Workshop: Future of Work

Among the major social institutions of society is the way it organizes labor and production. Despite the fact that even a cursory glance at modern societies makes plain the importance of workplaces, firms, and (often unpaid) social reproductive labor, contemporary moral and political philosophers have only recently begun to treat work and labor as themes that merit significant philosophical reflection.

At the same time, the way in which labor is organized and governed has undergone radical changes. We work for apps, not bosses; from home, not in traditional workplaces. Similarly, many workers experience casualization and precarity connected to the decline of unionization and the resurgence of corporate power. The stability that industrial labor once promised (in theory, if not often in practice) is now, for many, gone. Artificial intelligence threatens to further transform the productive landscape, pushing us–some fear, and others hope–towards a post-work future. These developments have also been met with new forms of labor activism and resistance–pioneering efforts at unionizing food delivery workers, for example. They are also situated within complex global dynamics, marked by the emergence of new economic structures, such as global supply chain management, which have emerged as central to modern global economies.

At LMU Munich, we aim to explore the moral and political issues that arise as the organization of labor undergoes these seismic changes

Organisers: Marius Baumann, Gloria Mähringer, Korbinian Rüger, Daniel Sharp. The workshop is funded by ZEPP, LMU’s Chair for Philosophy and Political Theory, and by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts in the framework of the BIDT Graduate Center for Postdocs.

Time: 7 and 8 December 2023, 10:00 am-6:30 pm

Place: Room M 210 (room finder), Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1

Registration: thefutureofworkshop@gmail.com

Schedule

Thursday 7.12.

Friday 08.12.