Two very different things made me think about work again recently. Not about actually doing any, that is – just made me think about it. Its important to be clear there.

One: the update of Battlestar Galactica, which I've recently watched compulsively, is a marvelous vindication of science fiction as a petri-dish for examining the big questions (interspersed with dreadful cliches involving fighter pilots who combine insubordination and disrespect for authority with just the right amount of cringe-worthy 'being the best goddam pilot in the fleet', but I'll not hold that against them.) I won't witter on about the whole thing but, for example, its covered every possible angle on the war on terror, often in the most grizzly, bloody, its-ok-to-torture-and-rape-em-they're-not-human kind of way. They've had occupation by a foreign power, and at what point it becomes reasonable to send people on suicide bombing missions that are likely to take out some of your own side. This either shows that the US is indeed still a great amphitheatre of noisy free speech, or that science fiction (like magic realism) disguises itself well enough behind fantasy to remain inconsequential. Dunno which.

A more recent episode saw some of the civvies in the fleet of 50,000 remaining humans getting funny ideas about class, privilege, work and caste. A fuel refinery strike, triggered by appalling and deadly working conditions, almost leads to the military executing union leaders. In the end, the compromise is fairly fluffy – but markedly less so than, say, a Blairite 'meritocracy'. There ends up being a lottery system for the shitty jobs – because any system based solely on merit, without any corrective mechanism, ends up ossifying into strata.

Two: rather different, far less rogue but brilliant fighter pilots. ActionAid has launched a report into supermarkets that claims:

The low prices enjoyed by shoppers at British supermarkets are paid for by poor wages, job insecurity and a denial of basic human rights for workers in some of the world's poorest countries. [from the Independent, 23.4.07]

ActionAid go on to quote the exact wage costs of certain third world producers, which is always entirely unhelpful. How does it compare to other local wages? But it does argue that the collective power of supermarkets is forcing conditions on a downward spiral. 70 to 90% of all bananas in Costa Rica, for example, are bought by supermarkets.

The supermarket's corporate communications departments all trot out the same line: trade is the best way out of poverty. ActionAid make the same claim, but say its not happening. Instead, the inequality is locking people into dreadful working conditions. In one factory, in Kerala in India, the report quotes a woman who shells cashew nuts, suffers from severe pain, but cannot afford to give up the job. Managers also regularly underweigh her shelling, and underpay. 45% of workers in the factory have respiratory problems, compared with 9% outside.

Now, any number of economists will argue not only that such trade is beneficial, in the long run, for such people, but that anyone – like ActionAid – arguing for throwing sand into the oily smooth workings of global trade are dangerously ill-informed; their position, if enacted, would only impoverish people more. A particularly glib one here, which starts from the premise that 'every market transaction makes all parties better off':

The problem with Asian sweatshops is that there are not enough of them. Adult workers take jobs in these unpleasant, low-wage manufacturing facilities voluntarily. So one of two things must be true. Either (1) workers take unpleasant jobs in sweatshops because it is the best employment option they have; or (2) Asian sweatshop workers are persons of weak intellect who have many more attractive job offers but choose to work in sweatshops instead.

Most arguments against globalisation implicitly assume number two. The protesters smashing windows in Seattle were trying to make the case that workers in the developing world would be better off if we curtailed international trade, thereby closing down the sweatshops that churn out shoes and handbags for those of us in the developing world. But how exactly does that make workers in poor countries better off? It does not create any new opportunities. The only way it could possibly improve social welfare is if fired sweatshop workers take new, better jobs – opportunities they presumably ignored when they went to work in a sweatshop. When was the last time a plant closing in the United States was hailed as good news for its workers? [from Charles Wheelan's Naked Economics p.21]

(Wheelan also notes the oft-cited fact that Western corporations generally pay their outsourced labourers better than the local going rate – one reason why ActionAid giving exact wages is misleading. Local comparison is meaningful; direct exchange rate comparison ain't, though it makes for good copy.)

Juxtapose this to Bauman:

Thick walls are an indispensable part of consumer society; so is their inobtrusiveness for the insiders. If such walls appear in the vision of the consumers, the do so as a canvas for colourful, aesthetically pleasing graffiti. Everything truly ugly and unprepossessing is left behind: the sweatshops, the non-unionised and helpless labour, the misery of living on the dole, of having the wrong skin colour, the agony of being unneeded and wished out of existence. Consumers rarely catch a glimpse of the other side. The squalor of inner cities they pass in the comely and plush interior of their cars. If they ever visit the Third World, it is for safaris and massage parlours, not for its sweatshops.

