Read Leo’s arguments about shifting grounds in the manufacturing sector here.
As the the past generation’s political and economic settlement continues to slowly unravel, a newly human economics of planning, coordination and foresight must emerge. Rather than thinking the job of nurturing workplace skills, spurring innovation and establishing new industry can always be left to private actors answering to short-term time-frames (with imperfect outcomes, always apologetically dealt with after the event), we can pre-empt future economic trends so as to maximise the chances of rooting our collective response to the needs of people’s lives. So when considering the social benefits and economic implications of additive manufacturing and the emerging production practices there are, I think, three major policy questions needing serious answers.
Firstly, while new machinery has always been a pharmakon – at once promising greater efficiency and improved goods, while reducing labour input and dispossessing people of their livelihoods – the potential for additive techniques to create a greater employment upheaval than any seen since the Luddites is considerable. While the expectation of more localised production and an uprooted outsourcing system could present an employment boon here in the UK, the response of those lean production clusters that have motored the rise of China will be significant. The delicate geopolitical balance between West and East, a trade of cheaper goods for foreign exchange, will come under increasing strain, especially with China’s demographic and political pressures likely to hit. Despite rising wages, an increasingly consumerised society and a very slowly improving labour rights situation in China, the question of how much manufacturing returns to western economies, particularly Britain, remains open.
While additive manufacturing may boost demand for new products and capital spending, it doesn’t automatically equate to a corresponding demand for new employment. Traditionally ‘high productivity’ skills in design, engineering, legal protection and other business services are likely to be in high demand, with the large employment associated with the old moving assembly line less likely to be forthcoming. Subsequently, the widespread business norms of reluctant job creation and over-long work hours in a context of weak growth and high structural unemployment will become increasingly untenable. As the unemployed and under-employed watch those in work working longer hours with dipping job satisfaction while the economic advantages to more democratic workplaces and inclusive production practices become ever more apparent, the pressures towards job-sharing, flexible work practices and a better distribution of paid and unpaid time will intensify too. Those companies that establish intensive employee engagement within the firm and wider community while offering family- and citizen-friendly work practices will assume a natural fit with the production practices and consumer expectations associated with additive manufacturing.
Secondly, when considering the problems of Chinese enforcement of world-wide intellectual property rights, the IP regime governing additive machinery and digital CAD files will have to strike a firm balance between strong enforcement of design rights while spurring innovation.
While IP is too often sidelined as a technical policy matter fit only for experts, it in fact determines not only the location and flow of a given industries innovation and output, but also the distribution of its rewards. The precedent of the internet and web is mixed. While it was inevitable that on an open platform a set of giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Microsoft, Apple and Oracle were likely to emerge, cornering key parts of the utilities that carry on an open network, what wasn’t inevitable was how aggressive capital markets would produce a situation where larger companies and patent trolls end up stockpiling patents, trading them as commodities in an industrial stitch-up that would consolidate control, stifle competition and deny consumers and citizens many of the benefits of new technologies.
While much of the ‘open source’ ethos of the web (the commitment to network neutrality, copyleft licensing) can be seen in nascent industries like additive manufacturing as in the RepRap community or in synthetic biology, under-regulated capital markets and overzealous security pressures could mean that much of the promise of these new technologies goes unrealised. A newly enlightened approach could see new forms of IP protection that incentivise job creation, as well as guarantees that design patents remain with their maker. The need to find a IP stance that blows a strong wind on the back of job-creators, engineers and design innovators will best promote the widest realisation of the benefits of additive manufacturing.
Thirdly, the unique corporate governance arrangements of the UK – the single-tier board, limited stakeholder influence, footloose capital and company formation – will threaten to exert an even greater developmental drag than they already have. Where countries whose companies have strong employee influence and intensive engagement with company decision-making have benefited over the past decades, the UK has persisted with a manager-king model where the CEO claims all the glory when things go right while grumbling about excessive red tape and an under-skilled workforce when the company under-performs.
While it may be fanciful to link the early Dutch advantage in 3D-printed design with its labour and company laws offering wider opportunities for a shorter working week, it is certainly the case that many of the past generation’s most prominent artists, inventors and musicians were able to spend years without shame nurturing their craft on state benefits and affordable rents. A young industrial designer needing to work their way through 5000 prototypes (as James Dyson did with his vacuum cleaners) would struggle in modern Britain.
The weakness of the UK’s innovation ecosystem is linked culturally to the prevalence of low job satisfaction, as uninvolving and undemocratic workplaces consolidate the broad power of an unaccountable managerial class taking on too much of the burden of invention. While the case for revisiting the fundamentals of the UK workplace culture and for broader economic democracy become ever more compelling, the pressure on Britain to free up our outmoded, uncompetitive and increasingly innovation-unfriendly corporate governance arrangements will grow.
There is much Labour can explore in opposition and enact in government, ahead of these trends, to nurture employment and innovation. Ramping up apprenticeship schemes and advancing STEM education as a set of comprehensive rather than piecemeal investments; allowing Treasury accountants to distinguish between short- and long-term capital investment; encouraging media outlets, particularly the BBC, to help promote a renewed craft culture; organising high-profile design competitions; temporarily underwriting the establishment of highly-accessible and modifiable additive production facilities to attract the best designers to these shores and to ensure the emergence of new industrial clusters in British towns and cities. While Peter Mandelson’s later moves towards an interventionist industrial policy lent momentum in this direction, we can go further than the standard abstract calls for Keynesian stimulus by offering specifics of what our future economy might look like – a flesh and bones industrial policy.
Among the many precedents and dormant traditions Maurice Glasman has sought to revive an interest in, the success of Tudor statecraft to many seemed like one of the more fanciful. Elaborating later, he described how its laying down of strong institutional endowments in fields where England lagged behind – in its literature, its naval strength, its financial clout and its scholarship – both established England as a global power and enriched the body politic. Nothing less than a similarly bold economic statecraft made up of intelligent strategic support for our growth industries and careful institutional design will do for Britain today, as the promise of collaborative and additive manufacturing practices offer British workers and entrepreneurs a compelling route to future prosperity.
Leo Pollak is a researcher and Labour activist.
