilities on the part of the government
  are matched by the responsibility of individuals,
  where possible, to prepare for, look for and
  engage in work (Ibid.).
• So the government has adopted an eclectic blend
  of the human capital and work-first models,
  propped up with a terminology that fits with New
  Public Management ideas and agendas as private
  sector techniques begin to dominate public sector
  management in the name of neoliberal social
  progress (Beckmann and Cooper 2005, 477).

11
Influence on curricula

• Harvey et al (2004/5) identify four broad areas
  of activity that higher education institutions
  have sought across Europe, for the development of
  students employability
• Enhanced or revised central support (usually via
  the agency of careers services) for
  undergraduates and graduates in their search for
  work. To this can be added the provision of
  sector-wide resources.
• Embedded attribute development in the programme
  of study often as the result of modifications to
  curricula to make attribute development, job
  seeking skills and commercial awareness explicit,
  or to accommodate employer inputs.
• Innovative provision of work experience
  opportunities within, or external to, programmes
  of study.
• Enabled reflection on and recording of
  experience, attribute development and achievement
  alongside academic abilities, through the
  development of progress files and career
  management programmes.

12

• Labours version of rights thus become
  transformed to construct an outer frame of
  community expectations and supposed needs
  rather than an outer frame that allows for
  alternative personalities/types of individuals
  with certain needs (Robinson 2007).
• Government programmes therefore are now aiming to
  prepare workers for international competition and
  have begun to focus on training people to achieve
  greater individual self-sufficiency over job
  stability and career advancement (Worth 2003,
  608, references Walker and Kellard 2001).

13
Employability is a highly subjective term

• Employability is a highly subjective term, and
  requires the productive woman/man to become a
  citizen/worker, who is also labelled a learner
  worker (Williams 2005).
• Rather than specific skills and abilities alone,
  workers are expected to have particular labour
  attitudes (Worth, 2003 608).
• Employers have begun to place emphasis on work
  ethics and soft skills like communication, to the
  extent that in 2006, employers cite communication
  skills, worth ethic, and personality as the top
  three desirable skills, placed above literacy,
  qualifications, and numeracy (CIPD 2006). Only 26
  per cent of the 1,400 employers surveyed in the
  Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
  (CIPD/KPMG) quarterly Labour Market Outlook
  placed literacy and numeracy at the top of
  rankings.
• The August 2006 report indicates that UK
  employers now emphasise soft skills over literacy
  and numeracy in spite of the concern regarding
  public examination standards in recent years. 40
  per cent of employers indicated that a key
  attribute they seek is excellent communication
  skills, and 32 per cent even emphasise
  personality as a crucial factor (Phillips 2006,
  12)!

14

• Too often, employability is used as a mediator
  that fails to address unequal access to job
  markets and is merely a performance indicator
  that neglects to note how social structures such
  as gender, race, social class and disability
  interact with labour market opportunities
  (Morley 2001, 132, cited in Cranmer 2006, 173).
• Generally, though, employability has become
  increasingly defined as the ability to adapt to
  flexible patterns of employment and the ability
  to become lifelong learners (Hillage and Pollard
  1999 Tamkin and Hillage 1999).
• The demands for adaptability and self-management
  have actually been critically deemed an ethic of
  employability for unemployed youth (Worth 2003).
  This ethic is increasingly evangelised in a
  judgemental tone that appears to be encroaching
  on lives of all age groups.
• Lazzarato contemporary management techniques
  that aim at stimulating subjectivity and the
  exchange between subjects while firmly
  subordinating such exchange to the corporation

15

• Alex Galloway (2001 2004) has argued that this
  logic of control is embodied in the protocols
  that facilitate the digital environment of the
  internet, arguing that, rather than the anarchic,
  rhizomatic space of the hyperbolic commentary of
  the mid 1990s, the internet is characterized by a
  decentralisation underwritten by the immanent
  controls of protocols.
• The internet is decentred only to the degree that
  control is distributed throughout the network, it
  reveals a horizontal rather than vertical logic
  of control.

16

• Work in the information age is increasingly
  problematic idea
• Cannot rely on traditional images of class,
  because roles are blurred and salaries do not
  always match skills or status in a coherent
  manner that reflects industrial capitalism
• We need to reconceptualise social relations to
  understand the reformation of connections between
  knowledge, production processes, and value.

