What Comes After Work?
What I read: Fuck work by James Livingston. Published November 25, 2016.
Anyone who knows me intimately is aware that productivity has historically been central to my sense of self-worth. I’m not saying that’s a good thing. It’s not. In hindsight, it’s been an albatross around my neck.
Growing up with an overachieving father amid the 1950s/60s suburban American dream culture, heavily influenced by Catholic work ethic teachings, was a recipe for conformity. Without ever intellectually challenging the idea that working is good, that working more is better, and that our work is indeed an essential part of our identity, I embarked on the path most Americans walk along. Be productive. Work hard. Even if your job sucks, do it anyway because that’s what good people do. It’s your duty to society. It’s a large part of what makes you a good person. I absorbed such messaging like a sponge.
Presently I don’t have a job that sucks. I like my work. I like the people. They’ve been good to me. I’m also aware that I’m lucky. It could have easily gone another way and I’d be miserable.
That said, I’ve spent the bulk of my adult years heavily identified with my work. Whether it’s been my corporate jobs or self-employment ventures, I was one of those people who would ask a guest at a cocktail party by the second or third question “What do you do?” As if what we “do” always implied work and career and somehow clearly identified what sort of person they were and where in the social stratum they landed.
Which is of course bullshit. I don’t ask that question much anymore because I’ve learned that what a person might do or not do for work has little to do with the quality of the person or their character. A fancy job or high income doesn’t even make them particularly interesting even though we often feign being impressed by a title or working for a well-known company.
Far too often I’ve encountered corporate attorneys, Wall Street brokers, company Vice Presidents, high end programmers, and other supposedly impressive jobs only to discover they’re not all that interesting and in some cases they’re rather awful people.
Other times I find out someone is in a blue-collar profession or entry-level service sector job and discover they’re intellectually stimulating and a truly nice human being.
I’ve seen little correlation between the job or profession someone is employed in and what they’re like as a person.
Which leads me to the article by James Livingston that sparked this post. He points out the folly of attaching status to a job or associating it with any positive character qualities whatsoever. Many jobs don’t give employees an adequate sense of purpose or meaning. Even when a job is an awful hardship and does nothing but pay the bills, our culture still assigns the false notion that even those bad jobs somehow instill in us meaning, purpose, and a necessary structure to our lives. How silly. How unfortunate we went down that path.
Livingston also asks the reader what happens when there are no longer enough jobs to keep 100% of the adult population employed? And why is there any character upside to work that doesn’t pay a living wage?
These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.
Full employment is a third rail of politics. It seems baked into our national ethos. Without questioning whether it’s a good thing or not, Americans across the political left/right spectrum seem determined to tout the gloriousness of full employment even as the data clearly demonstrates that much of that work is low paid or demeaning, assuming it’s available at all.
Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.
One fourth of employed adults in the United States are paid wages below the official poverty line. Nearly half of employed adult Americans are eligible for food stamps. This is not sustainable. This is not fair. Yet we seem to accept it with a shoulder shrug as simply the unwavering and unquestionable status quo.
Livingston doles out some statistics to illustrate that jobs that disappeared during the Great Recession aren’t coming back, ever. Efforts to increase the minimum wage while noble and worth pursuing don’t really put a dent in the need to elevate Americans to the life they deserve.
Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.
And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?
Is it any wonder why many in the workforce are disenchanted? Is it any wonder why the ever-increasing income inequality between the wealthy and everyone else is such a lightning rod for collective hopeless anger?
When I’ve posted something on social media expressing my concerns about the future labor market, I’m consistently met with counterarguments that I’m just a doomsayer and that of course jobs will come back. The artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics to which I point as primary driving factors for a future jobs crisis are dismissed as so much hand wringing. They point to past technological developments and that eventually the number of jobs came back, and that they spawned new and better jobs.
Apart from the fact that the data just cited earlier details a plethora of jobs that are extremely low paid and sometimes grueling, predicting the future based on the past is a tenuous endeavor. Such arguments are replete with confirmation bias. Smarter minds than mine believe there is no reason to assume rapidly advancing technologies coupled with unpredictable social trends will necessarily bring an abundance of more or better jobs.
For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the book Race Against the Machine (2011). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process – cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.
So, what do we do when many Americans can no longer point to their work for meaning or purpose, assuming they can be employed at all? Since our culture seems to equate being employed with a moral superiority, what happens when jobs disappear or what’s left of employment opportunities is but the bottom of the barrel in terms of options?
What comes after work? Might this point in time be an opportunity to reevaluate and reimagine a world in which jobs are no longer charged with building character? What type of society might emerge if we determine our incomes might come from non-work sources? What happens when work no longer dominates our daily lives?
In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.
Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?
And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?
Many of the suggestions on how to correct this societal conundrum are dismissed as unethical or even unAmerican. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one of the solutions that’s been proposed. A smattering of UBI social experiments have been undertaken, but this avenue needs a lot more exploration. Yet so many people proclaim UBI is downright evil and will lead to a society of lazy good-for-nothings funded by immoral entitlements.
Hmm, entitlements. That word gets thrown around a lot these days, especially by Republicans and others on the right-wing end of the political spectrum. But even some liberals, Democrats, and moderates seem reticent to embrace what is seen as a “money for nothing” social undertaking. But are entitlements inherently a bad thing?
Are we not all, today, currently enjoying some entitlements?
We already have some provisional answers because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement, half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.
But are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we subsidise sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good life?
Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.
Livingston goes on to explain that the United States can indeed afford a substantial increase in funding for offsetting the landscape of unemployment or low-wages. A few simple adjustments to some taxation contribution limits along with modest but reasonable corporate taxation can “create an economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.”
The details Livingston lays out on why such simple changes wouldn’t negatively impact the American economy much at all, while lifting millions of people to a decent standard of living, are compelling and I’ll let you read the article for his argument.
That these ideas ruffle feathers and run counter to the entire American mindset regarding work is not surprising. It’s so baked into the way we were raised and collectively think as a country that new ideas run up against a wall of intransigence that defers to what is perceived as common sense when it’s nothing more than a long history of social programming.
Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted time on earth because they teach us, as we make or repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.
We’ve essentially placed a price on each human walking the Earth with the amount of productivity that can be squeezed from us and how high a dollar amount our efforts can sell for in the marketplace being the markers of our status. Our sense of self-worth is also often founded upon how we perceive our own productivity and earning potential.
Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.
The American Dream can indeed also be the American nightmare. It sounded great in its time, and perhaps it was a necessary step for our country and industrialized capitalist countries around the world to go through to reach where we are today. But a huge rethink is necessary.
So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?
I find it ironic that as I’m typing the last words of this post I’m about to complete my annual taxes for submission. The numbers on my IRS form scream out how productive or not I’ve been this year and what I’m worth in the eyes of a society built on money worship and the unfortunate worship of work culture generally. Until such time as we implement some of the big necessary changes regarding how we work, if we work at all, and the value society places on work, I’ll be plodding along making the coin I can to pay the bills that pile up unabated.
I dream for a better time, if not for me, certainly for the young people living a longer life behind me.
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