GEOG20011 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Gender Pay Gap, Precarious Work, Household Income
16 May 2018
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LECTURE 7: WORK AND INEQUALITIES
Karl Marx, Work and Inequality
• Work sites such as factories
• Focus on 2 major classes in capitalist society:
o Employers: capacity to accumulate capital
o Employees: extent wo which they are exploited
• Suggest work is based around class and hierarchical
o Depends on inequality to exist
• Marx: the only worse than being exploited, is not being part of the system at all
DIFFERENT TYPES OF WORK
• Work as a continuum – not something you are either in or out of
• Forms of employment have become more complex in the last few decades
o Less predictable in terms of time
• More involve in precarious work: unemployed, multiple work, cycling through poor quality work, internships, temporary
• Precarity: lives inflected with uncertainty and instability
o Rise due to neoliberal globalisation, pulling back of state services – restructuring of global economy (stronger
labour management, pool of cheap labour competing for work and abandon commitment to full employment and
universal welfare)
o In advanced capitalist countries: 1/3 people in precarious work
• Moving away from the idea of factory worker as the key exploited worker
• Precariat: emerging social class – Guy Standing (author)
o Alliance between precarious poor and newly precarious educated class
o Lack of security leads to entrenched insecurities in society
o Growing size of this class and anger – pointing towards new collective politics
o Division leads to villianisation of particular groups of workers
DIFFERENT AXES OF INEQUALITY IN RELATION TO WORK
• Gender
• Age/generation
• Race/ethnicity
Gender
• About lines of social difference other than class
• Gender pay gap – difference between average wages of men and woman working full time
o Expressed as a percentage of men’s average weekly income
o Partly due to more women working part time – care for children and elderly more
o Highly dependent upon age bracket – generational difference
• Stereotypes of women’s work: more in lower-paid sectors
o Basis for exclusion and social reproduction of inequalities
• Positives for women: shifting terrain in neoliberal economy
o Service work requires new set of skills and bodily representation
McDowell Reading
• Men and women’s employment histories
• Pre-1980’2 contract between husband and wives
• Rise of precarious work
• Shift to ‘feminised’ service work
• New intergenerational contract between mothers and their sons
ETHNOGRAPHY OF WORK
• Importance of work as a social and moral sphere in addition to its utilitarian or economic functions
• Research links work, identity and social practice
Labour Agency
• Recognising agency of labourers, doesn’t make the conditions they work under ok
o Need to think through real structural constraints that produce inequitable working situations
• Rise of independent contractors: Air BnB, Uber
Lecture Outline
Extending a Marxist approach to
work and inequality, thinking about:
• Types of work
• Axes of difference
• Ethnography of work
Document Summary
Karl marx, work and inequality: work sites such as factories. Focus on 2 major classes in capitalist society: employers: capacity to accumulate capital, employees: extent wo which they are exploited. Suggest work is based around class and hierarchical: depends on inequality to exist, marx: the only worse than being exploited, is not being part of the system at all. Extending a marxist approach to work and inequality, thinking about: axes of difference. Different types of work: work as a continuum not something you are either in or out of. Forms of employment have become more complex in the last few decades. Less predictable in terms of time: more involve in precarious work: unemployed, multiple work, cycling through poor quality work, internships, temporary. In advanced capitalist countries: 1/3 people in precarious work: moving away from the idea of factory worker as the key exploited worker. Precariat: emerging social class guy standing (author: alliance between precarious poor and newly precarious educated class.
