Forced to Love the Grind
August 13, 2015 2:57 PM   Subscribe

There are numerous reasons for the disappearance of the forty-hour workweek, but journalist Sara Robinson singles out work cultures that promote worker passion as one of them. She sees this culture taking root first in the defense and then in the tech industries in late twentieth-century California. During the Cold War, defense companies like Lockheed in the Santa Clara Valley drew scores of ambitious scientists; these workers seemed to share certain personality traits, including social awkwardness, emotional detachment, and, namely, a single-mindedness about their work to the point at which “they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of nonwork relationships, exercise, sleep, food, and even personal care.”
An excerpt from Do What You Love, and Other Lies About Success and Happiness.
posted by nebulawindphone (50 comments total) 45 users marked this as a favorite
 
You and your research
posted by grobstein at 3:15 PM on August 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


In "the wild" success means "passing on your genes before you die." Increasingly in western culture success means "working yourself nearly to death for somebody else" with the pleasant side effect of dying of a heart attack or stroke before you get a chance to retire and take any advantage of social security.

1. Build a product
2. Convince good people to burn their lives away for your product instead of hiring enough people
...
3. Profit!
posted by aydeejones at 3:17 PM on August 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


So glad I'm not passionate about my job. I like what I do, and I'm good at it, and I'm aiming for some career advancement, but not executive level-tied my smartphone kind of shit. And I'm totally socially awkward. Which is why I only spend 40 hours a week with my coworkers. My company absolutely has that passion mentality, which is why I'll never advance much farther than where I am now.
posted by Ruki at 3:19 PM on August 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


Also it's important to ingrain us with narratives to the effect of "if you like what you do and are important enough, retiring is not an option because you will die" as is the legend of John McCain and countless doctors and lawyers "emeritus" who can't relax ever
posted by aydeejones at 3:19 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Do what you love" gives me huge anxiety because I still can't figure out what that is and I'm getting really old.
posted by chococat at 3:41 PM on August 13, 2015 [46 favorites]


Apparently what I love is wasting time on the internet.
posted by ckape at 3:42 PM on August 13, 2015 [33 favorites]


"Do what you love" gives me huge anxiety because I still can't figure out what that is and I'm getting really old.

Trust me. Doing what you love (as your job) can be the quickest way to kill that love.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:47 PM on August 13, 2015 [29 favorites]


I work as admin for a financial advisory firm and the two times someone has said to me, "I hope you love it and will be with us for many many years," I wanted to scream and run from the room.
posted by Kitteh at 3:49 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


If everyone actually did what they loved, it would work out about as well as the Do What You Feel Festival on the Simpsons did. Somebody has to tighten the bolts on the Ferris wheel, but it's never going to be Steve Jobs.
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:49 PM on August 13, 2015 [5 favorites]


My bosses are constantly breathing down my neck that I can't work 1 single minute more than 39 hours a week. However, they also insist that I get as much work done as a normal person would take at least 60 hours a week to do. So there's a lot of donated time going on that I would get in big trouble for if I ever admitted to out loud.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:49 PM on August 13, 2015 [7 favorites]


So there's a lot of donated time going on that I would get in big trouble for if I ever admitted to out loud.

In one past, horrible, probably not even totally legal finance job, when the writing was on the wall and we all knew we were getting the axe before year's end, my entire department submitted ACCURATE timesheets.

We all still got laid off. But at least it meant that the higher ups who'd been hosing us with 20 "donated" hours per week got fired first.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:56 PM on August 13, 2015 [36 favorites]


What really makes me sick is how this "passion" idea has trickled down from areas where it might possibly have made some sense, i.e. inventing the iphone and getting stinking rich, to areas where it's blatantly absurd, i.e. stocking shelves at Home Depot. I've seriously seen ads for utterly shit jobs that are looking for "passionate" people.
I wish they'd just be honest. For example:

"Large, faceless corporation seeks employees who will do what they are told without complaint. Work is generally not too hard or challenging, pay is pretty disappointing, and we imagine that you will move on before too long. But we really need somebody to do this stuff."

