Labor and Antiwork

Unless you have systematically shut yourself off all kinds of news reports and social media, you know well that there is a serious labor shortage here in the US. There are about 10 million jobs that aren't staffed.  There are no takers!

Take a look at the following examples:

• "Where are the workers?," asks the New York Times.
• The worst crisis at the state level is in Nebraska with "three job openings for every unemployed Nebraskan — signifying the largest labor shortage among all states."
• The US labor market could face structural problems, says the CEO of Whirlpool.

What's going on?

Lots of things are going on.  And that is the problem!

Farhad Manjoo writes that "there might also be something deeper afoot."

In its sudden rearrangement of daily life, the pandemic might have prompted many people to entertain a wonderfully un-American new possibility — that our society is entirely too obsessed with work, that employment is not the only avenue through which to derive meaning in life and that sometimes no job is better than a bad job.

I am not surprised one bit.

I have been writing for a while that there is something wrong with the obsession with work.  And about bullshit jobs.  The following is one of those that I am re-posting here; it is from October 12, 2019:

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If you are like me, you, too, until today, have never ever come across the word nepreryvka.  What does that mean?

Glad you asked.  Because I want us all to pause a little and think about it.

In 1929, Stalin--yes, that Joseph Stalin and not this guy--introduced a staggered schedule that was known as nepreryvka, "or the “continuous workweek,” since production never stopped."

The government divided workers into five groups, and assigned each to a different day off. On any given day, four-fifths of the proletariat would show up to their factories and work while the other fifth rested. Each laborer received a colored slip of paper—yellow, orange, red, purple, or green—that signified his or her group.

Oh, why five when there are seven days in a week?  Because his governemnt "downsized the week from seven to five days. Saturday and Sunday were abolished."

Anything introduced by Stalin ought to be the worst for humanity, right?  What was awful about this continuous workweek?

People had no time to see friends; instead they associated by color: purple people with purple people, orange with orange, and so on. Managers were supposed to assign husbands and wives to the same color but rarely did.

You are perhaps thinking, "hey, that was back in the godawful USSR."  Think again.

How many people do you know in the working age who truly do not work on Saturdays and Sundays?  Do they leave at a reasonable hour in the morning and return home about the same decent hour in the evening?  Are they checking their work emails during their "off" time?  Do you hear people complaining that it is increasingly difficult even to plan dinners with family and friends because of conflicting work schedules?

Remember that we are talking about people in the working age.  Think about 25 to 55.  Those of us over 55 are lucky that we are mostly done, as long as we are able to hang on to whatever we are now doing.

We seem to have created for ourselves a nepreryvka in a market economy, without a Stalin dictating it,?

Whereas we once shared the same temporal rhythms—five days on, two days off, federal holidays, thank-God-it’s-Fridays—our weeks are now shaped by the unpredictable dictates of our employers. Nearly a fifth of Americans hold jobs with nonstandard or variable hours. They may work seasonally, on rotating shifts, or in the gig economy driving for Uber or delivering for Postmates. Meanwhile, more people on the upper end of the pay scale are working long hours. Combine the people who have unpredictable workweeks with those who have prolonged ones, and you get a good third of the American labor force.

Why does this matter?  "A calendar is more than the organization of days and months. It’s the blueprint for a shared life."

Without a shared life, there are no shared memories either.  Shared memories are what we are left with, yes?

It’s a cliché among political philosophers that if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationships and local community. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She focused on the role of terror in breaking down social and family ties in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.

What good is a smartphone and "progress" if we can't get together consistently and create memories?