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Overview
In this thought-provoking book, David Frayne questions the central place of work in mainstream political visions of the future, laying bare the ways in which economic demands colonise our lives and priorities. Drawing on his original research into the lives of people who are actively resisting nine-to-five employment, Frayne asks what motivates these people to disconnect from work, whether or not their resistance is futile, and whether they might have the capacity to inspire an alternative form of development, based on a reduction and social redistribution of work.
A crucial dissection of the work-centred nature of modern society and emerging resistance to it, The Refusal of Work is a bold call for a more humane and sustainable vision of social progress.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783601202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Sales rank: | 532,335 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
David Frayne is a sociology teacher and social researcher, based at Cardiff University. You can follow him @theworkdogma.
David Frayne is a sociology teacher and social researcher, based at Cardiff University. His research interests are wide-ranging, but his main areas are social activism, consumer culture, the sociology of happiness, and radical perspectives on work. David is the author of several articles and has also written a chapter on critiques of work for the SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment. Twitter: @theworkdogma
Read an Excerpt
The Refusal of Work
The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
By David Frayne
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2015 David FrayneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-120-2
CHAPTER 1
A provocation
Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.
Bertrand Russell – 'In Praise of Idleness' (2004c: 15)
In his 1972 book Working, Studs Terkel collected transcripts from over a hundred interviews with working Americans, providing an intricate snapshot of American life from an astonishing range of perspectives (Terkel, 2004). In this enormous book, we hear from welders, waiters, cab drivers, housewives, actors and telephone operators, as each discuss their hopes, fears and everyday experiences at work. Much of Terkel's book is about the little coping strategies that people use to get through the working day, from pranks and teasing to fantasising and other strategies of mental detachment. A gas-meter reader passes the time by ogling a housewife who sunbathes in her bikini. A waitress makes the day go quicker by gliding between tables, pretending to be a ballerina. A production line worker says 'fuck it', and takes a rest without permission. Standing back to reflect on the interviews in Working, Terkel wrote:
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, a book about violence – to the spirit as well as the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. (Terkel, 2004: xi)
Many of the accounts featured in Terkel's book give substance to his conclusion that work is violence, yet some of the book's accounts also offer glimpses of work's pleasures. In one memorable case, a piano tuner portrayed his work as an artistic exercise, describing how he would enter an almost hypnotic state of concentration and aesthetic delight as he brought harmony to the pianos. His account brings to mind the notion of the 'flow state': a psychological condition of complete and blissful absorption in the task at hand, entered when a work task synchronises with a person's skill level and interests (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In the flow, one loses track of time and space, focusing only on the craft. It is the opposite experience to that of the bored worker who watches the ticking clock, unable to shake his physical surroundings from his mind.
The delight of Terkel's piano tuner is a form of pleasure unfamiliar to many people. In modern capitalist societies, access to satisfying and engaging work is profoundly unequal. For those who work in jobs with dubious social utility, subjected to the latest innovations in workplace organisation and control, work often represents a struggle against boredom, meaninglessness and exhaustion. A range of personal tactics help us to survive the working day: we remind ourselves that we are more interesting than the jobs we do, we stage imaginary rebellions against bosses and clients, or we hide away in shells of cynicism. Sometimes we construct elaborate escapes and compensations out of hours in an effort to forget (or 'rebalance', as the life coaches call it). In later chapters I will introduce people who describe work as an external, coercive pressure in their lives. They talk about how they felt 'compressed', 'controlled' and 'forced' in their work. They said that work made them feel 'watched from behind', 'penned in like battery hens', or 'dominated by a big beast'. The perceived meaninglessness of the work they performed (or that they might, in the future, be forced to perform) represented a significant source of distress. Matthew – only in his mid twenties – said that the thought of working in retail or an office job made him panic about death. His anxieties reminded me of something Terkel once said in a television interview: 'the jobs are not big enough for people's spirits'.
Work is not without resistance, of course. Activists and labour scholars continue to address the pressing need for fairer pay, better- quality jobs, and more democratic relationships in the workplace. These important issues delineate the traditional terrain of trade unions and the politics of the Left. They are all extremely pressing issues and the fight is far from won, but it is crucial that we also think beyond workers' rights to confront a broader and more fundamental set of questions. What is so great about work that sees society constantly trying to create more of it? Why, at the pinnacle of society's productive development, is there still thought to be a need for everybody to work for most of the time? What is work for, and what else could we be doing in the future, were we no longer cornered into spending most of our time working? As we will see, such questions are part of a well-established history of critical thinking on the meaning, purpose and future of work. If such questions are rarely posed outside of this academic clique, however, it is perhaps because they ask us to scrutinise realities that are usually accepted as natural and inevitable. It may feel like there is little incentive to reflect critically on work from a position where most of us, irrespective of our attitudes towards work, are pretty much obliged to perform it anyway. To take a critical stance on work may even seem distasteful or elitist in the context of a society where jobs are so highly sought after. In regions wracked by poverty and high rates of unemployment, what people are feeling is a need for more work, not less, but it should be noted that the thinkers introduced here are in no way ignorant or in denial of this fact. It would be senseless to dispute the fact that most of us experience a powerful need to work. What we can dispute, however, is the celebrated prominence of work in the cultural, ethical and political life of advanced industrial societies. What is baffling, from the perspective of work's critics, is the notion that the activity of work should continue to be valued more than other pastimes, practices and forms of social contribution.
