Because as soon as we set the human project to be building machines to do our work for us, we also set about designing the perfect machine, easily adapted to new products and refitted with instructions: ourselves. More than transforming production through mechanization, the post-industrial world has changed human beings into machines. Our corporate culture refers to us as "human resources", and our available effort "bandwidth". Schools no longer strive to produce a small number of highly trained experts, but an army of adaptable administrative drones adept at email and spreadsheet software to handle the domain-level problems of our corporations for which automation is too expensive a solution. We are, to them, cheap computers.
They would surely have looked around and seen technology take over in many professions which previously needed heavy manpower, they would have looked at the increase in automation and mass production, and wondered – why are they spending 12 hours a day on menial tasks?
I don't know about the health care field, but as a programmer/engineer, the super long weeks never made sense to me.
I can't see how working super-long hours could beneficial to anybody. People are working inside all day long, sitting or standing for extreme periods of time, with absolutely no exposure to fresh air or sunlight. They get up before the sun comes up to go to a job where you are inside all day and then you leave when it's dark out, go home to sleep and then do it all again. It seems like some sort of bizarre punishment. And it's killing people - figuratively and literally.
"...mak[e] visible the enormous amount of unwaged reproductive labor performed by women. Against those who reject basic income as an unearned handout, we can respond that it is capitalism which arbitrarily refuses to pay for a huge proportion of the labor that sustains it."Yes indeed.
"...we often talk about the need to create jobs when what we really mean is that people need income. Most of the unemployed don’t actually want jobs – that is, they don’t just want a place to show up every day and be told what to do. The real problem these people have is not that they need jobs, but that they need money. We’ve just been trained to think that the only way to solve this problem is to get people jobs."...and from the latter piece:
"...wage labor is a form of domination that lots of people find inherently unpleasant, and...a lot of what people do for wages is less socially desirable than what they could do if they had control over their own time."An unconditional basic income, while not a panacea, would go a long way toward giving people this kind of control over their own time. This is one of my dreams: to have enough control over my own time that I could be freed up to do socially useful work, instead of being forced to compete with all the other over-educated people for minimum-wage jobs, most of which I'm "overqualified" for and don't even want, just so I can earn enough to pay for food, shelter and basic needs.
Is there an economic model that accounts for this? Because as far as I can tell, it's total pathology. I suppose if you could convert the earning "status" value into dollars you might be able to tell if working the additional hours is worth the effort. But does signaling behavior actually increase the odds of promotion/tenure/salary increase?
There's this economic term, "signaling behavior", in academia, you work long hours to show that you're "dedicated", not because it gets more done. My suspicion is that a similar idea has taken root in industry. Since capital has labor over a barrel these days, laborers are desperate to signal in any way they can. This is also the source of the college bubble/credential inflation problem.
"If there's one thing practically all futurologists once agreed on, it's that in the 21st century there would be a lot less work."That rings a bell, my favourite economist wrote a book which could almost have been titled "It's the 19th century--why are we working so much?". It starts:
The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and labor-saving machinery, the greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilitation of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor.that was in 1879, so this is an old question, at least as it applies to those who find themselves having to work too hard just to survive. Of course things did improve somewhat (world wars and the great depression aside) for many decades after that, but we sure seem to have been regressing since the late 1970s when I was told to expect a future of abundant leisure. Now I know more history/politics/economics I get why that day has never quite come to pass, but at least the old misguided optimism left me questioning and idealistic. In more recent decades I instead hear kids being told they will have to work hard because things are tougher "these days", but rarely any questioning (present company excepted) about why that should be, given that we still have that same ongoing technological progress which caused such optimism for more than a century.
At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer ...
It is true that disappointment has followed disappointment, and that discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor.
You would be AMAZED how many doctors and medical professionals not only buy into the idea that 12 hour shifts are necessary, but that they actually work better on them than if they didn't have them. "I need to follow a patient all the way through the process," is one reason I've heard, and "You learn more when you are working a shit-ton of hours, and there's no other way!" Also "I've never killed anyone and real doctors/nurses can handle it!" Because once you get your medical training, you stop needing the standard human amount of sleep and rest, I suppose.I think the weirdest part is that it's not implicit. We discuss it, we're aware of the need for rest and the risks of working 12+ hours and, as far as I can tell, everyone is in agreement that it's probably a stupid, dangerous thing. But everyone still buys into it.
I'm the author of the "Are we anti-work?" piece in the very last link. I wrote it in 1998. I'm also the founder of Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery (CLAWS) at whywork.org.I think CLAWS might have been my introduction to the concept of critiquing work, way back when. I was a little dismayed to find it somewhat defunct when I thought to tack it on somewhere, but I'm glad you worked on it. It was an influential thing in my life.
« Older Inklewriter... | Could the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicar... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by byanyothername at 5:30 PM on July 10, 2012