We are surrounded by crises and have lived with, and in, crisis for a long time. The legacy of the multiple crises of the Cold War still haunts our geopolitical landscape; in the UK, our National Health Service is ‘in crisis’; we are told we are facing a ‘crisis of immigration’; we experience mental health crises; there is a ‘homelessness crisis’; the global financial system went into crisis in 2007–8. We could go on. However, we need a sense of perspective and proportion to understand our crisis- ridden world if we are to find ways out of crisis. While there are many ways to conceptualize crisis, and to view crises across a historical perspective, in our current situation the crises we face, be they ‘natural’ or caused by humans, have a common cause in the fundamental operation and antagonisms of capitalism.

In this book, we argue that the changing world of work must be understood in the context of three crises: the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency. These three crises are interrelated and have considerable consequences for people's lives. We argue that these three crises combine to form a ‘polycrisis’ (see Tooze, 2021) which has far- reaching consequences for the world of work and employment. There is a synergy at play here: the polycrisis emerges from the fundamental antagonisms of capitalism and affects work; work is the fundamental generator of the profits of the capitalist system that we are embedded within.

While any crisis may have localized effects on economic relations, two of the major crises discussed in this book – the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency – and their global reach offer the probability of major long- term disruptions to the economy, the third crisis that we explore here. We will view this contemporary conjuncture through the lens of work and employment, and we suggest that work itself is in a state of crisis, a consequence of the economic, epidemiological and environmental crises which themselves are a consequence of the fundamental antagonisms of capitalism.

There is, clearly, much that is badly wrong with work (Pettinger, 2019), not least because of the cocktail of crises we describe in this book.