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I.
I think often of my first job, which taught me a lot and was a total scam. For years I worked as the gelato girl at an Italian restaurant in my hometown. The town was small and we were competing with a Coldstone about two blocks down the road, so the shop rarely had any business. My shifts were six to eight hours long, and I occasionally wouldn’t see a customer the whole time. I would sit and read and journal my day away, and at the end of my shift when I was locking up the store, I’d pack ice cream for my family in to-go containers: vanilla for my grandma, caramel for my sister, strawberry for my mom. For this I was paid $9 an hour.
Working bullshit service jobs was a fairly formative part of my adolescence, though it seems that this might not be the case for younger members of Generation Z. While the pandemic has obliterated many sectors of our economy, the service industry was hit particularly hard: several clothing stores, including J. Crew and Brooks Brothers, have filed for bankruptcy in recent months, and many food chains and restaurants have closed permanently due to covid, with some talking of ending the restaurant industry altogether. These changes will certainly impact more than just young people; most low-wage jobs are held by low-income people of all ages, and the pandemic has put these workers in an even more precarious financial position. But as I continue to see the younger generation struggle to find summer jobs without the option of summer camps or part-time service work, I can’t help but think on how our new economy will change more than people’s financial stability––it could also create a future where young people do not have their formative years defined by labor.
Our recent economic recession, which has caused the highest national unemployment rates since the Great Depression, has provoked several competing ideologies around the future of labor in this country. Many are enraged by record low employment, housing, and food security rates amid the pandemic, and argue that universal employment will ensure that all people can afford their basic needs. However, while some are convinced that employment is the solution to wealth disparity and mass dissatisfaction in this country, a growing number believe it is actually the problem. As the coronavirus brutally exposes the ways that the United States continually fails it’s most vulnerable communities, many have begun to champion substantial structural changes to our economy, arguing that housing should be free, that insurance should not be tied to employment, and, perhaps most radically, that we should not have to be working at all.
Despite my growing knowledge on the evils of labor, I’m ashamed to admit that the thought of not working grips me with what I can only describe as a paralyzing fear. As someone who staunchly identifies as a schemer, who has always had big dreams and plans for her future, I had internalised the mantra of “working hard” from a young age, and certainly expected it at some point to pay off. Today, when I think of an anti work future, I am plagued by two conflicting sensations: relief at the thought of a life full of rest, and terror at the idea that without labor, my ambition, my schemes, and my life become meaningless.
II.
In order to be against something, we must first define what the thing is. Socialist writer Peter Frase offers three different definitions of “work”: one, an activity that is necessary for the continuation of human civilization; two, an activity that people undertake in exchange for money; or three, an activity that requires some kind of discipline and deferred gratification in pursuit of an eventual goal. To be anti-work, then, Frase argues, we should be fighting for “fewer jobs, and shorter hours at the jobs we do have,” suggesting that we should perhaps take most issue with the second definition. Frase offers a useful framework for envisioning the tangible impact that an anti-work ideology can have on our everyday lives. However, his analysis falls short of addressing the structural exploitation we face under our capitalist system of work, which demands all of our time, energy, and physical labor in exchange for, if we’re lucky, enough money to barely survive. To the average person, Frase’s demand for shorter hours might seem like a radical move. In the grand scheme of anti work rhetoric, however, his ideology is fairly conservative––many are arguing that our entire system of labor must be overhauled, that we need to definitively restructure what “working” even means.
Liberals and reformists tend to cling onto the idea of the 40-hour work week in the hopes that mass employment will decrease poverty and improve a general standard of living. While this idea might seem logically sound, it is flawed for two reasons. Firstly, this argument assumes that an increase in the number of jobs would automatically increase per-person wealth in America. However, according to a 2014 study conducted by Stanford University, this is not necessarily the case; sociologist Marianne Page found that “recent labor market expansions” in America “do not cut poverty as much as we’d come to expect.” Despite a deep-seated centrist attachment to traditional notions of employment, it is also interesting to note that our current standard work week was, itself, initially part of a larger anti-work vision. In 1866, the newly formed National Labor Union, an organization comprised of working class organizers in the United States, proposed the 40-hour work week to Congress in an attempt to decrease and regulate working hours across the country, which averaged about 48 hours per week at the time. Though their efforts were valiant, the 40-hour-work week was not fully implemented until Congress passed the Fair Labor Act in 1940. In this way, the now-standard eight hour work day fits squarely into Frase’s anti-work ideology as a vision of “shorter hours at the jobs we do have.” Today, many companies and jurisdictions have decreased hours even less, or are considering doing so: In 2018, Shake Shack adopted a four-day workweek for managers, and earlier this year, a Washington state senator introduced a bill to reduce the standard workweek to 32 hours, or one less eight-hour work day.
