Submission to London Plan Further Alterations Public Consultation

Project Mimique
Contact: Carolyn Smith <c.smith4@lycos.com>

December 11, 2006

Submission to
London Plan Further Alterations
Public Consultation

Policy 3B.12 Improving employment opportunities for Londoners

In its conception of the London economy, Chapter 3B exhibits a bias towards immaterial production, that is, towards labour involving information, knowledge and cooperation (the production of value subjectivities). Despite a turn toward independent decision-making and creativity within the most mundane of tasks, the concept of immaterial labour is highly stratified. The growth of employment demanding creative-symbolic manipulation concurrently implies a corresponding growth of low value and low skill jobs requiring routine symbolic manipulation (data entry, word processing) or skilled occupations devalued by educational hierarchy within the creative and knowledge industries themselves. Such a tendency towards pronounced inequality is masked in your eulogisation. Meanwhile, characteristics of a post-industrial economy (the primacy, autonomy and production of the image as social relation as well as commodity [Debord]; de-personalised time the real agent of the process of valorisation [Beradi][1]) are heightened within immaterial production. Principles demonstrated without irony in your chapter which manages to be both spectacular as well as bland.

Restatement of a centrist consensus dominating economic development (here, promotion of employer-led skills training) one might charge as ideological, and redolent of the biopolitical. Martin Jones and Kevin Ward (2002, quoted in Games Monitor, 2006) suggest that training interventions can be regarded as a response to "a devolved rationality crisis", and within a discourse of competitive advantage under globalisation, displaced from the political sphere of the state onto vulnerable groups such as the unemployed, who are then stigmatised for the state's own economic failings and forced to shoulder responsibility. Qualifications reproduce class privilege and the state regulative framework -- from tax and accounting principles to the institutionalisation of consent in a labour process context. In Hackney, HTEN report that certificates issued by training contractors to the New Deal, as well as government-promoted NVQs, are regarded by employers as "largely useless" (Hutton et al, 2003, quoted ibid). Definitions of 'skill', intrinsic to job classification, are nuanced by the distribution of power in the labour market and the sphere of social reproduction (most noticeably around gender and race, but also international divisions of labour).

Could one counter that the Plan exhibits an administrative dependency (Offe, 1985) -- a need for others to cooperate, for legitimacy, taking preeminence -- as more innovative recommendations, for instance towards promotion of work rotation to enable both unemployed and workers gain employment experience (popular in Denmark and France), extended (and subsidised) study leave (Gray, 2004), free access to knowledge (Capocci et al, 2004) or the Guaranteed Minimum Income (demanded by redistributionists as well as revolutionaries) remain marginalised. One has to admit that radical options are thin on the ground and a tad cliché. But in the production of cooperation, marketing is the only paradigm that seems to dominate.

"Working in the age of flexibility is no longer associated with contract stability and long term linearity of working life, but rather a motley set of temporary and discontinuous experiences. In this way, the paradigm of capitalist subordination is transformed into the capability of capital to exert control over the flows of mobility between jobs" (Capocci et al, ibid). Training geared to employer demand is one aspect of this tendency, but so also are low wages, agency hiring and underemployment, coercive aspects to the postmodern metropolitan labour market. The Skills Intelligence Network (SKIN) found in a 2004 survey that almost 60% of respondents attempting to work in key clusters of the creative industries made less than 25% of their income from their creative specialism and 40% made no income at all; and that less than 25% of businesses made over 75% of their income from their specialism as well (Bewley, 2004).

Conditions for forced labour, another issue ignored by the further alterations, are created by employer demand for ultra-flexible labour (Brendan Barber, General Secretary TUC). The Andersen & Rogaly report 'Forced Labour and Migration to the UK' identifies three urban sectors in which the forced labour of migrants is prominent: construction, contract cleaning and residential care, and threw up worrying examples from the NHS, and in the sex industry.

Economic development strategy needs to address the trend toward discontinuity, or precarity, as it is known, in particular, the situation of migrant and agency workers, and work to address the plight of forced labourers in the capital. At the very least, the LDA should compile a sound evidence base on both these key issues, and prioritise them strategically, to enable local authority working and enhance trade union and other organisation.

We also request research to be undertaken on low-wage and insecure employment within the knowledge economy and support the funding of initiatives set up to tackle underemployment, closed shop hiring, and sweated labour within the creative industries.

The London Plan itself needs to reflect these concerns.

With specific regard to the situation of migrant workers (the points below are adapted from the Andersen and Rogaly report on Forced Labour):
- Loathe as we are to validate the police, however, we suggest that the GLA mandates the training of Metropolitan Police officers in the recognition of forced labour situations (including joint working with trade unions), the navigation of subcontracting networks, and in the prosecution of forced labour crimes.
Working with strategic partners, the Mayor will [...]
- ensure that opportunities provided by the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics and other major new developments are used to assist in enhancing skills and the targeting of job opportunities to local communities
Starkly, the Olympics are an interpellation of post-Fascist regularity, the disciplinary subject imposed through state violence, corporate sponsorship and gender 'enhancement'; and remediated (and expanded) by Blairite experiments in labour market and social regulation, acutely spatial phenomena.

Critique below taken from Games Monitor, Briefing paper 3: Governance (Project Mimique, 2006)

Economic development is predicated routinely on the transience of opportunity, and of marginal increments in economic benefit. Yet even this limited horizon is overshadowed by the scale of job displacement and the 'flexi-security' and hazard of projected growth sectors of the Olympic development and Legacy phases.

