Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom. “The heresies of one period,” she said, always become “the orthodoxies of the next”. ... while men’s time is protected for more remunerative work. Although women in all sectors are tasked with office housework, the University of California survey focused on women in engineering and law to find out more. Post-work may be a rather grey and academic-sounding phrase, but it offers enormous, alluring promises: that life with much less work, or no work at all… It’s a very small post-work gesture. He is young and leftwing, and before academia he worked, All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work. And these were solutions intended to bring minimal disruption to a free-market economy that was still relatively popular and functional. To the post-workists, such findings are simply a sign of how unhealthy the work culture has become. For some of these writers, this future must include a universal basic income (UBI) – currently post-work’s most high-profile and controversial idea – paid by the state to every working-age person, so that they can survive when the great automation comes. 479 0 obj <> endobj To many people, this will probably sound outlandish, foolishly optimistic – and quite possibly immoral. Now that work is so ubiquitous and dominant, will today’s post-workists succeed where all their other predecessors did not? “We could say to people on the right: ‘You think work is good for people. Post-work may be a rather grey and academic-sounding phrase, but it offers enormous, alluring promises: that life with much less work, or no work at all, would be calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled – in short, that much of human experience would be transformed. Housework accounts for 85 percent of the time women in India spend on unpaid care work, the 2018 report found. Women’s unpaid work subsidizes the cost of care that sustains families, supports economies and often fills in for the lack of social services. After the political turbulence of the 60s and 70s, he says, “Conservatives freaked out at the prospect of everyone becoming hippies and abandoning work. Many of the interviewees were living in California, and despite moments of drift and doubt, they reported new feelings of “wholeness” and “openness to experience”. Since the early 2010s, as the crisis of work has become increasingly unavoidable in the US and the UK, these heretical ideas have been rediscovered and developed further. 89 quotes from Betty Friedan: 'No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. “I have one weekday off, and cram everything into the other days,” he said, as we sat in his overstuffed office on the Royal Holloway campus outside London. In Britain, possibly the sharpest outside judge of the movement is Frederick Harry Pitts, a lecturer in management at Bristol University. One of its few remaining British manifestations was the Idler magazine, which was set up in 1993 and acquired a cult status beyond its modest circulation. And yet work is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways. It is an argument most of us have long internalised. Many also take the time to relax. In 1979, Bernard Lefkowitz, then a well-known American journalist, published Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine to Five World, a book based on interviews with 100 people who had given up their jobs. ur culture of work strains to cover its flaws by claiming to be unavoidable and natural. He is young and leftwing, and before academia he worked in call centres: he knows how awful a lot of modern work is. We know work’s multiplying problems intimately, but it feels impossible to solve them all. Those who … I’ve been a Domino’s delivery driver,” he told me. For most people, it is impossible to imagine society without it. The economic consequences were mixed. Yet Pitts is suspicious of how closely the life post-workists envisage – creative, collaborative, high-minded – resembles the life they already live. Like most historians, he identifies the main building blocks of our work culture as 16th-century Protestantism, which saw effortful labour as leading to a good afterlife; 19th-century industrial capitalism, which required disciplined workers and driven entrepreneurs; and the 20th-century desires for consumer goods and self-fulfillment. Even in Britain and the US, the vogues for “downshifting” and “work-life balance” during the 90s and 00s represented an admission that the intensification of work was damaging our lives. ork is the master of the modern world. Figure 3 Global trend in time spent in unpaid care work in 25 countries, 1998-2012 Source : Charmes (2019) Nonetheless, men have never been more involved in family life than today, with more fathers, “They are not looking to their job for satisfaction or social advancement.” (You can sense this every time a graduate with a faraway look makes you a latte.). But not quite all. Just over one in 10 women – 13% – say their husbands do more housework than they do, while only 3% of married women do fewer than three hours a … Provides resources, tips and newsletter. “It felt like a watershed moment,” says Will Stronge, head of