17

• The value of labour is increasingly difficult to
  measure quantitatively with the developments of
  technology and with the transformation of firm
  relations, and workers are thrown into a
  completely new playing field as a result.
• Demands on labour and conditions of production
  have a tendency to change rapidly and
  unpredictably and thus, are appear to go
  uncontested.

18
FS/OS workers do they have free time?

• Agency and power relations within knowledge
  production even non-profit production
  environments such as OS
• Can we escape the pressures for conformity of
  international norms toward what are now seen to
  be employable skills?
• Irony a large percentage of participants are not
  employed but in fact, aim to become employable
  through this informal training ground for
  knowledge production
• Other developers affirm that their participation
  in these communities is a privilege
• Is FS/OS a training ground, or a playground?
• Those who aim to remain employable, or
  re-employable in a site that serves to prepare
  the intellectual labour power needed for the
  existing monopolies of the software market?
• i Telephone interview with Ryan Junell of
  Creative Commons San Francisco, CA, 11 December
  2006.

19

• Can FS/OS models actually contribute to workers
  survival through workers very employability
  within the global economy?
• Since the production of knowledge occurs within a
  rapidly changing arena and holds the potential to
  become a site for contestation, or for a
  reconsideration of how intersubjectivities are
  formed

20
The promise

• In the KBE the means of production includes less
  measurable, intangible requirements for
  participation.
• Workers are increasingly expected to take
  ownership of their own employability, or toward
  the ability to gain, maintain, and obtain
  employment within post-industrial conditions.
• Will this shift will cultivate an arena within
  which workers can take control of the labour
  process?
• Will it eliminate discrimination and power
  relations within the workforce?
• Politicians across the globe, the management
  literature, and employers preach a certain
  revolution, or what is called the promise
  implying that this shift will indeed offer
  workers a new dimension to work freedoms and
  ownership.

21
So why do software developers join the OS
community?

• Participants tend to be young and predominantly
  male, well educated and single.
• FS/OS developers earn a significantly lower wage
  than those working for the hegemonic companies
  such as Microsoft and IBM.
• 7 earn nothing, and 45 earn no more than
  2000EUROs monthly.
• From the online survey of 2784 OS and Free
  Software developers, Ghosh (et al) found that
  this type of software production is treated as
  more of a hobby than a salaried occupation
• 8 out of 10 developers or 78.9 join OS
  communities with the intention to learn and
  practice new skills
• 29.8 stay in OS to specifically improve job
  opportunities

22

• 52 of participants develop proprietary software
  as well as OS products
• 65 are employed full time anyway
• so it seems that this originally ideologically
  driven political movement has not established a
  clearly defined contestation toward traditional
  models of production.
• Participants are still faced with the fundamental
  question of income (though a lot of money can be
  earned by the development or application of
  OS/FS, like it illustrated by the example of
  LINUX. (Ghosh et al)

23
Training? Read the fing manual? Or what?

• The ownership of intangible goods and services
  and the knowledge involved in their production
  drives competition in the new capitalism.
• Workplace requirements have become less directly
  trainable because the outcome is less obviously
  measured, so the OS community becomes an
  attractive arena for self-development and
  preparation for re-entry into the market.
• While this is heralded as a triumphant moment in
  history for the emancipation of the worker,
  because the production of intangible goods within
  these industries requires new learning
  capabilities and skills, without an obvious route
  for training of these within the private sector,
  workers are being forced to take a new level of
  responsibility for individual welfare that was
  historically part of states responsibility.

24
Is there such thing as free time?

• In a regime of affective labour everybody works
  all of the time, since all of our activities
  whether remunerated or not are recuperated by
  capital.
• Subjectivity and its capabilities are the site of
  production -- renders the whole field of
  subjectivity a potential site of production
• Desires are locked into the system of
  consumption, assuming the status of labour and
  generating profit
• Immateriality effects not only workers or
  producers but also the corporations that direct
  them
• these too become weightless, production and
  the ownership of the means of production become a
  necessary but irritating encumbrance outsourced
  to the developing world.