Pluralistic: The enshittification of labor (07 Nov 2025)


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A Gilded Age editorial cartoon depicting a muscular worker and a corpulent millionaire squaring off for a fight; the millionaire's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of 'Enshittification,' its mouth covered in a grawlix-scrawled black bar.

The enshittification of labor (permalink)

While I formulated the idea of enshittification to refer to digital platforms and their specific technical characteristics, economics and history, I am very excited to see other theorists extend the idea of enshittification beyond tech and into wider policy realms.

There's an easy, loose way to do this, which is using "enshittification" to refer to "things generally getting worse." To be clear, I am fine with this:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

But there's a much more exciting way to broaden "enshittification," which starts with the foundation of the theory: that the things we rely on go bad when the system stops punishing this kind of deliberate degradation and starts rewarding it. In other words, the foundation of enshittification is the enshittogenic policy environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

That's where Pavlina Tcherneva comes in. Tcherneva is an economist whose work focuses on the power of a "job guarantee," which is exactly what it sounds like: a guarantee from the government to employ anyone who wants a job, by either finding or creating a job that a) suits that person's talents and abilities and b) does something useful and good. If this sounds like a crazy pipe-dream to you, let me remind you that American had a job guarantee and it was wildly successful, and created (among other things), the system of national parks, a true jewel in America's crown:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#ccc

Tcherneva's latest paper is "The Death of the Social Contract and the Enshittification of Jobs," in which she draws a series of careful and compelling parallels between my work on enshittification and today's employment crisis, showing how a job guarantee is the ultimate disenshittifier of work:

https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/wp_1100.pdf

Tcherneva starts by proposing a simplified model of enshittification, mapping my three stages onto three of her own:

  1. Bait: Lure in users with a great, often subsidized, service.

  2. Trap: Use that captive audience to attract businesses (sellers, creators, advertisers).

  3. Switch: Exploit those groups by degrading the experience for everyone to extract maximum profit.

How do these map onto the current labor market and economy? For Tcherneva, the "bait" stage was "welfare state capitalism," which was "shaped by post–Great Depression government reforms and lasted through the 70s." This was the era in which the chaos of the Great Depression gave rise to fiscal and monetary policy that promoted macroeconomic stability. It was the era of economic safety nets and mass-scale federal investment in American businesses, through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal entity that expanded into directly funding large companies during WWII. After the war, the US Treasury continued to play a direct role in finance, through procurement, infrastructure spending and provision of social services.

As Tcherneva writes, this is widely considered the "Golden Age" of the US economy, a period of sustained growth and rising standard of living (she also points out that these benefits were very unevenly distributed, thanks to compromises made with southern white nationalists that exempted farm labor, and a pervasive climate of misogyny that carved out home work).

The welfare state capitalism stage was celebrated not merely for the benefits that it brought, but also for the system it supplanted. Before welfare state capitalism, we had 19th century "banker capitalism," in which cartels and trusts controlled every aspect of our lives and gave rise to a string of spectacular economic bubbles and busts. Before that, we had the "industrial capitalism" of the Industrial Revolution, where large corporations seized power. Before that, it was "merchant capitalism," and before that, feudalism – where workers were bound to a lord's land, unable to escape the economic and geographic destiny assigned to them at birth.

So welfare state capitalism was a welcome evolution, at least for the workers who got to reap its benefits. But welfare state capitalism was short-lived. To understand what came next, Tcherneva cites Hyman Minsky (whose "theory of capitalist development" provides this epochal nomenclature for the various stages of capitalism over the centuries).

Minsky calls the capitalism that supplanted welfare state capitalism "money manager capitalism," the system that reigned from the Reagan revolution until the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. This was an era of "deregulation, eroding worker power, rapid increase in inequality, and a rise of the money manager class." It's the period of financialization, which favored the creation of gigantic conglomerates that wrapped banking services (loans, credit cards, etc) around their core offerings, from GE to Amazon.