The idea of a 32-hour work week certainly feels like progress and is in line with an anti-work vision. However, an incremental shrinking of the weekly hours of labor required to survive in a capitalist society still falls short of a necessary reimagining of how our time and energy could be spent if we were not constantly worrying about output and profit. When the National Labor Union first fought for a 40-hour work week back in 1866, they framed their request as a desire to separate work from all other facets of life, namely “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.” This logic was perhaps sound at the time, but is no longer applicable in the 21st century: despite an alleged 8-hour work day, research shows that almost three quarters of millennials across the globe are working more than 40 hours a week as of 2016. This is due in large part, of course, to the changing conditions under which we are expected to work. While all jobs in the 19th century required employees to work in a specific physical setting outside the home, new technology––namely the internet––allows workers today to tend to their job at practically any time or place, Slacking coworkers from the toilet or emailing our bosses from bed before we’re even fully awake. In a society that values output over all else, time meant to be saved for “what we will” will eventually become devoted to working, too. Writer and artist Jenny Odell addresses this conundrum in her brilliant 2019 book, “How To Do Nothing,” poignantly noting, “In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’.”
We are groomed from a young age to think work will save us, that it will define us and we should thank it for doing so. In Kindergarten, we are asked what we want to “be” as adults and a chorus of six year olds list off professions with the robotic efficiency of a brainwashed cult: doctor, teacher, lawyer, nurse, are the proper answers to this question, though kind, brave, funny, or smart are more acceptable attributes for children to aspire towards. On occasion, we are told to follow our “passion,” to stray away from traditional work to pursue the thing that brings us joy. I certainly have tried this method myself, with severely mixed results: though I am grateful to spend my time doing something I like, I often deeply question my decision to make the thing I like my job. Under capitalism, profit is our eternal quest––and so even in following my passion, I am following the path that makes my passion monetizable. As a writer, my “success” is defined by the biggest name that allows my words on their website; my “ambition” is defined by my dream editing job, and how many hours a week I’m willing to put in to get it. There are no metrics for the value of my work, the quality of my words, the way they helped my community or touched people’s lives––capitalism has no method for measuring these variables, and further has no interest.
III.
Much like other anticapitalist frameworks such as prison abolition or defunding the police, anti work ideologies are often written off as far-fetched, ludicrous, and all around impossible. Though I disagree, I do understand people’s reluctance to accept an anti work framework––restructuring the way we work in America would literally mean reprogramming the way we live our lives. Working has entirely defined our sense of time, so much that we have come to romanticize the rhythm of the work week, cherishing 6 am morning routines and planning happy hour drinks or weekend getaways rather than questioning why we have so few waking moments that are not devoted to labor, output, or profit.
Despite our country’s inexplicable commitment to labor, the anti work movement has been on the rise in America for decades. The 1960s in particular saw a surge of––mainly white, middle class––workers and families who were so fed up by their overworked, profit-driven lifestyles that they gave up their material possessions, left the city, and moved onto rural communes en mass. According to Odell, these folks were in search of “a better life” and an experience of community opposed to the competitive and exploitative system they had rejected. Despite their noble ambitions however, most commune experiments failed in a number of years; even far from the city and it’s fast-paced complications, mortgages had to be paid, children had to be raised, and most communes couldn’t grow all of their own food independently. Many communes also reported repeated instances of hierarchical violence and infighting, demonstrating how capitalist tendencies of power and ownership must also be dismantled from within. “Even if they were far from the city,” Odell mused, “they were still in America.”
Though the commune experiment largely failed, the idea of ruralism as an antidote to the evils of our capitalistic lifestyle is not an uncommon one. While researching this essay, I took a delightful detour down r/antiwork, a sub-Reddit with over 130,000 members that caters to, in their own words, “those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.” One young woman’s story particularly resonated with me: “I want to enjoy what I love such as hiking, fishing, and video games but I never have time in the day and I'm always tired after work to do anything,” she wrote. “I just want to live life on a farm with my future husband and dog and not have to walk into a soulless corporate office everyday. I'm still in my 20s and imagining myself doing this the rest of my life is absolutely soul crushing.” This person’s testimony could have been taken verbatim from my own cottagecore fantasies; the idea of spending time in nature and living off your own land and seem to many like a beautiful anarchist lifestyle that escapes the pitfalls of labor and consumerism we are too often subjected to in an urban environment. Both myself and this Reddit user seem pretty far off from achieving our dreams, but it’s still strangely comforting to know that somewhere out there, another twenty-something is also dissatisfied with this life, and that she too is doing her best to envision something better.
IV.
A few lifetimes ago, before 2020, before covid-19, before I became the person that I am today, I was sitting in my aunt’s kitchen watching her cook, musing to her about my post-graduate plans. It was the Christmas before I was set to graduate, and she was encouraging me to take a fun trip between finishing school and starting to work. I was only half listening, convinced she was too old or out of touch to understand the depths of my ambitions and how far they were going to take me. “I don’t know,” I remember saying, “I just want to move to New York and become a writer and really start my life.”
Where capitalism has failed me most as a young and hopeful schemer is here––in it’s insistence that without labor, there is no point in living at all. For me, embracing anti work has meant reimagining what I would want out of life if I were not constantly worried about survival: a sweet home to live in, a garden to nurture, enough time with my loved ones, enough space to write. It has meant pushing the boundaries of what I let myself dream, and redefining what ambition can mean.
Being anti work is tricky because it requires looking forwards and backwards at the same time, understanding that there is a precedent for societies governed without the need for bullshit labor, and believing against all odds that we might live without work once more. I’m still working today because I need to, because I’m trying to survive, because it’s possible to find meaning in something compulsory, and sometimes that’s the best you can hope for. Now and then I remember my first job as a teen, where I was paid to eat ice cream all day and write, and think maybe our anti work future is not as far off as it seems.
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