I'd be way more likely to apply to that ad than to somebody who wants to own my soul.
posted by crazylegs at 4:05 PM on August 13, 2015 [55 favorites]


I work in media (television) and it's definitely an industry where 'work culture that promotes worker passion' is real. Liking what you do and being pretty good at it is not enough, you have to *love* what you do and be passionate about being *the best* at it. I do enjoy my job but it's not my life's only passion, and in this kind of work culture, standing up for yourself and the other things you love in life is seen as being unprofessional and lazy.
posted by matcha action at 4:06 PM on August 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


I work in the tech industry and I hate, hate, hate that I'm supposed to love what I do. I don't. I like it fine, but it's just a job. And when it's five o'clock, I leave, and I refuse to check my work email until the next business day.
posted by monospace at 4:35 PM on August 13, 2015 [15 favorites]


I don't agree with the article's assertion that "the answer clearly has nothing to do with economic rationality and everything to do with ideology." I suspect that this is just predatory capitalism at work, squeezing as much productivity out of people as possible, and all the stuff about passion is a convenient excuse. But then, as somebody who makes very little money but likes their job very much, I care less about everybody admitting that we all hate work already and more about everybody organizing and demanding worker protections. Maybe this is more of a high-earning prestigious job thing?
posted by thetortoise at 4:52 PM on August 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


This has to be at least loosely related to the phenomenon where certain professions being regarded as "heroic" and "heroic" is short for "it sure is heroic how you do this essential job even though we can't really pay at an equally heroic level commensurate to all that heroism."
posted by Wolfdog at 4:52 PM on August 13, 2015 [9 favorites]


I work in media (television) and it's definitely an industry where 'work culture that promotes worker passion' is real. Liking what you do and being pretty good at it is not enough, you have to *love* what you do and be passionate about being *the best* at it.

I'm now working in the legal side of banking. My team is a good bunch of people who enjoy each other's company - we joke around and have fun where we can, and generally try to make the best of what is a highly specialised but ultimately dull area of law. We're good at what we do. We hit and exceed our targets.

But yesterday, we were told that there is a 'perception' held by 'some people' that we are not 'applying ourselves'. Even though we are kicking goals and delivering good outcomes. The perception, what 'they say', is more important that the reality. Love your job, but don't act like you love it, apparently.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:59 PM on August 13, 2015 [10 favorites]


My husband switched from being a litigator at a big national law firm to working as general counsel for a state agency where he is only allowed to work 37.5 hours per week. The number of hours he has physically at work is HALF of what it was when he was litigating, but he gets THE SAME AMOUNT OF WORK DONE. Part of this is just having "one client" (so he doesn't have to fuck around with billing), and part of it is being the boss (so he doesn't have to be on call to someone else's whims), but an AWFUL LOT OF IT is that he isn't overtired and burnt out all the time, and also that since he's a knowledge worker, when he leaves at 5 and comes home and has dinner with his family and works in the garden and plays some video games and sleeps a normal number of hours, the problems he's working on are still percolating in the back of his mind. He's just not staring blearily at a computer screen while waiting for them to work their way up.

We hear this from almost all the lawyers we know who work for state or municipal government and now work the 37.5- or 40-hour week -- they're so much more productive than when they were litigating and billing hourly that they get as much or more done now that they're working family-friendly hours. It is seriously like getting a whole second life because you have 6 hours of your day back AND you don't want to stab everything all the time AND you get sleep!

(The other thing is, there are some times of the year -- generally when the legislature's in session -- when he has to work longer hours or be on-call after hours, and they expect him to tally those up and take the same number of hours off once the legislature is out of session. In fact HR will REMIND him that he is due those hours if it doesn't look like he's taken enough hours off to make up for his overage hours. And everybody takes their vacation days too! It's like a WHOLE DIFFERENT WORLD OF WELL-RESTED PEOPLE WITH OUTSIDE LIVES WHO THEREFORE LIKE THEIR WORK.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:30 PM on August 13, 2015 [52 favorites]


This was also why I really liked working as a newspaper editor -- you produce a defined end product and when it's done, you go home. Sometimes that means you're sitting there at 4 a.m. having been waiting more than 2 hours for one drunk sportswriter who can't write a fucking sentence to finish his article, but it also means if you're done at midnight, you get to go home! No sitting there for four hours killing time trying to come up with makework or make anybody think you're putting in enough hours. You do the work, you finish, you go home. In fact, the editors who ran the tightest ship and finished the paper earliest were considered BETTER at their jobs than the ones who took forever! The better I was at my job, the less time I had to spend at work. PRODUCTIVITY WAS REWARDED!