Then came the crash of 2008, which gave us our current era, the era of "international money manager capitalism," which is the system in which gigantic, transnational funds capture our economy pumping and dumping a series of scammy bubbles, like crypto, metaverse, blockchain, and (of course) AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

Welfare state capitalism was the "bait" stage of the enshittification of labor. Public subsidies and regulation produced an environment in which (many) workers were able to command a large share of the fruits of their labor, securing both a living wage and old-age surety. This was the era of the "family wage," in which a single earner could supply all the necessities of life to a family: an owner-occupied home, material sufficiency, and enough left over for vacations, Christmas presents and other trappings of "the good life."

During this stage, the "social contract" meant the government training a skilled workforce (through universal education) and public goods like roads and utilities. Companies got big contracts, but only if they accepted collective bargaining from their unions. Governments and corporations collaborated to secure a comfortable requirement for workers.

But this arrangement lacked staying power, thanks to a key omission in the social contract: the guarantee of a good job. Rather than continuing the job guarantee that brought America out of the Depression, all the post-New Deal order could offer the unemployed was unemployment insurance. This wasn't so important while America was booming and employers were begging for workers, but when growth slowed, the lack of a job guarantee suddenly became the most important fact of many workers' lives.

This was foreseen by the architects of the New Deal. FDR's "Second Bill of (Economic) Rights" would have guaranteed every American "national healthcare, paid vacation, and a guaranteed job":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights

These guarantees were never realized, and for Tcherneva, this failure doomed welfare state capitalism. Unions were powerful during an era of tight labor markets and able to wring concessions out of capital, but once demand for workers ebbed (thanks to slowing growth and, later, offshoring), bosses could threaten workers with unemployment, breaking union power.

The social contract was bait, promising "economic security and decent jobs" through cooperation between the government, corporations and unions.

The switch came from Reagan, with mass-scale deregulation, a hack-and-slash approach to social spending, and the enshrining of a permanently unemployed reserve army of workers whose "job" was fighting inflation (by not having a job). Trump has continued this, with massive cuts to the federal workforce. Today, "job insecurity is not an unfortunate consequence of shifting economic winds, it is the objective of public policy."

For money manager capitalism, unemployment is a feature, not a bug – literally. Neoliberal economists invented something called the NAIRU ("non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment"), which deliberately sets out to keep a certain percentage of workers in a state of unemployment, in order to fight inflation.

Here's how that works: if the economy is at full employment (meaning everyone who wants a job has one), and prices go up (say, because bosses decide to increase their rate of profit), then workers will demand and receive a pay-rise, because bosses can't afford to fire those "greedy" workers – there are no unemployed workers to replace them.

This means that if bosses want to maintain their rate of profit, they will have to raise prices again to pay those higher wages for their workers. But after that, workers' pay no longer goes as far as it used to, so workers demand another raise and then bosses have to hike prices again (if they are determined not to allow the decline of their own profits). This is called "the wage-price spiral" and it's what happens when bosses refuse to accept lower profits and workers have the power to demand that their wages get adjusted to keep up with prices.

Of course, this only makes sense if you think that bosses should be guaranteed their profits, even if that means that workers' real take-home pay (measured by purchasing power) declines. You aren't supposed to notice this, though. That's why neoliberal economists made it a sin to ask about "distributional effects" (that is, asking about how the pie gets divided) – you're only supposed to care about how big the pie gets:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

With the adoption of NAIRU, joblessness "was now officially sanctioned as necessary for the health of the economy." You could not survive unless you had a job, not everyone could have a job, and the jobs were under control of a financialized, concentrated corporate sector. Companies merged and competition disappeared. If you refused to knuckle under to the boss at your (formerly) good factory job, there wasn't another factory that would put you on the line. The alternative to those decaying industrial jobs were "unemployment and low-wage service sector work."