The work-centred society
We live in a work-centred society, and this is true in a number of senses. First of all, work represents society's main mechanism for the distribution of income. Work is therefore the central avenue through which people access material necessities such as food, clothing and shelter, as well as the commercial entertainments and escapes offered by modern consumerism. The centrality of work is also grasped when we consider the sheer amount of time spent working – in which I also include the time spent preparing for, training for, searching for, worrying about, and travelling to and from work – as well as the fact that for most people, work represents the main centre of social life outside the family. In affluent societies, work is one of the most conventional and readily available means through which we become part of the pattern of other people's lives. Engagement in paid work also marks the passage to adulthood, showing that the child has matured, gained independence, and accepted what it means to live in 'the real world' (in which we are presumably supposed to forget about our youthful ambitions and knuckle down). The connection between identity and occupation is forged from a young age, with children being prompted by parents and educators to refine their career aspirations and begin cultivating their employability. In the work-centred society, the most readily accepted purpose of education is the socialisation of young people for the successful adoption of a predefined work role.
If every society has its own way of measuring achievement, in affluent societies this is usually through work. Conversations with strangers often start with the question 'What do you do?' (a dreadful question to ask a person who does not work, or who dislikes the work that she does), and it is common knowledge that this question represents an abbreviation for 'What job do you perform?'. The tendency to treat occupations as the yardsticks of social status is revealed in the prevalence of clumsy modern euphemisms, often designed to puff up society's less auspicious forms of work. The bin man works in 'waste and sanitation management', the fry cook is 'part of the culinary team', and the unemployed person is 'between jobs'. Reflecting on these quirks of modern usage, Terkel suggested that the people who embrace such terms are not necessarily ashamed of the work they do; instead, they are justifiably defending themselves from a society which is obsessed with measuring status through work, and therefore looks upon them as a 'lesser species' (Terkel, 2004: xvii). It is clear that work represents much more than an economic necessity and a social duty. In affluent societies, work is powerfully promoted as the pivot around which identities are properly formed. It is valorised as a medium of personal growth and fulfilment, and constructed as a means of acquiring social recognition and respect. All of this we recognise, even if work's ultimate function is in most cases to generate private profit.
If work can be described as central on a cultural level, then it is certainly also central at the level of politics. In the UK (the context in which I am writing), apart from New Labour's cursory interest in 'work–life balance' in the mid 2000s, the question of working hours, and the entitlement of people to lead active and varied lives outside work, has long been absent from the mainstream political agenda. Mainstream politics focuses its efforts on job creation and employability, with political rhetoric continuing to promote traditional beliefs about the sanctity and dignity of work. This is particularly evident in the moral tones of discussions about unemployment. In 1985, Claus Offe wrote that the persistence of mass unemployment, particularly if it were concentrated in particular regions, might put an end to the stigmatisation of unemployed people, since the rate of joblessness could 'no longer be accounted for plausibly in terms of individual failure or guilt' (Offe, 1985: 143). Yet we can now see that Offe's confidence was misplaced, failing to anticipate the moral fortification of work in neoliberalism, which has seen a revamped ideological focus on the virtues of 'hardworking people' versus society's so-called scroungers and skivers (Baumberg et al., 2012; Coote and Lyall, 2013; Tyler, 2013: Chapter 6). The ethical lines have been drawn: are you a worker or a shirker? This moralisation of work has been enshrined in the latest social policies, as enforcing work – no matter how dubious its social utility – is adopted as a key function of the state. In recent times, the stripping-back of the welfare system has seen a phased introduction of increasingly stringent audits and penalties for the non-worker. Even groups that have been traditionally exempted from the duty to work, such as single parents and people with disabilities, have found themselves under scrutiny in the drive to move people off welfare and into employment. All of this has significantly reduced the latitude for developing lifestyles based around activities other than paid work. The sociologist Catherine Casey justifiably summarises:
Whether one is in or out of employment, preparing for it, or seeking it, and certainly whether or not one likes one's job, work as it is conventionally organised significantly shapes everyday life experience for most people in industrial societies. (Casey, 1995: 25)
In this chapter, I begin formulating a response to this situation by taking on the task of denaturalising work – this most central and taken-for-granted feature of our lives – and opening it up as an object for critical discussion. If work is indeed a central source of sociality, rights, status and belonging, then it is important to recognise that this situation is a social and historical construction, and not a fixed feature of some natural order. First I need to clarify what I mean by the term work and, in the process, make some preliminary remarks about what it might mean to engage in a critique of work. Following this, I briefly touch upon a number of studies that chart the historical emergence of work, with a view to developing some critical distance from its central role in modern capitalist societies. In the final part of the chapter, I provide an introduction to those critical authors who have challenged the centrality of work by promoting a radical reduction of working time. In the compelling and unorthodox visions of these authors, work, instead of being central, would be subordinated to the need for human autonomy and the leading of richer, more varied lives.
