Work. The defining task of our lives. An indicator of status, a generator of wealth,
and a necessity to live. The world we exist in is built around work. You set an alarm for work,
drive to work, do your work, stress about work, commute home from work, and even relax to try
to get away from work. For many, work is hell. Horror stories of oppressive bosses [play clip]
and exploitative conditions [play clip] are not uncommon in our work-to-live economy.
This is the story of work. How it's come to define our lives and destroy our environment.
But this is also the story of how we might carve new paths away from work towards modes
of living that embrace play, happiness and a rich relationship with land and people.
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What does it mean to “work” Before we go any further we need to understand
what work means under capitalism, because as feminist scholar Kathi Weeks describes in her
book, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries,
“Wage work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic systems…” She goes on to add
that wage work “is not only the primary mechanism by which income is distributed, it is also the
basic means by which status is allocated, and by which most people gain access to health care and
retirement.” In short, under capitalism we need to work in order to live. Without a job we lose
social status, and our very means of subsistence. So, when we critique work under capitalism,
we're not saying there is no labor that needs to be done. Cooking, cleaning, construction, farming,
and childcare are all examples of forms of labor that we would need no matter what economic system
we live in. I’m specifically critiquing wage work, which can be thought of as the commodification of
your productive labor. Or in other words the act of selling your labor power (aka your ability to
produce goods) for cash or wages. A system wherein, instead of cooking to feed yourself
or your neighbors, you sell your time and expertise slicing cucumbers to a company
and in return receive money. This is, as Kathi Weeks, and indeed Marx, argue,
the lifeblood of capitalism. And to make matters worse, within capitalism, the profit incentive
means that employers inevitably try to minimize the amount they are paying you while maximizing
your productive output. The less they pay you for your time and the more you can produce,
the larger their bank accounts grow. As a result, wage work under capitalism is necessarily a system
of exploitation of employees by employers. But because there are few alternatives, we are forced
into this exploitation, selling our labor in order to live. So, work has consumed our lives.
Work defines our lives:
You’re at a party. The lights are dim, the music a little louder than you’d like,
and a friend of a friend comes over to you and strikes up a conversation. They immediately dive
in with a question: “What do you do for a living?” In the bastion of capitalism that is the U.S.
this is a common turn of phrase that speaks volumes of our puritanical relationship with work.
Quite literally we spend most of our lives on the job. In 2017, the average US worker spent
1,757 hours working per year, which is just under half of their total waking hours. We work for a
myriad of reasons: to eat, pay rent at the end of the month, pay utilities and medical bills,
pay off debt, and even to fit in with our neighbors and friends. Without resources
held in common, wage work is the only means by which we’re able to provide for ourselves,
and to make matters worse, this kind of work has become intertwined with virtue– if you work hard,
if you get down in the muck, you’re a productive member of society and you’ll be rewarded. A
sentiment routed in Puritan work ethics, that is epitomized in modern hustle culture and the dream
job mentality [play clip of hustle youtubers]. So now, we must not only report to work to put food
on our plates, but we must also be passionate about how we make our money. If we care enough,
the thinking goes, exploitative and inhumane working conditions are acceptable. How many times
have you heard “do what you love” and “find your dream job.” Journalist and author, Sarah Jaffee
suggests that this is yet another way to exploit workers: “You see this ‘labor of love’ story then
just seeping into everything… This myth has become so pervasive in this economy, and it accompanies
worsening conditions broadly across the entire economy. So you’re getting more sort of verbal
pressure to love your job at the same time as your job is giving you less back.” This
“love your job” framing is insidious. If a company convinces you to work for passion or for a cause,
then you might be willing to work for less compensation. This is the case for mission
driven non-profits, where burnout runs rampant, for creative industries like film and animation,
and the “working for a cause” mentality that is now being used to lure workers into the oppressive
warehouses of companies like Amazon. Our work shapes who we are, whether we like it or not.
And it not only defines our personal lives, it defines our environments and communities.
