Labour-saving technology and advanced marginality: A study of unemployed workers’ experiences of displacement in Finland

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

The article explores the experiences of people displaced from work by the introduction of labour-saving technology in Finland. Interviews with 13 unemployed individuals are used as data. The study is underpinned by a Marxist interpretation of potentially emancipatory technology under capitalism reduced to an instrument for reorganizing skilled workers into an exploitable, precarious cadre of surplus and abstract labour. Loïc Wacquant’s thesis on advanced marginality is used as a theoretical framework to unpack and understand the little-studied experience of being displaced from work by technology. The interviewees share a sense of growing alienation and social exclusion. Feeding these experiences are capricious changes in skill-demands and deskilling under automation and robotisation of work. The experiences are exacerbated by digitalised, vertiginous and isolating job-seeking and employment services that cast responsibility on the unemployed individual. While the participants of this study were not on the brink of acute or extreme socio-economic marginalisation, their experiences are rooted in the very same social, economic and political dynamics as advanced marginality. The findings of the study help anticipate the risk of advancing marginality faced by displaced workers, if social policy reforms are not carried out in the short term. In the long term, the findings support the argument that studies on labour-saving technologies and unemployment pay closer attention to the particular role of technology under capitalism.

Original languageEnglish
Article number02610183211024122
JournalCritical Social Policy
Volume42
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)285-305
Number of pages21
ISSN0261-0183
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2022
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Fields of Science

  • abstract labour
  • advanced marginality
  • capitalism
  • displacement
  • labour-saving technology
  • unemployment
  • JOB LOSS
  • FUTURE
  • 5142 Social policy

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