The potential moral offensiveness of the walls is disguised by the moral indifference of the masks in which they appear in public. Walls seldom appear as walls; instead, they are thought of as commodity prices, profit margins, capital exports, taxation levels. One cannot desire poverty for others without feeling morally contemptible; but one can desire lower taxes. One cannot desire the prolongation of African famine without hating oneself; but one can rejoice in falling commodity prices. What all such innocuous and technical sounding things do to people is not immediately visible. Neither are the people to whom they do it.

Last but not least, why do the outsiders resent their plight? Because they have been denied the self-same consumer freedom which the insiders enjoy. Given the chance, they would grasp it with both hands. Consumers are not the enemies of the poor; they are patterns of the good life, examples one tries to emulate to the best of one’s ability. What the poor are after is a better hand, not a different card-game. The poor suffer because they are un-free. And they imagine an end to suffering as the acquisition of market freedom. [From Bauman, Freedom]

Generally such thinking as Bauman's, for an economist, would come in the category of 'unfalsifiable leftie drivel'. But I've always come back to these quotes in Bauman because they have a passion about them that makes viewpoints such as Wheelan's appear so narrowed in their logic as to be myopic.

But what would I see happen? Close the sweatshops down? Would I salve my bleeding heart at the expense of the real interests of those people who produce a good proportion of my cheap goods? I honestly don't know. I'm suffering from the same moral queasiness that lies at the root of many a well-meaning trade-justice-badge wearing person and I'm not sure what to do about it. You'd think I'd have come to a position on it by now...

That queasy sensation paints a picture for me: a world that is colossally precarious for the majority, but – for people like me – manages to be remarkably stable. I imagine that, as the effects of climate change set in, it will be us rich folk who will feel the instability last. Though it will have to reach us eventually, our structural power will channel resources our way for some time yet. It's the supermarket and banana-grower relationship on a much larger scale. Any number of banana producers could close down without it affecting my ability to go to Tesco and buy bananas, or indeed without it affecting the price overly. The supplier market could churn away, consuming itself over and over – but those banana boxes would be full and affordable for us.

Unskilled labour is the third world's great comparative advantage. Supposedly, it won't last for ever; its their route to development. As their human capital increases, so will their wealth and the quality of their work. I suffer slightly from a tendency to cling to my landscape gardening days as a token of 'real' work, but it never was - I was never trapped there. In Bauman's terms, I had easy access through the thick walls, through a life on the dole, through unskilled manual labour, by using my brain. Our society smiles on people that do this; its what a meritocracy is supposed to be all about. But here's the rub: should that ability to be able to work the academic system give me a place in the world doing something that will challenge me, exercise me, while someone else should have no choice but menial work with no autonomy whatsoever? And can we really claim in all honesty that such work is transitional?

This is a market question, not a moral one – so the argument goes. Doctors are paid well because there a few of them, the ones who were willing to invest the time; unskilled labour is poorly paid because there are millions of them, and they're as replaceable as washers. As Wheelan says:

Imagine a highly educated community that produces all kinds of valuable goods and services but generates a disgusting sludge as a by-product. Further imagine that collecting sludge is disgusting, mind-numbing work. Yet if the sludge is not collected, then the whole economy will grind to a halt. If everyone has a Harvard degree, who hauls away the sludge? The sludge hauler does. And he or she, incidentally, would be one of the best paid workers in town. If the economy depends on hauling this stuff away, and machine can do the task, then the community would have to induce someone to do the work. The way to induce people to do anything is to pay them a lot. The wage for hauling sludge would get bid up to the point that some individual – a doctor, or an engineer, or a writer – would be willing to leave a more pleasant job to haul sludge. Thus, a world rich in human capital may still have unpleasant tasks, but no-one has to be poor.

There's no denying that education and training equals a richer country overall. But this hypothetical end-point, where everyone's educated – the shitty jobs pay the most? Really? Bobbins. This rationalises away inequality on the basis of some idealised notion of the labour market that will never bear any resemblance to reality.

Bobbins, I say, but where's my evidence? Hmm, well, I don't have a lot. There's plenty enough evidence that, say, the ethnic minority groups around where I live will have been discriminated against at school, and so can expect to have far less access to the things I've had. As to what percentage of cleaners with dark skin at university I see can be account for by this, its impossible to say. But talk of meritocracy must sound very hollow to people who have been dismissed from the start as not worth the investment. There's also reams of work on how women's work is valued less – regardless of what sector that work is, in different societies. And as regards all those workers that make our cheap goods and produce cheap food – does anyone see, at any point in the far future, let alone near, a situation like the one Wheelan describes? Or is it more likely that economic and war refugees will continue to turn up at the gangmasters' counter for many a year to come?

