The End of Work

 

 

I remember as a teenager when the “I have to go to work” schema first invaded my mind. There was something exciting about it, then, since "going to work" meant becoming an adult and becoming an adult meant that one had some control over one's life. I never took it very seriously. Indeed, it felt like I was “playing work”:  ironing my uniform and heading off at a brisk speed to avoid the stigma of being “late”. Going off again to the nice clean plastic place to perform some mindless task. While there, I’d always do a little extra just for a “thank you” from my coworkers or a riveting pat on the back from my grumpy boss. Of course, at the time I had such a good attitude because I harbored the naïve notion that the slog was “temporary”: since it was so overtly demeaning and unsatisfying that surely no serious person would think someone could stay at it for a lifetime.

I’m now forty-eight and I’m still just “going to work”. I still iron my uniform, though not quite so meticulously.  I run off at a less brisk pace, sometimes I'm late. When I am there, I don't really do anything extra. When the phone rings and the caller ID reads "work", I ignore it and don't bother calling back. The biggest difference between then and now is that I am no longer fooling myself. I know that I will be doing this forever. I know that I will not ever have agency in my life. I go to work with a lump of resentment in my throat. 

The resentment has been building steadily over time as I gradually recognized that it doesn't matter what job one is performing: the “forty hour” work week is a great big lie. First, assuming one job is enough for a person to stay afloat in this economy, one is almost always required to work more than that just in the regular day to day operations. Second, even if one is not physically working, one is usually preparing for work, recovering from work, commuting to work, making arrangements around work, complaining about work, receiving calls from work to work “extra”; All of this adds up. Work consumes a person’s life. Work makes a big assumption: that it is the priority in your life when it most definitely is not. It forces itself upon you. When a person is at work, she gives herself up to be entirely at somebody else’s mercy. A working person is trapped in someone else’s version of how things should be, and that version is usually inhumane, inefficient or both.

 

The “job creators” are often presented as so generously providing us helpless cogs with our livelihoods that we should be on our knees thanking them that we are not starving. Forget the fact that we spend most of our precious time making them rich, surrendering our own dreams in the process.   

Don’t get me wrong: there are ways out for the lucky few, and if a working person is doing something that he loves than none of this matters. However, I argue that these options are far from ubiquitous.  There is only so much of this to go around. Most of us, out of necessity to avoid starvation, find ourselves doing  something that is at best  inconsistent with our natural talents and at worst something we utterly dread. We usually have unreasonable expectations thrust upon us in the interest of productivity, making us sacrifice quality and whatever internal reward we may get from doing a “good job”. So, derived from this is a heaping helping of stress and anxiety and the health outcomes that follow.  

Yeah, thanks for the “retirement” fantasy. Never mind the fact that I can’t save any money; I’m not going to make it out alive. 

After over thirty years of being a working class person in America I have finally arrived at a rather radical conclusion of what is required to change the system. Surprisingly, it isn’t fighting for better wages, benefits and working conditions in the traditional sense. I’m not talking about strengthening unions. Unions were born in a different time and a different economic climate. Unions, my working class friends, are as obsolete as retirement. This was when automation was not the threat that it is today and workers had some leverage. Though I am grateful that the issue of economic inequality is solidly upfront in the 2016 election, what working class people need to do to foster real change in the condition of their labor is divorce themselves completely from the “job creators”. Enter the “worker-owner”. Enter the “cooperative”.  

A working person in my generation is so used to the autocratic hierarchy that it just seems natural: the “way it is”. The assumption that the “doers” have to be dependent on the “deciders” throughout the entire process is a given. The fact that we have to “look for a job”, show up when we are told, work within the system that has been set up whether it is sensible and humane or not, and not have any real say in the very environment in which we must spend such a large chunk of our time are all artifacts of dependency.

I’m talking “Atlas Shrugged” folks, except those that are shrugging are the “doers”.  In the words of Todd Snider: hang your own dry wall. The “deciders” have set up these hierarchies for their own benefit.  We need to stop playing by their rules. It is, in fact, a matter of survival. We are entering a new era of automation and the “deciders” won’t need us anymore. Workers must take control of their own lives. We must become worker-owners: the cooperative is the only model that is going to save us.