How will we value humane "work" (as opposed to "flunkies", "duct tapers" and "box tickers") coming out of Covid-19?
It’s the most sulphurous meme of Coronavirus - “more people will die from the employment consequences of Covid-19 than will from the pathogen itself”. Other than being hugely arguable from a disease perspective, it presumes that most people were healthy and flourishing in their working lives before the pandemic.
But there’s a lot of clarity about essential and inessential jobs that’s come through from coronavirus. At our windows, we applaud as heroes those health and service workers that keep the rest of us alive. While at the same time, rage mounts about how poorly these workers’ protection against contagion is.
And how much they are being collectively forced back to work situations, which will be more infectious than staying at home.
We need to sustain our thinking about the nature of necessary and unnecessary work in our current moment. Two pieces this week give us some useful - and different - handrails.
Not labour, but work - and health work as our new foundation
In the New Statesman, Lyndsey Stonebridge asks us to think about the distinctions that philosopher Hannah Arendt makes between labour, work and action. Labour is the basics of what we have to do to survive: “We labour to eat, to keep our bodies healthy, to keep roofs over our heads, and to keep life reproducing. All animals labour, with or without coaxing, as do slaves and women who, often literally, labour behind closed doors. There’s nothing special about labour, save for the fact that without it we would die”
Whereas work:
…gives collective meaning to what we do. When we work to produce something we both put something into and leave something lasting in the world: a table, a house, a book, a car, a rug, a high precision piece of engineering with which we can order the days into time, or keep a body breathing.
In short, what we work at makes up the human reality that we all share. Work is part of what Arendt called “human artifice”: it means that we are more than mere nature, and that we have made something that endures. We labour by necessity; we work to create a human reality.
Stonebridge suggests that the resistance to going back to their jobs (polling heavily in this direction, as we reported last fortnight) comes from people sensing they’re being treated as mere labour (“commanded to get our bodies back into the service of the economy”).
From Unsplash
The author suggests that the new and fundamental esteem given to health care workers is a new foundation for how we might think of work as a whole:
…Debates and policies about how we get back to work matter so much: we are also talking about what kind of human society we are – or want to be.
If taking the human value of work more seriously is key to a better politics, we should also grasp this opportunity to think about what counts as valuable work.
…As feminists have noted, the labouring necessities of life Arendt described are also descriptions of traditional women’s work. The labour of keeping human bodies alive over the past three months has, in the main, been done by women and, at great cost, BAME people.
Making a table is a great thing, but the work of creating a dignified human being out of an ailing, suffering, possibly dying body is too. The NHS was set up to do that work.
What if instead of seeing the NHS as a frail but plucky thing that needs protecting, we thought of it instead as the table around which we all need to get to create a really different – and possibly more human – political future? What if getting back to work might also be a way of getting back to the human condition?
Flunkies, goons, duct-tapers and more bullshit jobs that needn’t come back
Another, harsher take on what work means after the pandemic comes from the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who on a twitter thread applied his “bullshit jobs” concept to the situation:
What precisely do people mean by "getting the economy up again"? If the economy is how you keep people alive, fed, clothed, housed, etc, the economy was still running during lockdown. So in what sense is "the economy" coming back when lockdown is lifted?
It can only conclude this is the voice of those people whose work has been revealed to be largely or completely useless. They have become impatient that the veil is lifted - or worried if it is too long lifted, they won't be able to put it back.
What's being restored is not "the economy”. It's precisely the bullshit economy. All those managers who supervise other managers. All those people whose job is ultimately to convince you the existence of their jobs is not insane.
The only reason there's even a possibility of restoring the veil is the maintenance of the old 20C rubric of "productivity" - since yes, some factories have shut down, and eventually the stock of refrigerators or harmonicas will have to be replenished.
But this is now a small part of the economy. Most labour isn't "productive" in that material sense & framing things in terms of "productivity" (i.e., in official stats they even talk about the productivity of real estate) is ultimately a way of claiming that anything that produces profit (like real estate) is "productive”. And therefore that all those managers and consultants really are making something after all.
So much "productivity" is artificially produced for its own sake, for instance by making products that will break or be useless in a year or two when you could easily make them to last. This is literally destroying the planet's ecosystems.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Worth reminding ourselves what Graeber’s categories were of BS jobs - he reckons in his book they comprise up to 50% of total jobs.
flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
goons, who oppose other goons hired by other companies, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags don't arrive
box tickers, who use paperwork or gestures as a proxy for action, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
taskmasters, who manage—or create extra work for—those who don't need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
More here. (It should be noted that Graeber isn’t arguing for 50% mass unemployment, but a reduction of the working week (to share out the necessary jobs), a UBI (to support people’s right to direct their labour in the labour market), and a wholesale re-evaluation of our life priorities under the environmental constraints of the future. And he’s also trying to be funny too.)
Update: here’s a letter from thousands of scholars and economists (including Chantal Mouffe, Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang), under the title of Democratizing Work: “Democratize firms; decommodify work; stop treating human beings as resources so that we can focus together on sustaining life on this planet”.