One study in the US found “strong evidence that households with longer work hours have
significantly larger carbon footprints.” The authors point towards the fact that longer
hours at work leave little room for tasks like cooking or grocery shopping, which often leads to
an increase in carbon intensive activities like getting take-out and home delivery.
In short the more work we’re made to do, the more emissions we create. And there are also
a number of studies that reveal that the opposite is true. The fewer hours we work,
the less emissions we create, but we’ll get into the specifics of that research a little later on.
Because there is also a social toll to capitalist wage work. Because our employers get us to work
during the bulk of our waking day, we have very little free time for organizing, deliberating,
being in community, and finding passion and play outside of our job, all of which are crucial parts
to a true democratic system. Perhaps this is purposeful. The more free time we have,
the more we recognize the exploitation of work, the flaws and destruction of capitalism,
and ultimately the necessity to end work as we know it. But before we end wage work,
we need to understand just how meaningless some work under capitalism really is.
Meaningless Work:
Imagine this: You commute everyday into your corporate cubicle job, sit down,
turn on your computer, and act as a glorified copy and paste button. All day every day you copy
text from employee emails asking for tech help and paste it into a separate form. Or you stand guard
over an empty room. Or you drive an hour into work just to move some military equipment from one room
to another. Well, you can stop imagining because these are all real descriptions of people's jobs.
In his book, Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber supplies countless confessions
from workers across the world condemning the pointlessness of their own jobs. Indeed,
a recent YouGov poll found that one in five people living in the United States think their job is not
making a meaningful contribution to the world. And a similar poll conducted in the U.K. revealed that
a quarter of British workers claimed their jobs lacked meaning. That is a substantial amount of
people who think their jobs are doing little or nothing. Graeber points to whole industries
like corporate law, telemarketing, and private equity whose jobs wouldn’t be missed for a second
if they didn’t exist. He also nods towards other industries that are not only useless,
but create immense amounts of waste and emissions: speculative construction,
planned obsolescence, and I would add the military in imperial countries like the US.
Real-estate companies building a high-rise on property that they think might gain in value,
but is too expensive for most people to live in, phone companies that render gadgets unusable after
two years, and a war-machine that starts wars to protect oil interests, and creates more emissions
than many countries of the world, all are in the business of excess and excrement. What if instead,
we only built accessible dwellings for people, phones that last 15 years or more, and dismantled
the military-industrial complex, maybe then we would have a little less environmentally
destruction and meaningless work on our hands and a lot of hours to do something we actually care
about away from our jobs. In stark opposition to these useless jobs, the paid work that actually
needs doing is undervalued and cast aside. Exploited farmhands, underpaid teachers,
and burntout carregivers, among others, are professions relegated to the lower rungs of worker
status. We “refuse to acknowledge the truly brutal reality of the kind of work that makes our cheap,
convenient lives possible. And so we outsource it, often to the most marginalized members of society,
and that allows the rest of us to ignore it.” So, in this economic system, a lot of the work
we value most (as evidenced by both the paychecks of the people doing the work and the social
value associated with that work) is some of the least important to the wellbeing of a society,
and much of the work we devalue is the most needed. On top of that the meaningless jobs that
exist throughout the economy often are situated in industries that produce the most waste and
emissions. So if the capitalist form of work doesn’t work, how can we work less? What would
even happen if we worked less? Or, dare I say it, end this capitalist form of work once and for all?