Autonomy, a British thinktank set up last year to explore the crisis of work and find ways out of it. Between 6:30am and 7:30am, most people wake up, head into personal care such as showering and brushing teeth, and then head to work, eat breakfast, relax for a bit, and do housework. As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners. In the US, sharp recent books such as Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) by the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, and No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by the historian James Livingston, have challenged the dictatorial powers and assumptions of modern employers; and also the deeply embedded American notion that the solution to any problem is working harder. In the US, sharp recent books such as Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) by the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, and No More Work: Why Full. This review is concerned with those who work other schedules either on shifts or with extended hours which transcend the day-night work-sleep pattern. However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked more per day than women--8.3 hours, compared with 7.7 hours. full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked more per day than women—8.3 hours, compared with 7.7 hours. Housework has become so ingrained in our lives that Thomas and Ruth Roy felt it necessary to create a holiday where we don’t do any chores. When the audience finally asked questions, they all accepted the post-workists’ basic premises. By the early 21st century, the work culture seemed inescapable. I’m working the equivalent of two jobs.” Later in our interview, which took place in a cafe, among other customers working on laptops – a ubiquitous modern example of leisure’s colonisation by work – she said knowingly but wearily: “Post-work is a lot of work.”, Yet the post-workists argue that it is precisely their work-saturated lives – and their experience of the increasing precarity of white-collar employment – that qualify them to demand a different world. (See table 4.) “There is little wonder the uptake for post-work thinking has been so strong among journalists and academics, as well as artists and creatives,” he wrote in a paper co-authored last year with Ana Dinerstein of Bath University, “since for these groups the alternatives [to traditional work] require little adaptation.”, Pitts also argues that post-work’s optimistic visions can be a way of avoiding questions about power in the world. Yet a national survey of companies for the government by the management consultants Inbucon-AIC found that productivity improved by about 5%: a huge increase by Britain’s usual sluggish standards. h�b```�y,����(� The average full-time student does less than an hour of laundry and volunteering per week, 3 hours of cooking and clearing up meals and 2 hours of housework. “I once worked in an Indian restaurant while I was teaching. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 55 percent of American mothers employed full time do some housework on an average day, while only 18 percent of employed fathers do. Audiences trebled for late-night BBC radio DJs such as John Peel. “Mankind is hardwired to work,” as the Conservative MP Nick Boles puts it in a new book, Square Deal. Corporate superstars show off their epic work schedules. We resist acknowledging these as more than isolated problems – such is work’s centrality to our belief systems – but the evidence of its failures is all around us. Or are the utopians the people who think work is going to carry on as it is?”. ��Y But these were solutions for individuals, and often wealthy individuals – the rock star Alex James attracted huge media attention for becoming a cheesemaker in the Cotswolds – rather than society as a whole. Countries are sorted by paid work hours in the chart – from highest to lowest. The key to making this monthly cleaning schedule work for you is combining it with the daily cleaning checklist.Used together, the daily checklist keeps your entire house looking tidy, while the monthly routine guides you through getting it truly clean.. In a survey of more than 3,000 workers, women were 29% more likely than white men to report doing more office housework … Even once the new work ethic was established, working patterns continued to shift and be challenged. It’s quite an exclusionary vision: to do those things, you need to be able-bodied.” She also detects a deeper conservative impulse: “It’s almost as if some people are saying: ‘Since we’re going to challenge work, other things have to stay the same.’”. 