I was passionate about it, but I really liked getting to turn out a finished product and stop working until the next day.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:37 PM on August 13, 2015 [10 favorites]


During the Cold War, defense companies like Lockheed in the Santa Clara Valley drew scores of ambitious scientists; these workers seemed to share certain personality traits, including social awkwardness, emotional detachment, and, namely, a single-mindedness about their work to the point at which “they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of nonwork relationships, exercise, sleep, food, and even personal care.”

So basically engineers and scientists with Aspergers?
posted by gyc at 5:40 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


As I have gotten older, I have found there's a huge difference between enjoying your job and "doing what you love".
posted by rmd1023 at 5:53 PM on August 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


I work in defense and I have to tally all of my hours. On the rare occasions that it goes over 80 hours in our two-week pay period (usually because travel eats up a lot of time), our time reporting system gives me a helpful reminder that I can take back and vacation time I used that period to bring my total back down to 80.

It's not uncommon for people to "put in their 80" and take a half day on pay day. I've taken four-day weekends when a business trip ate up all my time the week before. It's probably not surprising that attrition is incredibly low and we have so many "lifers" on staff.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:53 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


I loved the author's earlier piece on this idea, which emphasizes that "Do What You Love" is "the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism".

This is also tied up in the issues with leisure and self-care that are being talked about here. The way we talk about work-life balance is still framed in terms of productivity, from Arianna Huffington's "Third Metric" to meditation and mindfulness. DWYL also drives the specific approach to "work-life balance" that drives a lot of initiatives designed to allow you to work longer and harder. From corporate concierges to do your errands to all the fun perks in Silicon Valley that make it fun to stay in the office, these things are great if they come with no strings attached but in reality come with an expectation that you give your life to your job.

I think that a particular subset of privileged and driven recent grads are particularly susceptible to this mindset; people who have spent their whole lives with all-consuming focus on the next accomplishment can be more readily convinced that this is what work should be like.
posted by earth by april at 6:24 PM on August 13, 2015 [9 favorites]


Thanks for adding that earlier piece, earth by april. It addresses other kinds of work and adds dimension to the later piece. I especially liked this:

But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet — the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.
posted by thetortoise at 6:50 PM on August 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


WHOLE DIFFERENT WORLD OF WELL-RESTED PEOPLE WITH OUTSIDE LIVES WHO THEREFORE LIKE THEIR WORK

I hope it is different for lawyers, but in my field those 37.5 hour public sector jobs pay about 1/2 of what the private sector jobs pay, and sometimes less than that, which mitigates some of the advantages.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:23 PM on August 13, 2015


My first job out of college was like this. It was a startup that was doing some defense contracts, and the CEO didn't hire nearly enough people to actually do the work and expected everyone to put in a bit more than 40 hours a week to make up for it. I distinctly remember that a coworker and I were both yelled at for leaving before 6:00 one day, and staying until 7 or 8 most days sort of became routine (a fair amount unrecorded). It basically burnt me up completely, and I didn't have the energy to do much else outside of work.

Sure I liked the work itself, but I also like to work on other things that are not work related as well. I think some of it was that the CEO made the company his complete passion and truly didn't seem to understand other people wanting to do things outside of work. He fit the "sci-tech personality" quite well since I know he complained often about having to deal with family matters and once told a coworker that I was to "unfocused" to go anywhere after he asked me how I spent my free time (which is apparently his business?) and seemed genuinely confused that I didn't spend it all learning more about things relevant to the job.

I feel this constant overworking hurt the company itself pretty badly. Almost all of my coworkers had jumped ship before me (not counting the CEO there was one person still at the company who was there before I started, and a couple who joined after me had already left). Also, because we were all always tired and rushed, the actual work output was definitely poor. I honestly have no idea how this whole idea has caught on, since to me it only seems like it would be effective in the short-term before people are completely worn out, but I guess they just let those folks go and get some fresh people to replace them to continue the cycle.
posted by tealNoise at 7:40 PM on August 13, 2015


Okay seriously where does one get these mythical 40.0 hour week jobs?

