Work in the Age of the Pandemic
What Have We Learned About the True Value of our Lives?
By Jim Miller
There have been some wins for California workers lately in the immediate wake of the recall election, with Governor Newsom signing a bill expanding protections for garment workers by ensuring they will be paid hourly and that the big fashion brands will now be liable for wage theft. For these largely female, marginalized, immigrant workers of color this is a big victory that will improve both their workplace conditions and their basic sense of dignity as valued members of our society.
The Governor also signed into law the bill I discussed in my Labor Day column that will restrict Amazon warehouses from setting brutal productivity quotas that prevent workers from taking breaks and avoiding injury. By pushing back against this modern form of Taylorist exploitation by the stopwatch, workers will regain some measure of control over their time and a bit of autonomy in the workplace.
Both of these wins come as Americans have a more favorable view of unions than they have in decades, and more and more workers are questioning not just how they work and for how much pay, but also what the meaning of work is and whether their jobs should define their lives. Indeed, as a result of the pandemic, it has become increasingly difficult to convince large numbers of workers in the United States that returning to “normal” is desirable.
The issue? Maybe “normal” sucked.
As Marie Solis wrote recently in In These Times:
“A pernicious corporate narrative suggests that workers . . . who ask for a decent wage and marginal flexibility from an employer — are simply lazy.” All the relief payments and unemployment extensions, the argument goes, have simply allowed workers to get paid for doing nothing. Thus, it’s time to turn off the relief spigot and force reluctant employees back to work.
But perhaps, Solis argues, there is something bigger going on in the U.S. Maybe a large swath of the American workforce has had a pandemic induced epiphany about “bullshit jobs” that offer little of meaning to peoples’ lives. Hence Solis asks:
After such a revelation, how could employers expect workers to return to business as usual? . . . In her seminal 2011 book The Problem With Work, Kathi Weeks argues that wage labor (one of the least-questioned arrangements in U.S. culture) is actually a social convention, not an economic necessity. As workers have become more productive and automation has picked up more slack, not much serious consideration has been given in the United States to the idea of reducing work hours. Instead, people work more and more. According to Weeks, having a job confers moral goodness and other virtues upon those who perform it, which is why people rarely question whether work is, in itself, good. If they did, they might see how work limits their pleasure, creativity and self-determination.
Maybe, Solis goes on to ponder, Americans are ready to move to a “post work future” where reducing the grind is more important that increasing the pay. Perhaps, more control over one’s time and, in turn, one’s life, has become a top priority in the post-pandemic world. If this is true and workers are finally fed up with the “intensification” of their labor, we could be in for a cultural sea change.
Interestingly, around the same time that Solis’s piece came out, Jonathan Malesic’s “The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less” appeared in the New York Times Magazine in which he argues that with millions of Americans returning to work we need to realize that:
The conventional approach to work — from the sanctity of the 40-hour week to the ideal of upward mobility — led us to widespread dissatisfaction and seemingly ubiquitous burnout even before the pandemic. Now, the moral structure of work is up for grabs. And with labor-friendly economic conditions, workers have little to lose by making creative demands on employers. We now have space to reimagine how work fits into a good life.
Rightly observing that work sits “at the heart of Americans’ vision of human flourishing” and has been an almost religious meaning-giving activity since the Puritans, Malesic then rejects this frame. Just as often, he writes, work can have a “negative moral effect” on people, “can harm us in subtle and insidious ways,” and can impede our fundamental well-being. As much as we valorize killing ourselves on the job, work should not be our guiding star:
[W]ork often doesn’t live up to these ideals. In our dissent from this vision and our creation of a better one, we ought to begin with the idea that each one of us has dignity whether we work or not. Your job, or lack of one, doesn’t define your human worth.
This view is simple yet radical. It justifies a universal basic income and rights to housing and health care. It justifies a living wage. It also allows us to see not just unemployment but retirement, disability and caregiving as normal, legitimate ways to live.
With this in mind, as we struggle to emerge from the pandemic’s grip and get back to “the way things were,” perhaps we should reject a mindless return to business as usual and instead chart a course that insists that we are not defined by our labor and our purpose is not to live to work but to work to live. In the long run, the gospel of efficiency that has defined American life from the beginning needs to be upended as the culture of mass production and consumption it has spawned is utterly unsustainable environmentally and, in our own lives, existentially.
We need to honor labor because we honor the human beings who do it not because they are only valuable because of it. Every one of us is worth much more than can ever be measured in economic terms.