0 By the end of the 70s, it was possible to believe that the relatively recent supremacy of work might be coming to an end in the more comfortable parts of the west. Women reported spending an average of 2.6 hours a day on household activities, and men 2.0 hours. On 1 May 1979, one of the greatest champions of the modern work culture, Margaret Thatcher, made her final campaign speech before being elected prime minister. The F.D.A. An appetite for a society that treats work differently certainly exists. The disappearance of the paid job could finally bring about one of the oldest goals of feminism: that housework and raising children are no longer accorded a lower status. The emergence of the modern work ethic from this chain of phenomena was “an accident of history,” Hunnicutt says. And yet the difficulty of shedding the burdens and satisfactions of work is obvious when you meet the post-workists. He found a former architect who tinkered with houseboats and bartered; an ex-reporter who canned his own tomatoes and listened to a lot of opera; and a former cleaner who enjoyed lie-ins and a sundeck overlooking the Pacific. “Normal” hours of work are generally taken to mean a working day with hours left for recreation and rest. Part-time jobs and jobs in the informal sector do earn less than full-time jobs, so men have to increase their paid work hours in order to compensate for the lacking family income. In the UK, almost two-thirds of those in poverty – around 8 million people – are in working households. “There is lots of worklessness,” he says, “but with no social policies to dignify it.”. When he wrote an article for the website Politico in 2014 arguing for shorter working hours, he was shocked by the reaction it provoked. One of post-work’s best arguments is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the work ideology is neither natural nor very old. Work has ruled our lives for centuries, and it does so today more than ever. And crucially, wages were high enough, for most people, to make working less a practical possibility. For a week, at frequent but random intervals, at work and at home, these employees were contacted and asked to fill in questionnaires about what they were doing and how they were feeling. It’s going to change again. An obsession with employability runs through education. But it was a strange sensation at first: almost like launching myself off the side of a swimming pool. After meeting Pitts in Bristol, I went to a post-work event there organised by Autonomy. Married American mothers spend almost twice as much time on housework and child care than do … Offers a system for organizing and managing a home, based on the concept of daily routines and a focus on small, time- and space-limited tasks. Sometimes, economic shocks accelerated the process. There was this intricate sociability. Adapting office blocks and other workplaces for other purposes would be a huge task, which the post-workists have only just begun to think about. Friends pitch each other business ideas. “The crisis of work is also a crisis of home,” declared the social theorists Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in a paper last year. At work, they were regularly in a state the psychologists called “flow” – “enjoying the moment” by using their knowledge and abilities to the full, while also “learning new skills and increasing self-esteem”. Digital technology lets work invade leisure. Even the Daily Mail loosened up, with one columnist suggesting that parents “experiment more in their sex lives while the children are doing a five-day week at school”. The left must have an answer | John Harris, Cover illustration for long read on post-work by andy beckett 19 jan 2018 Illustration: nathalie lees, Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs. As Joanna Biggs put it in her quietly disturbing 2015 book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, “Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”. Post-work ideas are also circulating in party politics. “Thinking was stimulated” inside Whitehall and some companies, the consultants noted, “on the possibility of arranging a permanent four-day week.”. Hunnicutt, the historian of work, sees the US as more resistant than other countries to post-work ideas – at least for now. Your job could be killing you, What happens when the jobs dry up in the new world? Our culture of work strains to cover its flaws by claiming to be unavoidable and natural. Last April, the Green party proposed that weekends be lengthened to three days. You take as long as you want, have a long lunch, spread the work though the day.”, Town and city centres today are arranged for work and consumption – work’s co-conspirator – and very little else; this is one of the reasons a post-work world is so hard to imagine. “There have been examples of this before,” she says, “like ‘Red Vienna’ in the early 20th century, when the [social democratic] city government built housing estates with communal laundries, workshops, and shared living spaces that were quite luxurious.” Post-work is about the future, but it is also bursting with the past’s lost possibilities. A new anti-work movement has taken shape. But the post-workists insist they are the realists now. Most people’s earnings fell. “Hard-working families” are idealised by politicians. As a source of sustainable consumer booms and mass home-ownership – for much of the 20th century, the main successes of mainstream western economic policy – work is discredited daily by our ongoing debt and housing crises. Among others, Graeber condemned “private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers … telemarketers, bailiffs”, and the “ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone is spending so much of their time working”. It felt alien – almost impossible to do, without the moral power of having a child to look after.”