Government.
posted by IndigoJones at 8:08 PM on August 13, 2015


I can remember a time when passion was reserved either for Easter or the bedroom. If I were ever to use the word 'passion' in an interview for a job, I would hope the other person would look slightly disgusted, then bid me a firm good day.

- posted to MeFi by le morte de bea arthur at 2:38 PM on January 15, 2012
posted by Iris Gambol at 8:08 PM on August 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


Do What You Hate: You'll be really fucking efficient, at least.
posted by gottabefunky at 8:20 PM on August 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


In my little four-person department, a principal (this company has so many goddamn principals) once came walking through our cubicle area at 5:30. Everyone was gone that particular day. He expressed surprise over this to our principal. And then we Had to Have Meetings.

Mind you, he didn't need us for anything. No crisis was occurring because we left at 5. No deadlines were hurt. We are blasting through our goals like crazy, racking up hours (we actually get paid for all our hours, but remarkably, we still try to go home sometimes) when needed, doing the best our department has ever done. But because a principal was mildly perturbed that we weren't there, we Had to Have Meetings, the subtext of which was clearly "just sit at your desk till at least 6 so certain people feel good about how much you work." Never mind that we could be watching Youtube the whole time. And often are. We aren't billable to clients, either; we're all overhead. Technically we could save the company money by going home . But all of that matters less than someone needing to see asses in seats to feel good about what we do.

We have that problem a lot in our company actually; they talk a big game about results and data, they're engineers for crying out loud, but what it really boils down to is whether someone got their executive feathers in a ruffle. That decides policy, not logic or performance.
posted by emjaybee at 8:38 PM on August 13, 2015 [12 favorites]


There couldn't be, for me, a truer sign that capitalism is on the very verge of being over. We don't have any enticements left to make you work any harder or longer (that is, any that we're willing to part with) but you should do it out of love, your deep unrelenting love for the work itself.
posted by newdaddy at 8:48 PM on August 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


your deep unrelenting love for the work itself
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother”
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:02 PM on August 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


A boot, stamping on a human face, forever for 80 hours a week, half of them being unpaid overtime.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:16 PM on August 13, 2015 [5 favorites]


. . . we joke around and have fun where we can, and generally try to make the best of what is a highly specialised but ultimately dull area of law. We're good at what we do. We hit and exceed our targets.

But yesterday, we were told that there is a 'perception' held by 'some people' that we are not 'applying ourselves'. Even though we are kicking goals and delivering good outcomes. The perception, what 'they say', is more important that the reality. Love your job, but don't act like you love it, apparently.


I remember this often happening at a job I had a few years back. It was a collaborative environment. And we'd get really into our work, sometimes laughing and teasing each other over silly mistakes.

Then some middle manager comes over and tells us how terrible it is because of the owner's son heard us, we'd be fired. Well, fuck. Fire away- if they can't stand of the sound of employees rejoicing in work, they don't deserve those employees.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 12:07 AM on August 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


It's taken me half a career, leading up to a harrowing firing and a period of unemployment to realize this, but the redemptive power of work is greatly over-rated.
posted by scruss at 4:47 AM on August 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


This thing about wanting passionate employees is not true. It is a meme sowed into the system by some consultant that a herd of managers have repeated without thinking about it. If you enjoy your work the actual real-world results for you will not be a reward. If somebody tells you "you have too much fun" or "you play too much" they are not complimenting you. They are being harsh. If you make any emotional display the only ones that will be to your advantage are the sweat, tears, and blood cluster. And work life balance is only excusable if you have a death or a birth in the family.

Don't ever skip out on even the most pointless meeting to watch your kid's basketball game ever.
posted by bukvich at 6:17 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


You can tell a workplace where everyone is supposed to be passionate by the fact that everyone is miserable.

Funny how that works, huh?
posted by clawsoon at 7:13 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Dip Flash: "I hope it is different for lawyers, but in my field those 37.5 hour public sector jobs pay about 1/2 of what the private sector jobs pay, and sometimes less than that, which mitigates some of the advantages."

We did okay -- it does depend, by state, by job, by level of government, by how unionized your government workers are, etc., but mid-career professional salaries are reasonably competitive with the private market. (Early career professionals are dramatically underpaid by the government; while senior professionals do nicely in government, you can obviously make a lot more in the private sector.) (More unions are better; most state benefit packages for non-union professionals piggyback on whatever the unions have negotiated.)

