Introduction: New and Growing but Not Necessarily Better — Expanding Jobs in Europe

Having been overshadowed for several decades first by skilled industrial labour, then by knowledge and creative work, the lower end of the labour market has once again, from the 2000s onwards, begun to receive some academic and public attention. It became abundantly clear that economic growth, technological innovation, the development of a service society and European policy strategies would not automatically upgrade working conditions and job quality of the majority of workers, and turn work into a professionalised and reflexive ‘game between persons’ (Bell, 1973). Instead, the supposed ‘knowledge society’ has consistently failed to get rid of ‘hard work’ — indeed, it has in fact been shown to generate its own low-skilled, menial and tightly regimented jobs, for example, in call centres or logistics. Jobs with low wages, low autonomy, physical and psychological strains, limited perspectives and insecure employment do not simply persist, but are newly created. In this book’s terminology, these aspects and their various accumulations are not covered by low-wage or low-skilled work or by precariousness. As Bolton and Houlihan put it somewhat resignedly, ‘the jobs flowing from shifts towards services and “new” forms of work are proving just as gruelling, monotonous, tightly controlled and poorly rewarded’ (2009, p. 4) as the previous types of job at the bottom of the hierarchy.