Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 7:54 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs
Work has ruled our lives for centuries, and it does so today more than
ever. But a new generation of thinkers insists there is an alternative.
By Andy Beckett
Jan 19 2018
<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/19/post-work-the-radical-idea-of-a-world-without-jobs
>

Work is the master of the modern world. For most people, it is impossible
to imagine society without it. It dominates and pervades everyday life –
especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in
recent history. An obsession with employability runs through education.
Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers.
Corporate superstars show off their epic work schedules. “Hard-working
families” are idealised by politicians. Friends pitch each other business
ideas. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is
play. Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom.
Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets
work invade leisure.

In all these mutually reinforcing ways, work increasingly forms our
routines and psyches, and squeezes out other influences. As Joanna Biggs
put it in her quietly disturbing 2015 book All Day Long: A Portrait of
Britain at Work, “Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion,
party politics and community fall away.”

And yet work is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways. We
resist acknowledging these as more than isolated problems – such is work’s
centrality to our belief systems – but the evidence of its failures is all
around us.

As a source of subsistence, let alone prosperity, work is now insufficient
for whole social classes. In the UK, almost two-thirds of those in poverty
– around 8 million people – are in working households. In the US, the
average wage has stagnated for half a century.

As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even
the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners. In 2017, half
of recent UK graduates were officially classified as “working in a
non-graduate role”. In the US, “belief in work is crumbling among people in
their 20s and 30s”, says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a leading historian of work.
“They are not looking to their job for satisfaction or social advancement.”
(You can sense this every time a graduate with a faraway look makes you a
latte.)

Work is increasingly precarious: more zero-hours or short-term contracts;
more self-employed people with erratic incomes; more corporate
“restructurings” for those still with actual jobs. As a source of
sustainable consumer booms and mass home-ownership – for much of the 20th
century, the main successes of mainstream western economic policy – work is
discredited daily by our ongoing debt and housing crises. For many people,
not just the very wealthy, work has become less important financially than
inheriting money or owning a home.

Whether you look at a screen all day, or sell other underpaid people goods
they can’t afford, more and more work feels pointless or even socially
damaging – what the American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit
jobs” in a famous 2013 article. Among others, Graeber condemned “private
equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers … telemarketers, bailiffs”, and the
“ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only
exist because everyone is spending so much of their time working”.

The argument seemed subjective and crude, but economic data increasingly
supports it. The growth of productivity, or the value of what is produced
per hour worked, is slowing across the rich world – despite the constant
measurement of employee performance and intensification of work routines
that makes more and more jobs barely tolerable.

Unsurprisingly, work is increasingly regarded as bad for your health:
“Stress … an overwhelming ‘to-do’ list … [and] long hours sitting at a
desk,” the Cass Business School professor Peter Fleming notes in his new
book, The Death of Homo Economicus, are beginning to be seen by medical
authorities as akin to smoking.

Work is badly distributed. People have too much, or too little, or both in
the same month. And away from our unpredictable, all-consuming workplaces,
vital human activities are increasingly neglected. Workers lack the time or
energy to raise children attentively, or to look after elderly relations.
“The crisis of work is also a crisis of home,” declared the social
theorists Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in a paper last year. This neglect
will only get worse as the population grows and ages.

And finally, beyond all these dysfunctions, loom the most-discussed, most
existential threats to work as we know it: automation, and the state of the
environment. Some recent estimates suggest that between a third and a half
of all jobs could be taken over by artificial intelligence in the next two
decades. Other forecasters doubt whether work can be sustained in its
current, toxic form on a warming planet.

Like an empire that has expanded too far, work may be both more powerful
and more vulnerable than ever before. We know work’s multiplying problems
intimately, but it feels impossible to solve them all. Is it time to start
thinking of an alternative?

[snip]

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