INTRODUCTION

In 2019, the World Bank published a report, The Changing Nature of Work. The report takes stock of how automation, or digitised labour as defined in Chapters 1 and 3, is impacting the world of work. While it touches on many different types of work, the report explores in detail the effects of automation on what might be termed as productive labour. Among other things, it makes some important claims about the productive sectors of the global economy; the sectors that create surplus value. It suggests that automation has become a more prominent feature of the manufacturing sector in recent years; manufacturing, of course, being a main area of the productive sphere of capitalism. Yet, the report continues, this has caused some anxiety in society. Automation and digitised labour, argue some, will take jobs away from ‘real’ people (World Bank 2019: 20). While manufacturing in strong Northern capitalist economies is declining, and while jobs in this sector are increasingly automated, the World Bank argues that the shift to services nevertheless establishes new types of jobs (Word Bank 2019: 28–9). Think about the rise of digital labour on digital platforms. These all require a new group of workers and employees, including skilled IT designers and technicians, who can operate, run and repair these platforms and interact with customers on them (World Bank 2019: 20). At the same time, the report continues, ‘the share of industrial employment, primarily manufacturing, has remained stable in the rest of the world’ (World Bank 2019: 6). In low-income countries, for instance, 10 per cent of the total labour force worked in the manufacturing sector between 1991 and 2017. Upper-middle-income countries saw an even higher figure of 23 per cent. In some developing countries, the numbers employed by the manufacturing sector also saw an overall increase. In Vietnam, there was a rise from 9 per cent in 1991 to 25 per cent in 2017. In all of these cases, the digitisation of labour is apparent across a range of jobs.

COVID-19 has turned upside down many of the more optimistic scenarios of digital labour and work. Before we come to some of these issues in the main body of the chapter, it is worth saying that even before the pandemic, a number of global governance bodies were already painting a less optimistic picture of automation than that of the World Bank.