That's where the final phase of the enshittification of labor comes in: the "trap." For Tcherneva, the trap is "the brutal fact of necessity itself." You cannot survive without a roof over your head, without electricity, without food and without healthcare. As these are not provided by the state, the only way to procure them (apart from inherited wealth) is through work, and access to work is entirely in the hands of the private sector.

Once corporations capture control of housing (through corporate landlords), healthcare (though corporate takeover of hospitals, pharma, etc), and power (through privatization of utilities), they can squeeze the people who depend on these things, because there is no competitor. You can't opt out of shelter, food, electricity and healthcare – at least, not without substantial hardship.

In my own theory of enshittification, platforms hunt relentlessly for sources of lock-in (e.g., the high switching costs of losing your social media community or your platform data) and, having achieved it, squeeze users and businesses, secure in the knowledge that users can't readily leave for a better service. This is compounded by monopolization (which reduces the likelihood that a better service even exists) and regulatory capture (which gives companies a free hand to squeeze with). Once a company can squeeze you, it will.

Here, Tcherneva is translating this to macroeconomic phenomena: control over the labor market and capture of the necessaries of life allows companies to squeeze, and so they do. A company rips you off for the same reason your dog licks its balls: because it can.

Tcherneva describes the era of money manager capitalism as "the slow, grinding enshittification of daily life." It's an era of corporate landlords raising the rent and skimping on maintenance, while hitting tenants with endless junk fees. It's an era of corporate hospitals gouging you on bills, skimping on care, and screwing healthcare workers. It's an era of utilities capturing their public overseers and engaging in endless above-inflation price hikes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/24/surfa/#mark-ellis

This is the "trap" of Tcherneva's labor enshittification, and it kicked off "a decades-long enshittification of working life." Enshittified labor is "low-wage jobs with unpredictable schedules and no benefits." Half of American workers earn less than $25/hour. The federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25/hour. Half of all renters are rent-burdened and a third of homeowners are mortgage-burdened. A quarter of renters are severely rent-burdened, with more than half their pay going to rent.

Money manager capitalism's answer to this is…more finance. Credit cards, payday loans, home equity loans, student loans. All this credit isn't nearly sufficient to keep up with rising health, housing, and educational prices. This locks workers into "a lifetime of servicing debt, incurred to simulate a standard of living the social contract had once promised but their wages could no longer deliver."

To manage this impossible situation, money manager capitalism spun up huge "securitized" debt markets, the CDOs and ABSes that led to the Great Financial Crisis (today, international money manager capitalism is spinning up even more forms of securitized debts).

In my theory of enshittification, there are four forces that keep tech platforms from going bad: competition, regulation, a strong workforce and interoperability. For Tcherneva, these forces all map onto the rise and fall of the American standard of living.

Competition: Welfare state capitalism was born in a time of tight labor markets. Workers could walk out of a bad job and into a good one, forcing bosses to compete for workers (including by dealing fairly with unions). This was how we got the "good job," one with medical, retirement, training and health care benefits.

Regulation: The New Deal established the 40-hour week, minimum wages, overtime, and the right to unionize. As with tech regulation, this was backstopped by competition – the existence of a tight labor market meant that companies had to concede to regulation. As with tech regulation, the capture of the state meant the end of the benefits of regulation. With the rise of NAIRU, regulation was captured by bosses, with the government now guaranteeing a pool of unemployed workers who could be used to terrorize uppity employees into meek acceptance.

Interoperability: In tech enshittification, the ability to take your data, relationships and devices with you when you switch to a competitor means that the companies you do business with have to treat you well, or risk your departure. In labor enshittification, bosses use noncompetes, arbitration, trade secrecy, and nondisparagement to keep workers from walking across the street and into a better job. Some workers are even encumbered with "training repayment agreement provisions (TRAPs) that force them to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Worker power: In tech enshittification, tech workers – empowered by the historically tight tech labor market – are able to hold the line, refusing to enshittify the products they develop, with the constant threat that they can walk out the door and get a job elsewhere. In labor enshittification, NAIRU, combined with corporate capture of the necessaries of life and the retreat of unionization, means that workers have very little power to demand a better situation, which means their bosses can worsen things to their shriveled hearts' content.

