Many decades ago world-shaping philosophers and economists pondered what the working world would be for future generations. Considering the gradual decline in working hours that was already then evident, many concluded that by, say, the early 21st century,
we would be working even less.
In the late 1880s the artist William Morris proposed a future in which we worked only 24 hours a week. Back during the Great Depression, the great economist John Maynard Keynes went further, reckoning we’d all have a 15-hour working week by the end of this decade—the “age of leisure and abundance”, if you hadn’t noticed.
For them this was not the stuff of science fiction—the world of Star Trek: Next Generation, in which money, scarcity and labour no longer exist, in which everyone is free to pursue their own idea of self-determination. For them it very much looked to be, inevitably, the stuff of reality. And they were partly right: from 1800 to the 1970s, thanks to unionism and enlightened employers, working hours were gradually eroded until we arrived at the archetypal ‘40 hour week’.
And yet, somehow, this trajectory has not only stalled, but tech, corporate culture and
an ‘always on’ mindset have extended working hours again for many, with job security and
satisfaction, poll after poll suggests, having plummeted. Utopia has not arrived. The word
‘utopia’, in fact, is an invention of Thomas More, whose book of the same name also provided a vision of the future in which, he posited, everybody worked a six hour day. More wrote Utopia in 1551. And yet here we still are, talking of ‘downshifting’ and ‘work-life balance’, yet without the time to devote to our children, or caring for our elderly, or our hobbies, or just doing nothing.
“What is needed,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in In Praise of Idleness in 1935,
“is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of overwork and the reduction of work to a minimum.” What he could not have foreseen was that it might take a global pandemic to amplify the rebellion. Many people were forced to stop work, giving them the chance to take stock and assess why they felt so burned out. They worked from home and found they actually liked their family. They thought deeply about what the hell they were doing with their lives.
“At the end of the 20th century the idea of a 15-hour working week was an inevitability. And yet, trajectory has not only stalled, but tech, corporate culture and an ‘always on’ mindset have extended working hours for many”
There was also what came to be called ‘The Great Resignation’. Millions, at least those with the right safety nets, quit work— retiring, trading out, changing their lifestyles to subsist on fewer hours and a lower income —leaving a labour shortfall in many nations, and governments desperate to find ways to tempt people back into employment for the sake of the seemingly never-ending pursuit of economic growth. It is, as Elizabeth Anderson, professor or philosophy at the University of Michigan, puts it, “screwed up”.
“The fact is that work is getting worse and worse for workers,” argues Anderson, author of the forthcoming Hijacked: How Neo-Liberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers. “Neo-liberalism, broadly, has seen corporations acquire the power to extract wealth from workers without adding value. And that’s turned into shareholder capitalism, in which the [key] purpose of a corporation is to dish out money to shareholders. Or a business model that’s all about building brands, and outsourcing all the actual work, which pushes workers to the periphery [of concerns]. In so much work now employees have just been
made infinitely replaceable.”
But what if there was something that not long ago would have been considered heretical—a more conscious rejection of work? Covid has also brought to the fore something that was bubbling away before. There is anarchistic talk of ‘anti-work’: a challenge to the economic order that underpins the workplace, that reframes work as fulfilling rather than as mere drudgery, that moves away from a system where we must sell our labour just to survive and regards—as the business department’s name blithely suggests we do—humans as ‘resources’.
After all, as the late anthropologist David Graeber, noted, this system—in which the value of what is produced per hour worked is inexorably slowing—now appears to be shored up by so many of what he provocatively called “bullshit jobs”. The true function of these seems not to in any way contribute to society, or to the individual’s well-being, but rather merely to fill their time and keep them in their place.
“Huge swathes of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound,” Graeber wrote. “It’s as if someone was out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.” One such bullshit job, Graeber suggests? HR.
“Remember the ‘essential workers’ of the pandemic?” says Professor Kathi Weeks of Duke University, North Carolina, and author of The Problem With Work. “That’s an incredibly telling category, because most workers aren’t.”
“‘Post’work’ isn’t about moving beyond all productive economic activity, but trying to imagine how we think work could be, about radical changes that would make work more humane.”
For the less anarchistic there is talk of ‘post-work’: proposals, mostly from leading academics, to reconfigure our working lives so that we work, if not at all, then at least considerably less. “The pandemic has helped to clarify, magnify and publicise problems with work that are systematic,” argues Weeks.
“It’s not just stagnant wages and bad bosses. It’s that people are underpaid relative to the value they create, subordinate to the demands of their employers and work in dramatically undemocratic workplaces. ‘Post’work’ isn’t about moving beyond all productive economic activity, but trying to imagine how we think work could be, about radical changes that would make work more humane. Does everyone have to work? Does everyone have to work as much, or for a lifetime?”
Slowly, some governments are responding—last year the UAE, for example, made the bold
decision to officially adopt the world’s first four-and-a-half day working week, with the Emirate of Sharjah shifting to a four day work week. Bahrain and Oman are said to be considering a similar switch too, which has likewise been trialled by companies in other parts of the world, from Chile to Denmark.