What happens when we abolish work? What would happen if we ended exploitative
or useless wage work as we know it? What if work wasn’t required to put food on your plate? Well,
we have lots of studies examining shorter work weeks that divorce pay from hours worked,
that give us a brief glimpse at a different relationship with work. Across the world,
countries and companies have been experimenting with a variety of shorter work weeks. Iceland,
the UK, Spain, and even companies like Microsoft Japan among many others have all run four day
work week trials. The results for almost all of them have been positive. In Iceland,
the government trialed a 32-hour work week while maintaining the same pay,
and the participants reported significantly less stress, more focus, more time to do household work
and more time to spend with family and friends. And a trial for Microsoft’s Japan offices produced
similar results. From these studies we can see that less work means better quality of life,
but something that seems to be often overlooked in the conversation is the environmental impact
of less work. During the Microsoft trial, for example, the offices used 23% less electricity
and printed 59% fewer sheets of paper. While an analysis of the consequences of shifting the UK
to a four-day work week without the loss of pay found that the reduction in work could cut the
country’s carbon footprint by 127 million tonnes per year by 2025, that’s a 21.3% cut to the UK’s
total yearly emissions. While a 2015 Swedish study found that for every 1% decrease in working time
energy use decreased by 0.7% and greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 0.8%. Part of the reason
why there are such significant reductions in emissions is that there’s less commuting,
as well as less energy needed for computers, office lights, and paper production. But also a
shorter work week trial in France, found that when people have more time, they’re likely to spend it
on low-carbon activities like gardening, walking, and reading. In addition, if we are able to cut
down on meaningless jobs creating useless stuff, consumption decreases and waste decreases. We’re
less tempted to buy a random gadget if there’s no one to make it and no company to advertise it. And
when we’re less stressed, less disconnected, and not burnt out, we are less reliant on technology
as a tool to numb and distract ourselves. But a shorter work week is just a taste,
what would it mean to have a world not based on work for wages, but instead on pleasure and play?
Embracing play and abolishing work
A world without exploitative and meaningless work is a truly enticing idea. Instead of
people giving up time with their children to work more, or people being abused because they have no
way to get out of an exploitative workplace, or people working endlessly to not even make enough
to pay for food or rent or clean water for their families, maybe we can have a world where everyday
people wake up, are provided for and did the work because they wanted to, not because they needed to
pay for the roof over their head and food on the table. How that would work is left to be seen.
It would definitely require a shared burden of undesirable jobs, some amount of automation, and a
much stronger sense of collective responsibility. Maybe you help build your neighbor’s house not
because you're getting paid to do it, but because you like carpentry and seeing the joy on your
neighbor’s face when the building is complete. Yes, this would certainly be a slower world,
without convenience of one day shipping, but a slower life could give time for people to stop,
appreciate and care for the environments and people around them. If this sounds
like I have my head in the clouds, there are a wide range of people and movements fighting to
change our current relationship with work. Some, mainly based in anarchist political tendencies,
are fighting to abolish work as we know it. They seek a world that embraces and finds,
what anarchist author Bob Black calls, a society based on “festivity, creativity, conviviality,
commensality, and maybe even art.” No, this doesn’t mean everyone will just sit on the couch
and watch TV, these anarchist visions imagine full control of the means of production in order to
transform work from a job that you need in order to eat to an act of pleasure that you do because
you love it. Think about all the useful materials things people produce in their free time:
vegetables from a backyard garden, clothes from hobby sewing, and blogs, art, cabinets,
the list goes on. But others are merely working to reform the workplace to achieve more dignity
for the worker. Better conditions, higher wages, and more say in the workplace. And still others,
degrowthers and progressives seek the shorter work week. Lessening the environmental and social
toll of work by a day or two. Giving us time to rest, retreat, and capture time for ourselves.
At the end of the day, we need to do away with our current relations to work. To me,
this necessitates abolishing it, because as long as capitalist wage work exists,
the systems of dominations between employer and employee will continue to exist. Capitalism will
continue to require meaningless jobs that pollute our environments and fill our landfills and oceans
with trash. Finding a path away from work and towards play and meaning is an essential task
of a post-capitalist, post-carbon world. We are capable of living in a world without wage work,
where the destruction of the natural world isn’t a cost of the job, where play is emphasized
above toil. We are capable, we just have to be bold enough to reach out and seize it.
But if doing away with our current relationship with work
is a post-capitalist strategy for mitigating climate change,
what solutions are being proposed within our current capitalist framework, and are they
effective? I dive into those exact questions in an additional full length companion video to this one
on Nebula looking at capitalism’s biggest climate gamble. If you don’t know by now Nebula is home
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