Nice Work If You Can Get It Previous Books by the Author Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons from Shanghai Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry Coeditor, The University against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace Coeditor, Anti-Americanism Editor, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers Editor, Science Wars Coeditor, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture Coeditor, Technoculture Editor, Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism Nice Work If You Can Get It Life and Labor in Precarious Times Andrew Ross NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London NYU SERIES IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS General Editor: Andrew Ross Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times Andrew Ross NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2009 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ross, Andrew, 1956- Nice work if you can get it : life and labor in precarious times / Andrew Ross. p. cm. — (NYU series in social and cultural analysis) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–8147–7629–2 (cl : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–8147–7629–9 (cl : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–8147–7635–3 (e-book : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–8147–7635–3 (e-book : alk. paper) 1. Employment in foreign countries. 2. Alien labor. 3. Globalization. I. Title. HF5382.55.R67 2009 331.6’2—dc22 2008045880 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10987654321 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 I Creative Workers and Rent-Seeking 1 The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries 15 Policymaking in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States 2 China’s Next Cultural Revolution? 53 3 The Olympic Goose That Lays the Golden Egg 77 II Sustainability and the Ground Staff 4 Teamsters, Turtles, and Tainted Toys 105 5 Learning from San Ysidro 131 III Instruments of Knowledge Capitalism 6 The Copyfight over Intellectual Property 161 7 The Rise of the Global University 189 Conclusion: Maps and Charters 207 Notes 215 References 219 Index 245 About the Author 264 v This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments BECAUSE THIS IS the first title in the NYU Series in Social and Cul- tural Analysis, I’d like to acknowledge the contributions of my faculty colleagues and staff in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA). Four years ago, we were given a rare opportunity—to launch a new and genuinely transdisciplinary department within the milieu of a re- search university. So far, the experience has been bracing and productive, to say the least. We salute NYU Press, and Editor in Chief Eric Zinner in particular, for seeing that the creation of the department was also an op- portunity to do something unique at the press. The result was to dedicate a series for publishing work generated from SCA. I’m proud that this book is the first fruit of that collaboration. For their valuable comments on the entire manuscript, my grati- tude goes to Neil Brenner, Toby Miller, Dana Polan, and the anonymous reviewers. Others who contributed ideas, suggestions, or who served as mod- els to follow include Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, Andy Pratt, Juan Flores, Teddy Cruz, Kristin Ross, Adam Green, Toby Miller, Devon Pena, Katie Quan, Liza Featherstone, Michael Keane, Wang Xiaoming, George Yudice, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Jeff Ballinger, Ned Rossiter, Geert Lovink, Sukhdev Sandhu, Paul Smith, Chris Newfield, and Cary Nelson. Thanks to the guest editors or staff editors of four journals where some of the material in these chapters first appeared: Ursula Huws, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Marita Sturken, Sam Binkley, Jo Littler, Richard Kim, and Bill Saunders. Each helped to shape the material in new, and more clear, directions. I’m also grateful to Danny Walkowitz, Harvey Molotch, Sophie Watson, and Frank Mort, whose New York–London seminar prompted my comparative research on the Olympics. Thanks to Michael Palm, Leigh Dodson, and Katie Haskell for re- search assistance. Among the many luxuries I enjoy from her companionship, Maggie Gray’s eye for detail and for justice has improved every page of the book. vii viii Acknowledgments Some of the material in chapter 1 appeared in Work Organization, Labour, and Globalization; chapter 4 in The Nation and Cultural Studies; chapter 5 in Harvard Design Magazine; an earlier version of chapter 6 in American Quarterly; and chapter 7 in Monika Krause, Michael Palm, Mary Nolan, and Andrew Ross, eds., The University against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). Introduction THE NEED TO make a living has always set people in motion—off the land, into the towns and cities, over the seas. Most have been fleeing op- pressive forms of work—chattel slavery, serfdom, indenture, guild depen- dence, patriarchal servitude, routine wage labor—in search of a more free and humane life. Employers have had little choice but to follow them or try to restrict their mobility to select population centers in hopes of cap- turing their labor (Moulier Boutang 1998, 2001). In the modern era, mass migration to cities and manufacturing zones was and still is a monumental geographical process, disrupting or reinventing ways of life and fabricat- ing the vast new urban spaces where one half of the world’s population currently ekes out a livelihood. Yet these patterns of flight, capture, and escape have ensured that no destination would remain fixed for too long. Nor has the restless and voracious spirit of capital delivered much in the way of stability. Industrial employers in the United States, for example, began to move from urban to greenfield locations as early as the 1920s, primarily to escape the threat of concentrated union power (Gordon 1978). Their opportunistic moves helped stimulate the mass suburban- ization of the 1940s and 1950s (postwar employers did not “follow” the newly suburbanizing masses, as is often assumed), just as they prefigured the flight of manufacturers in the mid-1970s to the U.S. South and then, later, to the global South. As a result, the mass of African Americans (just to cite one highly visible population) who sought relief from Jim Crow in northern cities in the 1920s saw their children and grandchildren aban- doned only fifty years later to joblessness and society’s neglect. The last three decades of deregulation and privatization have re- shaped the geography of livelihoods for almost everyone in the industri- alized world, and for a large slice of the population in developing coun- tries. On the landscape of work, there is less and less terra firma (Beck 2000; Castel 2002; Bowe, Bowe, and Streeter 2000; Sennett 1998). To- day’s livelihoods are pursued on economic ground that shifts rapidly un- derfoot, and many of our old assumptions about how people can make 1 2 Nice Work If You Can Get It a living are outdated pieties. No one, not even those in the traditional professions, can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of their lifetime, and they are under more and more pressure to anticipate, and prepare for, a future in which they still will be able to compete in a changing marketplace. The rise in the percentage of contin- gent employment, both in low-end service sectors and in high-wage oc- cupations, has been steady and shows no sign of leveling off. It has been accompanied by an explosion of atypical work arrangements far removed from the world of social welfare systems, union contracts, and long-term tenure with a single employer. It is no surprise, then, to hear laments for the bygone world of rela- tively stable “standard employment” in the core industries and service sec- tors that characterized the Fordist era in industrialized nations (in which workers were promised incremental wage hikes, expanded benefits, and job security in return for increased productivity and industrial peace). In the rosiest remembrances of that world, chronic insecurity was a paren- thetical experience—either the unavoidable burden of those who relied on seasonal employment, or the lot of part-time female workers in the sec- ondary labor market whose waged income was regarded as a supplement to the male “family wage.” Yet, however sentimentalized, and however un- equally shared its benefits really were, that was no mythical landscape, and there are good reasons why the lived experience of it as a lost utopia still resides within the living memory. For youth entering the labor market today, stories about those dec- ades of stable employment are tall tales indulged by the elderly, not unlike the lore of Great Depression hardship that baby boomers endured from their parents. In retrospect, the Keynesian era of state-backed securities— whether in the capitalist democracies, the socialist bloc, or the postcolonial, developmental states—was a brief interregnum, or, more likely, an armed truce. It took many decades of struggle to establish that governments and employers had any responsibilities toward securing the livelihoods of citi- zens.