Free An Economy is Not a Society by Dennis; Glover Page B

to gain a higher education, start a business or become successfully self-employed have lost a great deal, even when their take-home pay has increased. As E. P. Thompson put it, writing about the Industrial Revolution: ‘People may consume more goods and become less happy and less free at the same time.’ Understanding this fact is essential if we are to build a future that works for everyone.
    My sister’s old workmate from Heinz, Cheryl, articulated this better than anyone else could. Her working life – and, hence, her life – was better before the old economy was wiped out, and no MBA-toting economics adviser can tell her otherwise. And her example is representative of what has happened to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other working-class Australians.
    The national secretary of the National Union of Workers, Tim Kennedy, tells me he has another way of representing this. At gatherings of warehouse workers just like Cheryl (it’s in warehousing that many former manufacturing workers now work – my other sister, Pamela, being another), he asks employees to line up from youngest to oldest, and asks how many started their working lives as permanent, full-time employees. Only the oldest workers put up their hands. Then he asks how many started with a full-time job. Those over forty years then put up their hands. Then he asks how many started as casuals. Almost everyone under forty then raises their hands.
    Plot that on a graph if you must, because it tells you something. These workers’ frustration is obvious. Those who work for major companies are proud to do so and have great loyalty to their firms, partly because they know that direct employment means they will be comparatively well looked after. But those employed indirectly through labour-hire firms, with no direct contractual relationship to the people whose imported products they move from one place to another, are far from happy about it, apart from their relief at having any sort of job at all. Under such arrangements, two-way loyalty is impossible.
    It’s not unusual, Kennedy says, for warehousing workforces to be 60 per cent casual, 40 per cent permanent. Back at Heinz it was 100 per cent permanent, with casuals only being employed for seasonal work – an arrangement dictated by the logic of nature, not the logic of shareholder interests. And, he estimates, on the many current warehouse sites that once were factories, for every ten old factory workers there is barely one or two storemen or storewomen. Their jobs have gone, their work has intensified, they are not listened to, they are treated with less respect than their forebears, and managements are more ruthless and more tyrannical. Overall, their lives have become nastier and more brutal.
    The economic reformers know this, of course; turning the nation’s economy into the equivalent of a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks all the wealth and power to the top is the whole point. They don’t call it exploitation; they just phrase it differently: it is ‘increased productivity’.
    In his 2003 novel Millennium People, J. G. Ballard paints a picture of an England in which the professional middle class – de-unionised, largely self-employed, having to work all hours of the day instead of nine to five, totally at the whim of managers, enslaved to mortgages and private school fees, and suffering debilitating and soul-destroying anxieties as a result – is the new proletariat. In the neighbourhood of Chelsea Marina, its members form a new revolutionary class and begin a doomed revolt.
    It’s an intriguing concept that doesn’t quite come off; Millennium People is far from Ballard’s best book. But it did kick-start a train of thinking that is now, more than a decade after the book’s publication, becoming widespread: the idea that while the new economy may have made us wealthier (on average, at least), it hasn’t made us happier, and