Ricardo Antunes – författare

Billions of men and women depend exclusively on their labour to survive. For them work is not a choice, and yet the restructuring of the global economy has forced increasing numbers into unemployment and eroded the rights and economic gains of those still on the job. What does this increasing precariousness mean for today's labour markets?

Farewell to Work? presents the large process of capital's productive restructuring, triggered in the 1970s—a process with tendencies to both intellectualize labour power and increase the levels of the working class' precariousness on a global scale.This book hypothesizes that instead of work's loss of centrality in contemporary capitalism, when the world of production is analysed in its global dimension, including countries in the North and South, a substantial process of growing heterogeneity, complexity, and fragmentation is observed. The resulting configuration is a new morphology of the working class. Therefore, as new mechanisms are created to generate surplus labour, there is, simultaneously, an increment in casualisation and unemployment, pushed by the ongoing corrosion of labour rights in countries all across the globe.

The Meanings of Work aims to explore some dimensions of the changes taking place in the labour-world, as well as looking at the consequences, theoretical and empirical, entailed by these transformations, such as the relevance and pertinence of the category of labour in the contemporary world. Billions of men and women depend exclusively on their labour to survive and encounter increasingly unstable, precarious or casual workers and the unemployed. As the contingent of workers has grown, there have been a vast reduction in jobs, rights have been corroded and the gains of the past have been eroded. The Meanings of Work starts with a wider conception of work and seeks to understand this new condition of labour today.

The Privilege of Servitude presents a detailed and up-to-date portrait of today's working class. Antunes examines the main trends in new labour relations, where precariousness, outsourcing, and deregulation have become the rule rather than the exception. He offers an in-depth analysis of the rise of the new service proletariat and contemporary forms of digital labour, while also exploring changes in labour relations globally—with a particular focus on Brazil’s recent history, from the period of redemocratisation to the Bolsonaro years.