Introduction

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on two critically important dimensions of contemporary work and employment: the function of labour markets in distributing workers to various roles in organizations and occupational hierarchies, and employment relations, concerning the interplay between workers and employers, including the role of managerial approaches in shaping these relations. Implicit in these chapters, and sometimes also explicit, is an understanding of how capitalism produces inequalities – between managers and employees, for example, or between those in roles at different levels within occupational hierarchies. Such inequalities, we argue, produce antagonisms, especially the classic antagonism between capital and labour, as highlighted in the work of Marx and manifest in class conflict. But workplaces are also the site of many other forms of inequality, and these also generate antagonisms: those arising from the many forms of sociocultural difference, such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, sexual orientation and dis/ ability. Countries in the Global North have enacted legislation, to varying extents and in different ways, aimed at combatting unfair discrimination at work. In the UK, for example, the Equality Act 2010 consolidated pre- existing legislation prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race and other so- called ‘protected characteristics’ and extended protections elsewhere (for example, gender reassignment). Overwhelmingly, major employing organizations now operate policies focused on promoting equal opportunities and/ or facilitating greater diversity and inclusion, not least because of the presumed business benefits that arise from doing so.

As this chapter demonstrates, however, inequalities remain profoundly important in contemporary work and employment, notwithstanding governmental and organizational efforts to address them. We focus, to start with, on a dimension which governments and employers typically overlook, namely the prevalence of disadvantage based on social class and the disparities experienced by people from working- class backgrounds. Underpinned by an intersectional approach, the remainder of the chapter then covers three further social cleavages – relating to gender inequality, racial and ethnic disparities in employment and the parlous position of young people, especially those from working- class backgrounds. The chapter demonstrates that there is a crisis of equalities, as disadvantage at work has been exacerbated under conditions of intensified neoliberalism, a crisis which is responsible for, and has been influenced by, other notable crises – relating to poverty, care, housing and the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting antagonisms help to fuel the contemporary crisis of work.