Another (money) benefit in many states with big legal markets is that if you become a government lawyer who heads up an agency is that you're moving from New York City to Albany, or Chicago to Springfield, or San Francisco to Sacramento. Your cost of living PLUMMETS THROUGH THE FLOOR. And once you're senior enough to head up an agency's legal department, they probably have some legal staff in the big city, and have to make sure to pay the head of legal more than his lawyers. So we get what would be okay Chicago money, but is great downstate money. Not enough to retire young, but enough to be a one-earner family while our kids are little and still pay our mortgage. This may not be a net positive for everyone, but I like living in smaller cities, and they're nice places to raise families and go four times a year to the "big city" for the big city things. (If you ever want to move back to the big city, you probably want to think real hard about whether you'll ever be able to get back into the big city's real estate market if your equity is in a house worth $200,000 instead of $800,000, though -- will you be saving enough money in small city that you'll be able to save up a big downpayment for big city? Or will the lower salary/lower cost of living just cover your small city life, but not allow you to save towards a potential move back to big city?)

Also the benefits are fucking fantastic, even compared to the "gold-plated" health care and retirement benefits we got from his prior law firm. It costs me $50 to have a baby, whole thing from conception to walking out the hospital door. They cover orthodontia! Government!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:19 AM on August 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


One of the things I'm enjoying about working as IT staff for a university is that I have a slower pace than I did in private industry (there's still off-hours and oncall and whatnot - network engineering in almost any situation is an operational job that requires doing some of work when things are least-used), but people leave at 5pm and it's expected that you'll take a fair bit of the copious vacation time.

I took a 10% pay cut to come here, but it's been well worth it, I think. I do recognize that some of that is because I spent 15+ years in private industry - including some pressure-cooker environments - which put me in a place, personal-debt-wise, where I could afford a 10% cut.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:21 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


I thinksome people conflate having a passion for this work in particular with having a passion for work in general, i.e. a good work ethic, taking a great satisfaction in a job well done, etc.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:26 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


I once had a Very Serious Talk with the CEO at a company I worked for because it was apparently pissing people off that I left promptly at 6pm to go do the other stuff I call my life. I pointed out that it was largely because they tended to take sprawling 2-3 hour lunches in the middle of the day, then of course they'd be there until 9 or 10 at night, whereas I would take an hour lunch and go home promptly on time. He said that was fair, but I should consider just going to lunch with them for 2-3 hours because it was important to be a team player and "show the flag", even if I didn't have anything to do.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 12:26 PM on August 14, 2015


He said that was fair, but I should consider just going to lunch with them for 2-3 hours because it was important to be a team player and "show the flag", even if I didn't have anything to do.

Ugh. Yes. I've seen this. When I used to work in VFX there was a guy who would come in early and leave early...but since VFX people tend to come in at like 9:45am and stay until 8:00pm+ this dude was always getting heat for not "being there when the team is there."

Just fucking burn it all down. God.
posted by jnnla at 5:31 PM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


FWIW: My day job is selling beer, and I put in my normal 40ish doing that, but I put in another 10 or so doing outside stuff with brewers, reps, and other salt of the earth types, because: beer. You can feel free to hate me now, but know your liver is not the happy, hardened, knot of love and joy mine is.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 6:34 PM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Eyebrows: I am literally drooling at that job description. Jesus.

I've been having what you may call difficulties (one year anniversary of my one thousandth job application sent!) and a couple of months ago I scored an inteview with a cable company (not even close to what my degree is) that repeated several times during the interview that I'd be expected to work seventy hours a week, much of that doing light manual labor in strangers' homes. I finished the interview politely and only cancelled the night before I was supposed to start, and I'm honestly still not sure if I should have taken the job and given up all hobbies or spit in his face for trying to sell seventy hours a week as a reasonable starting number at around ten bucks an hour.