Development phase

Divisions of labour within construction are highly pronounced, and disparities reflect the racism of corporate wage and status setting, a recomposing secondary market, and the institutionalisation of peripheral economic relations forged through Empire and the regulatory arrangements of EU accession (and remediated through national strategies of exposure, socialisation and containment). Trainees local to the Olympic boroughs and migrant workers face the prospect of being labelled 'contingent' in an already flexibilised sector (construction training to target the more marginalised unemployed, particularly migrant workers, women and youth). Contingent workers are prey to greater substitution pressures by employers and are more vulnerable to exploitation. It is not clear from the planning literature whether recruitment for training schemes will be via the coercive New Deal programme or organised on a more open principle.

In any case, the construction industry is pregnant with hazard, and a brutalised context for local, national and international construction labour. UCATT Building Worker (Spring edition 2005) reports more than 300 on-site deaths since 2001, that 90,000 workers suffered musculoskeletal injuries during 2000-2001 (double the all-industry average), and that over 1,500 workers have been fired in the last five years for raising safety concerns, a statistic exacerbated by subcontracting endemic to the sector. The Health and Safety Executive acknowledges that only 5% of work-related injuries experienced by self-employed people are reported to them, due in part to the fact that the self-employed cannot claim compensation (of the 166,181 companies registered by the DTI in construction, nearly half have only one employee). Subcontracting is also responsible for the levels of forced labour in construction reported by the TUC (Andersen & Rogaly, undated).

The construction labour market is acutely international, and the initial Olympic planning proposals quite rightly intended to benefit international workers as well as the local unemployed in their training proposals. Project Mimique feels that access to training for migrant workers is an important principle, and must be reaffirmed in the London Plan.

The LDA might also: facilitate the housing of workers employed on Olympic developments; work with trade unions to advise them on safety, contract and rights issues; and provide a reporting point for employer and contract management infringements, and safety concerns.

Legacy phase

Perhaps because of a flagship post-Fordist policy maximising informational technologies and small firm support, Legacy expectations point strongly toward low wages (national minimum rates for younger workers in key growth sector leisure, retail and entertainment) and highly casualised and insecure employment in the longer term. 'Flexploitation' (Gray, 2004), where the flexibilisation of the labour market is accompanied by a major increase of job insecurity and of under-employment, and actively promoted by benefit and labour market regimes, appears implicitly defined as a Legacy principle. Consultation threw up demands from London and local networks such as London Citizen and TELCO for basic criteria to be met by Olympic and Legacy employment practices, wages and conditions, yet these are nowhere evident in the detail of the planning applications and have now been abandoned. The institutional attention toward a constellation of leisure-related employers in the Legacy period (and training and infrastructural subsidy for these industries) stands in direct contradiction to these constructive demands. The LDA strategy would seem to fall into what economic geographer Jamie Peck (1996) characterises as the "low road from Fordism": based on a principle of 'defensive flexibility', that is, "deregulation, individualised employment relations, job insecurity and sharpened competition". To which one might also add 'mobility'.

The LDA should abandon its support for firms offering low-wage, precarious employment and alongside trade unions, including the IWW, seek to foster worker solidarity and articulation of demands within the low- wage London economy, putting funds and resources at the disposal of militant organisers.

The LDA should also work to enhance the rights of precarious workers (including the benefit rights, national minimum wage levels and a temporal autonomy not predicated on 'voluntary' exhaustion) at a national level and with the European Commission.

With regard to the Olympics, the Mayor should insist that the Olympic Delivery Authority reinstate the commitment to decent wages and conditions for all Olympic and Legacy workers, regardless of status.

Peripheral

The economic development strategy also offers a structural functionalist package of 'lifelong learning', social- and micro-enterprise support, backed up by facilities for childcare. Mitigation of totalitarian proposals for 70,000 volunteers for Olympic Games staffing (reduced to 50,000 by the time of the bid decision) is promoted via training referral (after the event) and a partial choice in volunteer activity.

Economic development strategy seeks here to offset crisis engendered by flexible contracting and the volatility of technologised innovation (promoted by the other aspects of the stated proposals). Far from catalysing an improvement in prospects, the Olympics here is coopted into the New Deal paradigm: a marginalist experiment in social, labour market, and welfare state regulation.

Such strategies are central to an (increasingly coercive) mode of regulation underpinning post-Fordist social democracy. Labour market interventions, 'foyer' institutions where young people receive mandatory training in return for accommodation away from the family home, capital subsidies to small firms, and the promotion of self employment to the long-term unemployed, all define a marginalist current reflexive to the production and reproduction of variable capital (i.e. the disciplined worker [Melossi]) in the context of a wider regulatory compliance.

There is a sense of economic development as an elite project, of a socialised conception of disparity and uneven development informing a local acceptance of the Olympics themselves and promoted training, small-firm promotion and infrastructural proposals. One can see this in the LDA's assertion that sports facilities built for the Olympics will catalyse development and attract business location after the Games. This is in many ways similar to the Gramscian notion of passive revolution (Moore, 2005), but in east London (outside of libertarian circles) there is no failure of the neo-liberal hegemonic project, no revolutionary counter to seduce workers from.

By an absence of geographical barriers to flows of money capital, contracting, labour and firm migration, neo-liberalism imposes the discipline of value with full force:
Project Mimique refuses the 'urban bloc' implied by your deployment of mainstream consensus policies. We call for a strategic alignment of economic development professionals and planners at the GLA/LDA with the marginalised of the capital. Eschewing a shallow 'insurgency', we iterate our pessimism in the current conjuncture.

Footnote
1. Beradi's point is that the essential aspect of technical transformation introduced by the digitalisation of the production cycle "is not the becoming precarious of the labour relation, (which after all, has always been precarious), but the dissolution of the person as active productive agent, as labour power. We have to look at the cyberspace of global production", he says, "as an immense expanse of depersonalised human time" (F. Beradi, Info-Labour and Precarisation).

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