As with my theory of enshittification, the erosion of worker power is an accelerant for labor enshittification. Weaker competition for workers means weaker labor power, which means weaker power to force the government to regulate. This sets the stage for more consolidation, weaker workers, and more state capture. This is the completion of the bait-trap-switch of the postwar social contract.

For Tcherneva, this enshittification arises out of the failure to create a job guarantee as part of the New Deal. And yet, a job guarantee remains very popular today:

https://www.jobguarantee.org/resources/public-support/

How would a job guarantee disenshittify the labor market? The job guarantee means a "permanent, publicly provided employment opportunity to anyone ready and willing to work, it establishes an effective floor for the entire labor market."

Under a job guarantee, any private employer wishing to hire a worker will have to beat the job guarantee's wages and benefits. No warehouse or fast-food chain could offer "poverty wages, unpredictable hours, and a hostile environment." It's an incentive to the private sector to compete for labor by restoring the benefits that characterized America's "golden age."

What's more, a job guarantee is administrable. A job guarantee means that workers can always access a safe, good job, even if the state fails to adequately police private-sector employers and their wages and working conditions. A job guarantee does much of the heavy lifting of enforcing a whole suite of regulations: "minimum wage laws, overtime rules, safety standards—that are constantly subject to political attack, corporate lobbying, and enforcement challenges."

A job guarantee also restores interoperability to the labor market. Rather than getting trapped in a deskilled, low-waged gig job, those at the bottom of the labor market will always have access to a job that comes with training and skills development, without noncompetes and other gotchas that trap workers in shitty jobs. For workers this means "career advancement and mobility." For society, "it delivers a pipeline of trained personnel to tackle our most pressing challenges."

And best of all, a job guarantee restores worker power. The fact that you can always access a decent job at a socially inclusive wage means that you don't have to eat shit when it comes to negotiating for your housing, health care and education. You can tell payday lenders, for-profit scam colleges (like Trump University), and slumlords to go fuck themselves.

Tcherneva concludes by pointing out that, as with tech enshittification, labor enshittification "is a political choice, not an economic inevitability." Labor enshittification is the foreseeable outcome of specific policies undertaken in living memory by named individuals. As with tech enshittification, we are under no obligation to preserve those enshittificatory policies. We can replace them with better ones.

If you want to learn more about the job guarantee, you can read my review of her book on the subject:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#job-guarantee

And the interview I did with her about it for the LA Times:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-24/forget-ubi-says-an-economist-its-time-for-universal-basic-jobs

Tcherneva and I are appearing onstage together next week in Lisbon at Web Summit to discuss this further:

https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/2a479f57-a938-485a-acae-713ea9529292/working-it-out-job-security-in-the-ai-era/

And I assume that the video will thereafter be posted to Websummit's Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@websummit

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago PATRIOT Act secret-superwarrants use is up 10,000 percent https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366_pf.html

#10yrsago Protopiper: tape-gun-based 3D printer extrudes full-size furniture prototypes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beRA4sIjxa8

#10yrsago EFF on TPP: all our worst fears confirmed https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/release-full-tpp-text-after-five-years-secrecy-confirms-threats-users-rights

#10yrsago TPP will ban rules that require source-code disclosure https://www.keionline.org/39045

#10yrsago Publicity Rights could give celebrities a veto over creative works https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/eff-asks-supreme-court-apply-first-amendment-speech-about-celebrities-0

#10yrsago How TPP will clobber Canada’s municipal archives and galleries of historical city photos https://www.geekman.ca/single-post/2015/11/the-tpp-vs-municipal-archives.html

#5yrsago HP ends its customers' lives https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars

#1yrago Every internet fight is a speech fight https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/06/brazilian-blowout/#sovereignty-sure-but-human-rights-even-moreso

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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