Metamorphosis of work and the wage relationship: the Spanish case.

the Spanish case.

Abstract

This work immerses us in the complex world of labor relations through a genealogy of the wage-earning condition from its beginnings to the present day. In order to understand the profound transformations experienced by the world of work, especially during the last decades, a journey such as the one carried out in this book, where interesting analyses and reflections are developed, is essential. Therefore, the text is at the same time a point of arrival, since it contains lucid conclusions resulting from years of sociological research on the world of work and, on the other hand, a starting point for future research articulated within a context of late modernity such as the present one, where the consolidation of the flexible employment norm has generated societies in which the only certainty is uncertainty.

Thus, as we advance in the reading of the book we can identify many of the references that make up the main schools and currents of thought that have reflected on the world of work from different places and points of view (Castel, Braudel, Polanyi, Weber, Marx, etc.), also providing an enriching review that underpins the work developed in this study. Likewise, a clearly interesting aspect of this book is the orientation of its analysis from the general (European countries) to the particular (Spain), since it facilitates a rigorous approach, put in perspective, to the nature of the labor and social changes that have taken place in Spain during the last 150 years. Throughout the book, the author analyzes the evolution of the categories of work and worker and the role that this evolution has played as a precondition for the development of the different social orders that we have known historically. But, for this author, work cannot be explored as an isolated field alien to the rest of the structures and processes that make up our societies. Consumption, family, gender relations are interdependent dimensions that need to be studied in order to better understand the challenges facing labor relations, because at the same time that they influence the way of naming and understanding work, they are also conditioned by it. On the other hand, this work shows how the definition of categories such as employment, worker, unemployment, subsidy, risk, etc., are not the result of an aseptic, neutral analysis carried out by social scientists, but are rooted in the conflict between classes and are, therefore, a contested social and political construction in constant transformation.

The text is composed of seven chapters in which the five key stages for understanding the historical evolution experienced by the category of labor are identified and analyzed. One of these chapters, chapter six, is dedicated to the "women's revolution", that is, to the profound impact of women's movements and the questioning of the subaltern character of their spaces of enunciation in our societies. Among other issues, the naturalization of the sexual division of labor has made invisible any activity not regulated by the demiurge of the market, as well as the subjects, mostly women, in charge of carrying them out.

The first of these stages is characterized by the non-existence of the mercantile category of work. Although there were certainly productive activities, the category of work or worker did not appear as it would centuries later with the irruption of modernity. Therefore, the market does not operate as a classification device within the social order, but the place occupied by individuals within a society will be determined mainly by other criteria such as kinship and sex. The activities that would later be called work in these societies share two characteristics: they are normally carried out by individuals who are not legally free (slaves, serfs, etc.) and have a negative connotation associated with them. That is to say, these activities were performed by those who occupied the lower echelons within each social order.

The second stage is especially relevant to understand the scaffolding that allowed, decades later, the construction of a social order where work and the worker would be placed at the center of societies. This second stage, known as liberal-modern, began when the social order that had structured and sustained the ancien régime in European countries began to crumble. This questioning was the result, among other things, of the process of generalized impoverishment to which it had subjected large masses of the population, threatening the coexistence and sustainability of the social order. Thus, over time, work began to be understood (and theorized by influential thinkers) as a wealth-generating activity, crucial to convert those dangerous masses of impoverished individuals into productive workers functional to the incipient manufacturing industry that was beginning to take off. Thus, a new conception of work, understood as a key activity of the new liberal social order, is present in the texts of some of the fathers of liberalism, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Locke, etc. This process progressively transformed our societies into workers' societies where wage labor, together with the emergence of the legally free individual and the market as a key institution for social coordination, will form, as the author states, the three pillars that constitute and sustain the order of modernity.

But this process articulated within the liberal social order, which seemed to have solved the great problem of the social question unleashed during the Ancien Régime, will inevitably produce a new social question, even more complex if possible: the workers' social question, which leads to a third stage. Gradually the workers, who were apparently called to occupy a central position in the new liberal social order, problematized the contradictory and painful conditions in which they carried out their activity and the subsistence situation in which they and their families found themselves. In this way, a process of profound questioning of the existing social order was generated in which the workers' movement demanded better working and living conditions that would not be consolidated until after the Second World War. This is what the author identifies as the conquest of a real social centrality of the workers and which resulted in the construction of a new social order that enthrones employment as the social norm. This process was accompanied by the emergence and institutionalization of the Welfare State, as we know it in Europe, and, with it, a series of institutions and social mechanisms for the collectivization of risk.

These devices were based on the recognition of the situation of political vulnerability in which workers found themselves, which profoundly changed the way of understanding labor relations that had been hegemonic for years. In the Spanish case, this new social order, which was beginning to take hold during the Second Republic, and which had its first institutionalized manifestation in the 1900 law on accidents at work, suffered a considerable setback due to Franco's dictatorship, so that we had to wait until the 1970s to "come closer" to the European countries around us. However, as the book develops, even during Franco's regime we can observe timid measures which, although insufficient, gave a glimpse that our societies were changing and that the centrality acquired by work and workers was already an unquestionable phenomenon.

Finally, from the 1980s onwards, what some authors call "the rebellion of capital" took place, implying a counter-revolution of the dominant classes with the aim of dismantling and resignifying the central elements that had sustained the previous social order. Fundamentals as important in the epistemes of wage employment as job security, the socialization of risk, the centrality of labor and workers, etc. will be questioned and re-signified to give way to an entrepreneurialization of labor relations and life in general. This will result in more individualistic societies, with much more vulnerable workers and where precariousness and inequality become inherent elements of the world of work. This new stage is that of the flexible wage norm.

In short, Carlos Prieto, through a meticulous, rigorous and not lacking in a critical perspective that invites the reader to question many of the "truths" and dominant assumptions of our time, allows us to understand in depth the different transformations that the world of work has undergone, providing us with the necessary tools to analyze their political implications. This type of analysis allows us to remember that the centrality of work, stability and, ultimately, the possibility of working and living in dignity depends, to a large extent, on the political struggles that take place on a daily basis and that are often made invisible or taken for granted. Therefore, the path outlined in this text reminds us that it is possible to build alternative models that recover the decommodification of work and that, through collective tools (institutional and semantic) that allow socializing risks and balancing the situation of the most vulnerable, lead our societies towards a more egalitarian stage and where dignity and well-being do not become the privilege of a minority.