Beck sees a "global collapse in stable, full-time employment"
see also Aaron Benanav's Automation and the Future of Work, which, per Beck, details how "when growth first began to slow in the 1970s, unemployment rates went up in a number of wealthy countries"
Beck diagnoses this as a state of "permanently elevated unemployment caused by the fact that the golden age of manufacturing was over"
this is what leads to Beck's argument about "surplus population" -- "surplus with respect to the economic system they inhabit, surplus in the sense that the economy has no need for their labor and is unable to grow at a rate that would provide them with formal employment"