From 2011: Ben Baumberg discusses ‘Digital Taylorism’ as argued in The Global Auction (Brown, Lauder and Ashton). Perhaps this further cements the argument that Guy Standing’s Precariat is growing?
In my post last week I described the controversial new book The Global Auction, where Brown, Lauder and Ashton argue that the Western middle-class are subject to increasing competition from an army of highly-qualified workers in India, China and other countries. Not only can the workers undercut the pay of the Western middle-classes, but companies can increasingly integrate these people into a global workforce – leading to a global ‘war for talent’, and increasing pressures on most middle-class jobs.
This isn’t the whole story though. It’s not just that there will be an impending fall for some mystical and homogeneous ‘middle-class’. Instead, the middle-class is fracturing into those that are increasingly prized in the war for talent, and the rest of the struggling middle-classes – a divide that depends on ‘Digital Taylorism’, and with sharp consequences for intra-national inequality, as I describe in this post.
View original post 1,177 more words
Arijit Banik 