Making light work: An end to toil in the twenty‐first century By David A.Spencer, Cambridge: Polity Press. 2022. pp. 200. £15.99 (paperback/£14.99 ebook)
本书探讨资本主义下工作性质的变化，分析政策制定者、雇主和雇员面临的挑战，并提出减少无意义苦役的解决方案，强调赋予工人更多选择和控制权。
Making Light Work is an accessible, engaging and timely contribution to debates around the changing nature of work under capitalism.The book raises a number of fundamental questions about the challenges currently facing policy makers, employers and employees, and explores a number of possible solutions that would reduce the (highly uneven) burden of 'pointless toil'.While there are some references to the impact of COVID-19, the book manages to resist the temptation to jump on the 'pandemic and future of work' bandwagon and avoids headline grabbing statements about how technology will either 'save' or 'destroy' work.Rather it focuses on the ways in which workers can be empowered to exercise greater choice and control over where and how much they work.Given the relatively short format of the book (160 pages excluding notes and references), it covers a lot of ground in terms of the past, present and possible futures of work.The introduction captures the dominance of 'work' in most of our lives, before Chapter 2 moves on to the surprisingly complex question of 'what is work'.While Spencer notes the obligatory and largely instrumental nature of most work, he also emphasises the importance of looking beyond just waged labour, and recognising the various forms of unpaid work that are essential for the functioning of economies and societies.Spencer also avoids falling into the trap of trying to definitively establish whether work is inherently good or bad (spoiler alert: it is a bit of both) and makes a nuanced case that while work can provide a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, we should be careful not to wholly demonise work or to fetishise work for work's sake (which both free market and socialist thinkers have sometimes been guilty of).Chapter 3 neatly summarises the thinking of major historical figures from across the political spectrum, such as, Marx, Adam Smith, Keynes and Friedman towards work, as well as modern business 'leaders', such as, Elon Musk.The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary analysis works well in drawing attention to the successes and limitations of various policy paradigms, and also the difficulties of making accurate predictions about the future.For example, Keynes thought we would all be working fewer than 15 h per week by 2030 and Marx envisioned a postcapitalist future where nonpecuniary craft work and varied artistic pursuits would take the place of waged labour.