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Book review symposium: Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

Amid the devastation wrought over the past five years by the current global capitalist crisis, debates accompanying harsh austerity policies have tended to enact few variations of one basic script: ‘jobs’ are the salvation from collapse, corporate ‘job creators’ its avengers. Unprecedented pain is thus being visited, in the name of job creation, upon those that, over the past four neoliberal decades, have already suffered the injuries of economic liberalization. Politicians from the right and the left alike have consistently used the imperative of creating jobs to legitimize deepening inequalities, the constant erosion of labour and environmental standards, corporate tax cuts, the dismantling of public services and redistributive policies, the deepening insecurity of lives forced to depend on labour markets that offer little of the rewards and dignity they promise. Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work is thus uniquely timely for those who want to confront the narrowing of options and the stifling of imagination currently underway in mainstream discussions on how jobs shape a precarious world. The book’s main strength is its critical appraisal of employment not merely as an object of sociological analysis and therapeutics. The crisis of work is not here primarily about employees’ security, motivation and satisfaction, or the challenge of rebalancing the requirements of jobs, families and social provisions. It cannot be fixed by social engineering and productionrelated policy interventions. It rather speaks to the collapse of norms – evoking citizenship, freedom, empowerment and socialization – that have made work a master signifier of social existence in an age in which, as Weeks argues following André Gorz, actual jobs have ceased to underwrite any of those values. It is thus time, Weeks continues, to replace sociology with political theory as the key to unlock the implications of work with power relations, imaginative projects, social processes that produce governable subjects but also liberate subversive desires of liberation from, as much as of, labour. If the problem, then, is life’s subordination to work, it comprehensively affects the stable and precariously employed as well as the unemployed while fusing realms conventionally separated as ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. Rather than the 526346WES0010.1177/0950017014526346Work, employment and societyBook review symposium research-article2014