Sitting at my desk and composing this last section of my book, I revert to looking at images of work, this time two pictures on my wall. Up in front of me is a reproduction of a painting by Mancunian artist L.S. Lowry from the mid- 20th century. It depicts a football match on a bleak, grey day in what is presumably the Northwest of England. We see a goal and two teams battling it out on pitch. Two of the players, one representing each side, are jumping towards the ball, probably with the aim of heading it. They are surrounded by their respective teammates. In the foreground, there is a perimeter, and a few people watching who are positioned in front of it, mostly with their backs turned towards the observer. In the back, an industrial cityscape is visible: smoking chimneys, factory buildings and a gasometer.

In Lowry's painting, we glimpse what philosopher Bertrand Russell called, with dismissive overtones, the ‘industrial civilisation’ (2010). He referred to a way of life centred on industrial work and the factory, which was prevalent, in the 19th and 20th century, in many parts of Britain, Western Europe and the wider world. Lowry's imagery indicates that this civilization is characterized by strenuous, manual labour and a popular culture that celebrates comradery and confrontational physical activity (see Gramsci, 1971: 277– 320; Hobsbawm, 1984: 182). And arguably, he depicts a maledominated world. In the picture, there are only two females – a woman and a girl watching from outside the perimeter.

Importantly – and as both Silver's observations and the ILO numbers presented in Chapter 3 suggest (Silver, 2003; Figure 3.1) – it would be plain wrong to presume that the industrial civilization has vanished. Indeed, there is no evidence of deindustrialization as a general trend. The share of industrial workers in the global workforce has been constant in the last three decades. Manufacturing may have declined in many of its former hubs, be it the North of England, the ‘Rust Belt’ in the US or the Ruhr Valley in Germany.