Critical remarks on the liberal understanding in sociological and legal studies of the phenomenon of labour in the information society

Abstract

The transformation of methods and means of production under the influence of the development of digital technologies has led to an increase in the interest of scientists in the problems of radically changing labour processes. In the sociological and legal studies of the liberal direction, the phenomenon of labour began to be studied separately in the context of the transition from the labour practices of an industrial society to the labour practices of an information (post-industrial) society. The main conclusions that were made as a result of studying the phenomenon of labour in a liberal way were: recognition of the liberating nature of informationtype labour and its priority over industrial-type labour; endowing information labour with a characteristic of flexibility in comparison with the rigidity of labour in an industrial society. From a legal point of view, these conclusions created the preconditions for the deregulation (the elimination of protective norms and guarantees) of labour relations both for employees of the “endangered” industrial type and for “progressive” information employees. Within the framework of this publication, the author set a research task to cancel the four myths of the information society, which are most popular in liberal theories: 1) mass release of employees employed in industry, due to the computerization of production; 2) flexibility in the labour market is an integral part of the transformation of the traditional model of labour relations; 3) outsourcing is inherent only in industrial type production; 4) the release of a new product involves the release of employees due to the inability of the workforce to master modern methods of work. As a result of the critical analysis of these myths of the liberal doctrine, the author came to the conclusion that it is useless to establish distinctions in the very essence of the labour phenomenon. The author believes that the concept that allows convergence of all types of labour in state production chains is the theory of “community of labour” proposed by Karl Marx. For labour law, the presence of objective features of the implementation of labour processes means the need to deepen research on the differentiation of the legal regulation of labour of certain categories of employees, and not to deregulate labour relations.