Last year, for example, a pilot programme in the UK saw 61 employers—in manufacturing, software, recruitment and other sectors—adopt a four day working week for six months, with employees getting full pay for 80 percent of their normal hours. Remarkably, none reported a drop in productivity and some an actual increase—left to their own devices, employees founds the efficiencies to do five days work in four, which some might suggest is not quite the improvement desired for the long term—with 56 of the employers keeping a four-day week at the trial’s end.
There is now more vocal consideration of a universal basic income (UBI) too. Like minimal working hours, this isn’t a new idea—Thomas Paine proposed it back in 1797. It’s that a nation’s collective wealth, from both its natural resources and that passed down through the generations, should not land in the laps of the lucky few but is, in fact, the wealth of the commons and so should be rightfully distributed – by giving every citizen a regular payment that’s enough to cover basic living costs, allowing them to work more or less as they choose.
The fact that many governments provided furlough payments during the pandemic is, to some, evidence that such a UBI would be feasible given the political will. In 2020, Spain went as far as to launch what was called the world’s biggest economics experiment by putting in place a proto-UBI programme. UNESCO recently published a paper arguing that decades of evidence shows that UBIs—which it reframed as “unconditional national dividends”—simplified welfare systems, empowered women, and improved health, among other benefits.
For nations of the Middle East, a UBI would be easier to implement. And yet the UBI has been a divisive policy idea for years, often deliberately misrepresented as an ineffective way to alleviate poverty. And that’s a consequence of deep-seated ideas about work that will need to be challenged before a post-work society might be achieved.
“We’re stuck on the idea that work as some kind of moral good, that “work will make you better…that we should feel guilty whenever we’re not being productive.”
Russell, again, argued that we’re stuck on the idea that work as some kind of moral good, that “work will make you better,” as he put it. “A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work”, underpinned as it is by religion and the pervasive Protestant work ethic—the notion that working hard will get you into heaven. To this we can add what might be called the self-help/time management industrial complex and its insistence that we should feel guilty whenever we’re not being productive. Work is central to our politics, economics and social lives.
No wonder some might prefer the status quo: “Work is a faith many hold dear. It’s this modern religion [and] belief system that we go to in order to find our identity, our purpose, our meaning,” argues Benjamin Hunnicutt, professor of history at the University of Iowa, and author of Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. “But it’s counter-balanced by the doubt that there’s anything else: without work what is there but a great vacuum? It’s been so long it’s pretty hard to imagine a realistic moral alternative to work. So there’s a fear of leisure. Yet more free time was once equated with progress.”
“The ideology of work is still just so strong. Work holds this cultural kudos: if you work you’re a ‘good citizen’, a ‘contributor to society’. But as the need to work becomes less it becomes dangerous for the ruling elites to insist on that idea, to up the ante on the moralism,” argues Cass Business School professor Peter Fleming, author of The Death
of Homo Economicus.
“I think there’s a strong element of control [in the desire to maintain current working habits] too because when you’re at work you’re ‘official’,” he adds. “People know where you are and what you’re doing. Sometimes it seems [those in power] would rather keep the current system until it crashes and burns, rather than make changes. But clearly the narrative of work as we’ve known it is in big trouble. I think we’re just unsure as to where that goes.”
Perhaps the first step is a more widespread awareness of the big trouble that work is in. Karl Marx outlined the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—that it could provide the organisation and production systems to abolish what he called “alienated” work, and give us all so much more free time, yet it clings to work as if it was the only possible organising principle both for society and people’s lives. We work, we spend—profits are made—and we need to work more. Repeat. Die.
Might now, asks Hunnicutt, more of us finally be coming to openly acknowledge, as an existential challenge, that most work is repetitive and boring? If, he says, a cashier’s job was a video game—find the barcode, scan, slide, repeat—it would be called mindless. Yet politicians still pitch such a job as intrinsic to that person’s dignity. Of course, there is that rough third of the working population said to love what they do. For the majority, polls suggest, those things we might hope for from a job—autonomy, fulfilment and so on—are sorely lacking.
“The idea that work is a belief system to which we go in order to find our identity, our purpose, our meaning, is increasingly shaky, increasingly incredible,” says Hunnicutt, who, less than a decade ago, faced death threats in response to writing an article proposing the introduction of a UBI in the U.S. “People are beginning to lose faith, if you like. It’s a bit dramatic to say we’re rejecting work but we’re considering other possibilities rather than devoting life to a job that doesn’t deliver on its promises. We’re thinking more of work as a means to an end, as we used to, rather than as an end in itself, and that’s especially true of younger generations.”
“The lack of work can lead to mental and physical illness, relationship breakdown and abuse. Or, at least, in a culture that insists on work being so core to our being that we struggle to imagine who we are without it”
Indeed, that work is an unalloyed good, in and of itself, is such a prevalent idea that those institutions that oppose the introduction of a UBI often do so on the judgement that it would only encourage people to slide into laziness and dissolution (while typically not seeing the lack of labour in the rich as similarly problematic). There’s a lack of trust that individuals can find the best way to spend their own time. There’s also the concern that
a UBI would decrease economic participation —governments want us to keep spending,
remember—even though evidence suggests it actually increases it.