. But it’s a dystopic one.” Office employees constantly interrupting their long days with online distractions; gig-economy workers whose labour plays no part in their sense of identity; and all the people in depressed, post-industrial places who have quietly given up trying to earn – the spectre of post-work runs through the hard, shiny culture of modern work like hidden rust. My students would come in to eat, and see me cooking, and say: ‘Hi, is that you, Will?’ Unconsciously, that’s why Autonomy came about.”, James Smith was the only post-workist I met who had decided to do less work. The work culture has many more critics now. Unemployment was lower than it had been for decades. A large part of the left has always organised itself around work. (See table 4.) “We haven’t talked to people on the right,” Stronge admits. In the US, the average wage has stagnated for half a century. In 1884, the socialist William Morris proposed that in “beautiful” factories of the future, surrounded by gardens for relaxation, employees should work only “four hours a day”. ow that work is so ubiquitous and dominant, will today’s post-workists succeed where all their other predecessors did not? However, if you have just as much free time as she does and do the housework for her because you don’t want her getting angry, then she’s going to lose respect for you as a man. Other forecasters doubt whether work can be sustained in its current, toxic form on a warming planet. She reflected on the nature of change in politics and society. In the US, “belief in work is crumbling among people in their 20s and 30s”, says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a leading historian of work. Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Is it time to start thinking of an alternative? Graeber argues that in a less labour-intensive society, our capacity for things other than work could be built up again. Between 1800 and 1900, the average working week in the west shrank from about 80 hours to about 60 hours. “I spend it with our one-and-a-half-year-old. Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers. Both have been so shaped by work, she argues, that a post-work society will redraw them. In his intoxicating 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Illich attacked the “serfdom” created by industrial machinery, and demanded: “Give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency … from power drills to mechanised pushcarts.” Illich wanted the public to rediscover what he saw as the freedom of the medieval artisan, while also embracing the latest technology. But for those who think work will just carry on as it is, there is a warning from history. Then you get a form from your local council telling you about things going on in your area: a five-a-side football tournament, say, or community activism – Big Society stuff, almost.” Other scenarios he proposes may disappoint those who dream of non-stop leisure: “I’m under no illusion that paid work is going to disappear entirely. “Mankind is hardwired to work,” as the Conservative MP Nick Boles puts it in a new book, Square Deal. 497 0 obj <>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[<6182826DAC815B49B13948516BA9808B>]/Index[479 35]/Info 478 0 R/Length 90/Prev 230899/Root 480 0 R/Size 514/Type/XRef/W[1 2 1]>>stream Some post-workists think work should not be abolished but redistributed, so that every adult labours for roughly the same satisfying but not exhausting number of hours. Golf courses were busier, and fishing-tackle shops reported large sales increases. From noon to 1:00pm, you see a lot of movement from work or housework to eating and drinking and then back again. With people having more time, and probably less money, private life could also become more communal, she suggests, with families sharing kitchens, domestic appliances, and larger facilities. But a new generation of thinkers insists there is an alternative. But it is not, so far, overwhelming: the evening’s total attendance was less than 70. ', 'Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength. Some men did more housework: the Colchester Evening Gazette interviewed a young married printer who had taken over the hoovering. “A post-work society is meant to resolve conflicts between different economic interest groups – that’s part of its appeal,” he told me. As a source of subsistence, let alone prosperity, work is now insufficient for whole social classes. Creating a more benign post-work world will be more difficult now than it would have been in the 70s. Explorers of a huge economic and social territory that has been neglected for decades– like Keynes and other thinkers who challenged the rule of work – they alternate between confidence and doubt. Like many post-workists, Stronge has been employed for years on poorly paid, short-term academic contracts. “Work as we know it is a recent construct,” says Hunnicutt. Graeber, Hester, Srnicek, Hunnicutt, Fleming and others are members of a loose, transatlantic network of thinkers who advocate a profoundly different future for western economies and