Anyway my favorite part of government jobs is when I say I only have one degree/less than five years experience and then they kick me off of the application site.
posted by sandswipe at 6:36 PM on August 14, 2015


There are numerous reasons for the disappearance of the forty-hour workweek
Let's see: 1} unions; 2) organized labor; 3) union contracts that limited hours of work; 4) more about organized labor; 5) more about unions; 6) unions, labor, etc. Thlinkec areticle by Sara Robinson says, okay, it was the unions that pushed it, but the bosses accepted it, so that means it was a good idea, so business owners are the reason, right? Wrong! There is a nasty ahistorical anti-union mindset with some folks that feeds wrong-headed revisionism.
posted by CCBC at 7:12 PM on August 14, 2015


Anyway my favorite part of government jobs is when I say I only have one degree/less than five years experience and then they kick me off of the application site.

This kind of hard requirement is probably there to try to fight cronyism and patronage jobs.
posted by thelonius at 1:05 AM on August 15, 2015


Our capitalist leaders have devalued labor to the point where it takes a massive amount of it to count for anything. They have shown, time and again, that the first line in reducing the bottom line will be screwing over workers, taking the jobs where they can pay in nickels. They cry foul at mandated living wages, raises, health care, time off, pensions, unions, and parental leave, saying that this intrusion into profits and higher-ups salary will manifest as them petulantly laying off the people doing the actual work.

And then they complain that the workers aren't "passionate" enough.
posted by Legomancer at 9:20 AM on August 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I've just finished reading Miya Tokumitsu's brilliant book Do What You Love, And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, so I'm delighted to see this thread. (I'm just now catching up on the blue after spending the bulk of my MeFi time for the past month hanging out in the Emotional Labour thread.) I had been impressed with Tokumitsu's Jacobin piece "In the Name of Love," so as soon as I learned that her new book was out, I went to Powell's Books immediately to get a copy. It's a quick read; I devoured it voraciously in a single evening.

I should warn potential readers that it's profoundly depressing...but it's depressing in that eye-opening, galvanising, radical-truth-telling sort of way that can spark underground resistance movements. Tokumitsu's writings have helped me understand that I long ago internalised all that DWYL rhetoric; in fact, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Despite my nagging sense over the years that the whole DWYL thing wasn't going to work out for me the way I had hoped, and my suspicion that there was something rotten at its core, I clung to remnants of it for a long time - in part, I think, because I feared the implications of fully facing the deeper truth. This book took away the last of those remnants, and I'm grateful for it, even as I mourn the loss of the last remaining piece of that dream.

One of the most brilliant take-aways from the book for me is the concept of hope labour, which comes from Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan's work. Tokumitsu quotes them and adds that hope labour is:
"...un- or undercompensated work, often performed in exchange for experience and exposure in hopes that future work will follow." Hope is a powerful driver of cheap labor because it is internalized by the worker...Other methods of extracting free or underrated labor typically entail external pressures, whether physical, as in prison labor or military conscription, or social, as in office peer pressure to work through lunch and respond to e-mail on weekends. Hope, on the other hand, comes from within."
The term was initially coined to describe modes of uncompensated affective labour happening in online spaces - blogs, forums, etc., - done with the hope of projecting employability in the real world. But it applies in all sorts of domains. There's a saying that circulates among writers, artists, etc., who have grown weary after a steady stream of requests for unpaid work in exchange for "exposure": "People die from exposure." As long as there are artists doing free hope labour in the hopes that it will lead to their big break, though, the requests for free work will continue.

Last year I did some unpaid editing and proofreading work for a musician whose work I appreciate. Editing and proofreading is work I love to do, so I was happy to do it. And yet - and yet - I now understand that I was performing hope labour, in the hopes that my skills would be noticed and it would eventually lead to a paid book contract, or maybe some paid proofreading gigs. I later learned that my skills were noticed, and even appreciated...but it didn't lead to any paid work for me. And why would it, when there's always someone else around who will do that kind of hope labour for free?

Damn. So depressing. Still, I'm glad I read this book, and I highly recommend it, especially for people who fell for the DWYL thing like I did.
posted by velvet winter at 2:57 PM on August 16, 2015 [1 favorite]




And of course, they want to cover you in sensors to track whether you're actually happy or not.

If there was any chance that corporate leaders would internalize any of this "sleep longer and better and you'll be more productive" as it applied to front-line contributors, there might at least be a silver lining. But in real life it's just the expectation that you'll really mean "yes sir, may I have another?".
posted by immlass at 10:18 PM on August 16, 2015


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