Introducing the Centre for Democratising Work

We are excited to launch the Centre for Democratising Work. The Centre’s launch could not come at a more urgent moment. The interlocking challenges we face — from the climate and nature emergency, to the crisis of social reproduction and grinding economic stagnation, to frontier technologies reshaping power and uneven global supply chains — have work at their core. How work is organised, on what terms, for whose benefit, how its organisation drives the ongoing recomposition of class, gender, and race; these are irreducibly political questions that are inseparable from how the wider conjuncture is unfolding. The hope for the Centre is that it becomes a space for exploring these issues, connecting up overlapping movements and traditions in the UK and internationally to interrogate contemporary work, rethink and contest its organisation.

We start from the premise that the nature of work and the distribution of its burdens and benefits are not static. Instead, they are subject to the ebb and flow of political struggle, shaped by the institutions we build and the patterns of wealth and resource we create. In other words, the quality and purpose of work reflect the wider configurations of power. Given this, it is unsurprising that in societies marked by sharp inequality, contemporary work fails basic to meet widely held norms of justice, freedom, and democracy. In the private government of the workplace, capital commands and labour obeys. Domination and the extraction of value is the guaranteed, everyday consequence. And if formal legal equality in wage labour masks exploitation and inequality, the background conditions that enable production — from unwaged care work to the expropriation of nature — are suffused with forms of work that are sharply hierarchical, gendered and racialised. Yet work is also a source of meaning and commitment to many, a means for collective transformation of our lifeworlds. How do we navigate this tension and reorganise work on terms of justice and freedom?

As the UK hub for the global Democratising Work movement, we share a commitment to three principles as a route forward: democratisation, decommodification, and decarbonisation. Democracy because labour is a profound commitment — of our time, our bodies, our minds — the conditions of which should be subject to democratic determination and meaningful agency. Decommodification, because human beings are not commodities and work should not be treated as such. Decarbonisation, because the fundamental collective task before us is securing a just transition to a post-carbon future of genuine equity and sustainability. This agenda in turn requires not just reshaping power at work but also reimagining the background conditions that shape waged labour — and themselves are forms of work: social security, social and physical infrastructures, new ways of democratising flows of investment, and many others.

The Centre will explore all these things and more, providing a platform for new voices, a space for big debates, and a site for new analysis of how work is being restructured, for whose benefit. What interventions can democratise work?  What are the strategic priorities for decommodification? How to ensure work is not merely decarbonised but reimagined in the process? And strategically, what is required to cohere a disarticulated social majority around these demands? Answering these questions will be our mission. We look forward to welcoming you to the conversation.