societies, and also for poorer countries, where the crises of work and the threat to it from robots and climate change are, they argue, even greater. Frequent strikes provided highly public examples of work routines being interrupted and challenged. “With the Labour party, the clue is in the name,” says Chuka Umunna, the centre-left Labour MP and former shadow business secretary, who has become a prominent critic of post-work thinking as it has spread beyond academia. There is a strong artisan tendency in today’s post-work movement. ', and 'It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. I’m always doing admin, or marking, or writing something. In 2016, shadow chancellor John McDonnell said Labour was “developing” a proposal for a UBI in the UK. As with free-market capitalism in general, the worse work gets, the harder it is to imagine actually escaping it, so enormous are the steps required. US workers, the psychologists concluded, had an “inability to organise [their] psychic energy in unstructured free time”. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is play. “I love my job,” Helen Hester, a professor of media and communication at the University of West London, told me. In this earnest, purposeful context, the anti-work tradition, when it was remembered at all, could seem a bit decadent. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in recent history. ne of post-work’s best arguments is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the work ideology is neither natural nor very old. The end of work as we know it will seem unthinkable – until it has happened. In half of all families with children, women are the primary or co-breadwinner1 . 513 0 obj <>stream --On days they worked, women were slightly more likely than men to do some or all of their work at home--26 percent of women, compared with 22 percent of men. During the 80s, the aggressively pro-business governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan strengthened the power of employers, and used welfare cuts and moralistic rhetoric to create a much harsher environment for people without jobs. Like an empire that has expanded too far, work may be both more powerful and more vulnerable than ever before. An obsession with employability runs through education. According to the 2018 American Time Use Survey, 84 percent of women and 69 percent of men reported that they spent some time performing household duties, which included "housework, cooking, lawn care, or household management." Instead, she would like the movement to think more radically about the nuclear home and family. Poverty fell steadily. In Britain, possibly the sharpest outside judge of the movement is Frederick Harry Pitts, a lecturer in management at Bristol University. Wages for most people were rising. Despite being a Tory MP from the most pro-business wing of his party, Nick Boles accepts in his book that a future society “may redefine work to include child-rearing and taking care of elderly relatives, and finally start valuing these contributions properly”. For the two months it lasted, people’s non-work lives expanded. More women than ever were working. And away from our unpredictable, all-consuming workplaces, vital human activities are increasingly neglected. “The postwar years, when people worked less and it was easier to be on the dole, produced beat poetry, avant garde theatre, 50-minute drum solos, and all Britain’s great pop music – art forms that take time to produce and consume.”, The return of the drum solo may not be everyone’s idea of progress. “So are we the utopians? Friends pitch each other business ideas. “I’ve worked as a breakfast cook. Digital technology lets work invade leisure. “There’s no boundary between my time off and on. One common proposal is for a new type of public building, usually envisaged as a well-equipped combination of library, leisure centre and artists’ studios. Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers. Post-work is spreading feminist ideas to new places. Stronge suggests a daily routine for post-work citizens that would include a provocative degree of state involvement: “You get your UBI payment from the government. Trade union pressure, technological change, enlightened employers, and government legislation all progressively eroded the dominance of work. From 1900 to the 1970s, it shrank steadily further: to roughly 40 hours in the US and the UK. “There were personal attacks by email and telephone – that I was some sort of communist and devil-worshipper.” Yet he senses weakness behind such strenuous efforts to shut the work conversation down. In today’s lower-wage economy, suggesting people do less work for less pay is a hard sell. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in recent history. Outside the insular, intense working cultures of Britain and the US, the reduction of work has long been a mainstream notion. “We’re in contact with Labour, and we’re going to meet the Greens soon.” Like most British post-workists, he is leftwing in his politics, part of the new milieu of ambitious young activist intellectuals that has grown up around Corbyn’s leadership.

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