Russell, however, reckoned that the most meaningful work one could actually choose to do comes from our leisure time—it’s in leisure that humans are the most inventive. Einstein, famously, would spend hours just staring at the ceiling. The decline in paid work might spark a resurgence in artistry, craftsmanship and artisan-making, with the economy founded less in consumption as in creativity, in the sense of ‘flow’ that we all find so enriching.
Technology—from social media to apps and 3D printing—is already allowing many people to become cultural producers in ways only entire professional organisations could afford before. In fact, it’s only since industrialisation and urbanisation that paid employment became a staple of society at all —before, as many traditional cultures still do, people picked up paid work here and there, but still remained productive in between. It may be far from ideal in many ways—the lack of security, the lack of paid holidays, pension and healthcare —but arguably the gig economy offers the same freedoms.
There may, though, be some truth in the naysayers’ concerns. The psychologists Judith LeFevre and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found through their classic 1989 study that “the paradox of work” is that people are often happier complaining about it than wallowing in too much leisure time. A UCLA Anderson School of Management study in 2018 further revealed that working Americans’ life satisfaction started to tail off if they had any more than 2.5 hours of free time a day. More than that was just too stressful, too clouded with ennui.
“Work that is properly organised and meaningful is important for human flourishing —people need to be needed, not to feel useless,” Elizabeth Anderson asserts. “Meaningful work doesn’t have to be wage labour. Sure, there are many people with the drive to be artisans, but there are lot of people who don’t, and I worry about those people.”
Certainly studies suggest that the jobless don’t use their spare time especially productively either—rather they watch TV and sleep a lot. They have more time to socialise, and yet don’t. The impact of not working can be seismic too. It’s harder to recover from long-term joblessness than it is from bereavement.
The lack of work can lead to mental and physical illness, relationship breakdown, abuse. Or, at least, it can in a culture that insists on work being so core to our being that we struggle, for the time-being anyway, to imagine what we might do, or who we might be, without it.
Yes, it’s hard to change an operating system, especially one that has a monopoly on the hardware. But imagine an alternative we must. In the 1980s, the French social theorist Andre Gorz proclaimed that “the abolition of work is a process already underway, and constitutes the central political issue of the coming decades”. And, he said, the sooner we came to terms with the inevitability of this, the better. That, reckons Tom Juravich, professor of labour studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will require big business to lead by example.
“I don’t think policy people have understood how big this shift in thinking about work is yet and I don’t see effective change coming one ‘mom and pop’ business at a time,” he says. “What it will take are major employers—an Amazon, a Google—to make a bold experiment in changing working hours, and so far they seem to be doing very little to set new standards. We need these kinds of big businesses to question if we can re-work the rules so people can still be seen as good employees while working less, without them being expected to be ‘all in’ for the company. And that’s a big cultural shift.”
But one that may be coming, like it or not. Serious consideration of a world in which we all work much less may well be forced, says Jack Kellam, lead editor at independent future of work research organisation Autonomy, given both environmental challenges and an aging population.
And, what’s more, the exponentially rising capabilities of ever cheaper automation—from self-service checkouts to self-driving cars and drone deliveries—and artificial intelligence.
These are often cited as inevitably leading to the redundancy of many forms of work. With AI already able to diagnose illnesses better than doctors, offer expert legal advice, trade stocks and even (surely not) write articles, no job, we’re told, will be safe. AI could take over a third to one half of all jobs within 20 years, by one terrifying/exhilarating estimate, though Kellam reckons “the outlook is likely a lot messier than we might imagine, neither dystopian—mass unemployment—nor utopian —the robots will do everything, but driving the discussion around work all the same.”
“The elephant in the room about moving to a post-work society is that the demand for labour just isn’t there anymore, which is why you see service workers needing two or three jobs to stay afloat.”
On the plus side, many of life’s necessities will become ever cheaper too. Great wealth may follow, but so will great many people with not much to do. One vision has it that this will come incrementally and slow enough for us all to adapt to new ways of working, or not working. Some say technology has been having this effect for a long time already. New industries just don’t require human labour like they used to either: in the developed world, the share of prime-age men neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the 1970s; the number of jobs in manufacturing is down 30% since just 2000.
“That’s the elephant in the room for all of this discussion about moving to a post-work society,” says Peter Fleming, who cheerfully predicts three or four decades of hardship until we work things out. “The demand for labour just isn’t there anymore, which is why you see service workers needing two or three jobs to stay afloat. And a service economy just doesn’t make jobs as manufacturing once did. But nobody in power ever admits as much. Elections are all about job, jobs, jobs, not how we need to change our approach to work.”
No wonder there’s a glut of over-qualified, debt-burdened young workers using their degrees to wait tables and stack shelves. They must be wondering where the dream careers they were sold on went. And whether they, as the next generation, need to rethink the place of work in their lives at a more profound level.
“People are starting to push back against the accepted idea of work, because they’re seeing the fundamental fault line that runs through it,” says Kathi Weeks. “There’s a long way to go to bring change, but there’s a new level of critical consciousness about it all. The quality of the discussion about a post-work world is radically different to what it was just 10 years ago. Now re-thinking work makes real sense.