There are two separate things here, if I can look past the emotion of the issue (which, I guess, is a skill any wannabe economist should nurter!) One: education will, indeed, address much of the gap. But how are people to get it? Many work places, as I was told recently by an union rep, have refused to allow in-house training for migrant staff, and for obvious reasons: they don't perceive it to be in their interest. Educated workers will eventually leave. (Though in reality this may not be true; educated and unionised workers have better morale; they may cost more but they're more productive and more loyal.) And, as Naomi Klein reminded us again this week, the World Bank still withholds aid from countries that have the temerity to spend public money on education. So how is a sweatshop factory-hand working twelve or more hours a day to find the time and the money to educate themselves or their kin? The occasional western 'community schooling' project is pissing in the wind.

Two: I don't think it should be conceded that work is a purely market issue, purely a question of human capital. An extreme example:

The purchasing of sexual services is the purest form of a master-servant relationship which is becoming ubiquitous in work-scarce capitalist societies... In ‘sex work’, the purpose of the transaction is the pleasure of the client, and the vehicle for this pleasure cannot be separated from the pleasure itself: the prostitute (the servant) is paid to please, not simply to produce an agreeable object or result. Pleasing another person in this manner means giving oneself, one’s freedom, to that other. // Hence the conventional argument that prostitution is ‘exploitative’ misses the point, which is not that prostitutes are paid less than the value of what they give, but that they give something which cannot be paid for. Payment, no matter how important an incentive for the selling of sexual services, cannot ‘settle the account’; it can only cheapen and mystify what is already a unilateral relationship of servility. [André Gorz: Autonomy and equity in the post-industrial age, Finn Bowring, The Sociological Review, Volume 53, Supplement 1, October 2005, pp. 134-147(14)]

This recalls a conversation I had with an old school friend many years ago; doubtless he'd been reading some similar left-wing wibble – he was off to work in a bar, and argued against all my protestations that it, and all paid work, was a form of prostitution.

But again – what would I see happen? Some friends of mine pay a cleaner to come and clean their house; I find that morally questionable. But why? Why is that different to my coming in to university and finding the computer lab clean? Or more precisely, never noticing its state of cleanliness one way or the other? But if a dictator banned all domestic cleaning, and legally compelled everyone to take responsibility for their own mess, few would thank them. “Cheers – I now have £60 quid less from my part time job than I did. Viva la fuckin' revolution, you pillock.”

There is, though, something in Gorz's point about the nature of the relationship, and about autonomy. I was 'volunteering' down the Common Place yesterday in the cafe. A bunch of menial tasks- and so how different? Gosh, its cliched, ain't it, but I chose to do it, in an environment where that work didn't alleviate someone else with more money to pursue their own autonomy at my expense.

Still, its impossible to escape the killer argument: so what would you do? The market may be imperfect, and it may relegate people, flesh and blood as you, to a life of back-breaking work with no chance of escape, but there's no other way. Gorz was mates with Sartre; I watched Adam Curtis' the Trap recently (now viewable on the tinternet) which had a scene with Sartre saying on camera: 'I am convinced of the need for violence to overthrow the system'. Well, I'm not. It would be better to start with something much simpler: realising that society consists of groups of interests, and that unions and worker's associations are needed to balance the structural power – not only of capital, but of people like me who may wring their hands a lot, but are unlikely to vacate their comfortable position any time soon. Note:

The limitations on trade union action hail from the belief that of economic liberals that welfare is best maximised when individuals are able to bargain over their situation in the market. [Real World Economics, Christopher Huhne]

Sweet and simple: unions distort the labour market. This is the view of the international financial institutions and the US in Iraq. Hence, as Adam Curtis points out, the ban on unions was the one law of Saddam Hussein's the CPA did not overturn. It may well be that there's a good economic model out there that includes the fact that groups will coalesce around interests, often in fluid and emergent ways, so unions are needed - but I don't know of it yet. Axelrod's work on competition and co-operation might seem the most likely candidate – but then he's an agent-based modeller...

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Addition: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have just produced a report that shows what the Commission for Racial Equality has called economic apartheid. The key findings from the JRF website:

• only 20% of Bangladeshis, 30% of Pakistanis and 40% of Black Africans of working age are in full time work (compared to over 50% of white British people of working age);
• even with a degree, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men are less likely to be employed than someone white with the same qualifications;
• despite a rapid growth in Pakistani and Bangladeshi women going to university, they suffer high unemployment and are much less likely than Indian or white British women to be in professional or managerial jobs;
• the problem is not confined to first generation immigrants: British born people from minority ethnic backgrounds, especially Indian, Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups are less likely to get jobs than their white equivalents;
• while poverty levels among white British people are the same whether they live in London or elsewhere, rates among minority ethnic groups are far worse for those living in London.