What work is
The concept of work invokes an extremely varied set of ideas and images, and any attempt to define it quickly leads us into a web of caveats, contradictions and grey areas. For some people, the word 'work' may call to mind the joys of craft and creativity. Marx suggested that, in its ideal form, work is the defining activity of humanity. In this view, humans are distinguished from other animals by their ability to conceive of and subsequently craft a world of artificial objects, opening up possibilities for new trajectories of development. In artistic circles, the termwork has a similarly auspicious ring to it, and is often used in its noun form, 'my work', meaning the material embodiment of my talents and sensibilities: my intangible inner world made tangible. Work, in the sense of aesthetic creation, might even be seen as a quest for immortality, expressing the producer's desire to create durable evidence of his or her finite existence in the world. From great structures like churches and bridges to cultural artefacts like novels and video games – all of these things are the product of work.
The trouble with defining work in these terms, however – as a form of creative activity – is that it becomes difficult to know what we should call work that is not creative but menial and routine. Workers who complain about their jobs in call centres, on supermarket checkouts, or at computers, inputting data day after day, are more likely to view their work as a means of self-preservation rather than self-expression. For all of us whose survival depends on submission to the daily grind, 'work' conjures a less romantic set of images. It calls to mind the sense of dread associated with words like 'chore', 'travail' or 'burden'. In these cases, work does not represent a source of joy or a form of self-expression, but that blank part of the day which must be endured until five p.m.: the coveted hour when work releases its grip and we can finally be ourselves again. Adding to the complications surrounding work's definition, we can also observe the morally loaded nature of the term work, which is often used to smuggle in ethical views about the respectability of certain activities over others. In a social context where engagement in work is tied with what it means to be respectable, socially included, and worthy of recognition, the question of which activities society chooses to allow into the category of 'proper work' becomes an important one. Domestic work, along with certain forms of artistic, intellectual or care work, continues to sit uncomfortably on the fringes of what society is prepared to categorise as actual 'work', especially in cases where the value of these activities cannot be explained in terms of any measurable social or economic contribution.
If the meaning of 'work' in everyday usage remains ambiguous and contested, this is certainly also the case in the academic realm, where we find a disconcertingly complex history of attempts to define work (see Granter, 2009: 9–11). In this book I will follow André Gorz's observation that the prevailing cultural understanding of 'work' in modern capitalist societies is that it is an activity carried out for a wage. Colloquially, it seems that the label 'work' is most often used to distinguish paid from unpaid activities, and refers to the operations performed in 'jobs' – things that we 'go to' and 'come home from'. Illustrating this definition, Gorz suggested that a market gardener can be said to work, whilst a miner growing leeks in his back garden is carrying out a freely chosen activity (Gorz, 1982: 1). Elsewhere, Gorz has referred to this predominant understanding of work as 'work in the economic sense'. It represents the contractual exchange of a certain amount of productive time for a wage, and is distinguished from the separate category of 'work-for-ourselves' (Gorz, 1989). If one of the key characteristics of a paid job is that it serves society in a general sense, work-for-ourselves is distinctive because the worker performs it for the direct benefit of either himself or others with whom he shares a relationship outside the commercial sphere. Work-for-ourselves is conducted according to principles of reciprocity and mutuality rather than commercial exchange; it has the quality of a gift, performed out of respect for, or a sense of obligation to, others. In today's employment-centred society, work-for-ourselves tends to be limited to domestic chores such as grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning, squeezed unhappily into evenings and weekends (and performed disproportionately by women). However, in a society with more free-time, Gorz believed that this category could in theory encompass a whole host of activities – anything from repairs to community gardening, healthcare and informal education.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Refusal of Work by David Frayne. Copyright © 2015 David Frayne. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Work Dogma1. A Provocation
2. Working Pains
3. The Colonising Power of Work
4. The Stronghold of Work
5. The Breaking Point
6. Alternative Pleasures
7. Half a Person
8. From Escapism to Autonomy