It’s Friday night. Maybe you’re winding down after a day of work – 8ish hours (plus commute) spent behind a desk, or on your feet; indoors behind a screen or outside exposed to the elements (or industrial chemicals and construction dust); in and out of meetings, talking to clients, coworkers, customers, your boss, or in isolation; providing a service and exerting yourself physically, mentally, or emotionally. Grateful for the upcoming two days “off” – 48 hours to clean the house, go shopping for groceries, prepare meals for the week, care for those dependent on you, rest, connect with your social network, your family, your kids, your self. Or, maybe you’re just getting ready for the night shift, or starting your work week through the weekend, or switching over to your second job. Maybe you’ve mastered the art of moonlighting, and are finally falling into a sense of financial security by expanding the hours you spend working into the 50s, 60s, 70s range… Maybe you’re tired. Maybe you’re wondering where your week went, or dreading the week ahead. Maybe you’ve started to notice That Funny Feeling that something just isn’t right, but between all this work you’re doing to stay afloat you haven’t the time or energy to explore what it could be.
Or maybe, just maybe, you like your job, find fulfillment and joy in your work, and feel valued and properly compensated in your employment (if this is you, this piece might not hit as hard – but we’ve likely all been caught up in the consumption of work at some point in our lives, or know and care about someone who has.) Either way, you deserve the opportunity to question the exhaustion, the burnout, the dread, the “Sunday scaries”, and that funny feeling. You deserve to understand the nature of your work, connect to the hours spent working, and believe in the point of it all in the grand scheme of this one precious life.
Whether it’s the job we work for the majority of our waking hours each week, the unpaid labor we are tasked with doing to meet the needs of daily living, or the dedication we put toward our passion projects, no one is a stranger to work. It is such an important part of our existence, we often think of our days as time spent sleeping, eating, participating in leisure, and working. An assessment of the ways that people spend their time across the world shows that work – paid labor – undeniably makes up a significant portion of the human experience. And the percentage would be even larger if unpaid and therefore often invisibilized care and maintenance activities of daily living were also recognized as work.
In a clever capitalist catch-22, we spend so much of our time and energy working, that we never really get the chance to question our understanding of work. Given the time off and rest required for our minds to wander into that territory, the questions rise:
What is work? Who does my work serve? Is there inherent value in work?
Is there such a thing as work-life balance?
Why do we think about “work” as separate from “life” if we work while living?
What work matters now?
Why are some of us encouraged to seek meaning through work?
What might it look like to take a different relationship to work?
What kinds of worlds can be built if we reclaimed our work in alignment with the needs of the world?
What is Work?
It’s Saturday. You work an administrative job Monday through Friday, and today is your day off. You’ve slept in, making up for the lack of sleep from early morning alarms to get you on the road and at your desk before 9 am every day. The extra rest was needed, but now there’s less time in the day to tackle that to-do list. You didn’t have time to clean the kitchen or wash dishes during the week, the garden needs serious tending, the car’s been making that weird rattling noise again. The book you said you were going to finish last weekend is now underneath a growing pile of mail that desperately needs to be sorted through. (Is the car insurance due? Are those tax forms?) While there are no mandatory meetings or emails to send, there is plenty that needs to be done. You can’t help but feel like this, too, is work.
While it may be tempting to dive into the many arrangements of work in our modern world, point out the places of exploitation, and dream into the avenues for reclamation, integration, and revolution, it is helpful to first build a shared baseline. We begin by answering the question: What is work?
As defined by classical western physics, work is the energy transferred to an object when a physical force is applied to move the object over some distance. In the most textbook sense of the word, work is the energy required to move an object; it is the energy of effort. An etymologist would likely align with this definition, tracing the word back to its earliest Proto-Indo-European root, werg, meaning most simply “to do.” Dictionaries that convey contemporary usage define the word with only minor additions, offering that to work is to “be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result.” Even today, work has a broad, though not unlimited, definition – it involves purportedly purposeful doing with the body or mind, but perhaps not the spirit or emotional heart.
Living requires work. This isn’t just a human thing – it’s a corporeal reality. It takes energy to grow photosynthetic leaves, forage for food, hunt for prey, sow seeds, harvest edible material, shop at the grocery store, prepare a meal, or place a take-out order. Even if you’re someone who typically skips ahead to the end of that list, you probably still need to exchange labor to accumulate enough money to purchase the food required to sustain human life. (And even if you are wealthy enough to have someone obtain, prepare, and feed you without any pre-mastication labor on your part, your digestive system will still have to break those grapes you’ve been hand-fed into usable nutriment.)
The reality of work is that it is exists in a greater metabolism of energy exchange – while maintaining life requires work, work is inherently dependent on the energy of the living. Exerting a physical force to move an object requires an input of energy, and — if we want to direct where the object moves — we’ll need to either engage the work of another living organism or channel another force (e.g., wind, water, combustion). To understand the work necessary for subsistence requires that we recognize our entanglement with the work of many other forces acting outside of our own autonomy, and how we may rely on them.
What work am I benefitting from without realizing? What work am I performing without recognizing?
What are the ripple effects of the work am I doing, or whose work is my work enabling/supporting?
Where did our ideas of work come from, anyways?
Why We Work
It’s Sunday. You’ve scored another day of (mostly) being in charge of how to spend your time. Working through enough of your To-Do list yesterday to not feel too much stress or guilt, you’ve made plans for a day of leisure. A friend invited you to lunch, and another to see a movie. Energized and ambitious, you commit to both – there are things to do, places to go, and people to see! After the movie, an unsettling but familiar anxiety starts to creep in… not the Sunday Scaries again! Back to the grind already? Just when your body was starting to let go of its near-constant tension, you’re back to setting that early morning alarm. Laying in bed, the anxiety reminds you that the day of leisure cost you, as did the car repairs and the bills in that stack of mail. You let out a tired sigh and think to yourself “Well, that’s the point of working, right?”
Our current understanding of work is shaped by much more than definitions and the demand for sustaining life. Work as we know it has been influenced by the many layers of different cultures that we have been born into, interact with, and contribute to.
Deeply embedded in each of our psyches lies an explanation for why we work. Perhaps it is this understanding of sustenance that drives our motivations – that our work is an exchange of time and energy for the materials that will give us access to our basic needs for survival – food, water, shelter, happiness, etc. We are innately aware that the most basic work of survival must necessarily be met before any other labor is possible.
But not to be ignored are the elements of purpose, meaning, identity, and value we associate with our explanation of why we work – the belief that the work one performs gives meaning to life, and that our purpose as human beings in this world is “to do” – to engage ourselves energetically and with effort to achieve some desired result. That said, to find purpose and meaning through work is a privilege not available to all. The options for work are limited by the differential values ascribed to different types of work. Further, what may be considered “purposeful” or “meaningful” work may also be made inaccessible to certain individuals on the basis of gender, race, or socioeconomic class.
The understandings of work that we hold might run deeper than attempting to survive and thrive under capitalism. The dominant narrative in modernity asserts that everyone needs to work. To be a valued member in society, one must contributes their time and energy to working hours. Those who find themselves in a state of unemployment (upwards of 7 milllion in the United States currently) are often painted as lazy people that have a choice in whether or not they find and hold a status of employment, neglecting the various physical and social factors that play into one’s ability to do so. Villianizing unemployment has been longstanding in the United States, as seen in the quote engraved on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC:
“No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.” – FDR
In the context of the mass unemployment and deprivation of the Great Depression, connecting unemployment and demoralization is understandable. But this sentiment has mutated over the better part of a century. Laid bare, modern moralizing about workforce participation and worth is venal. Tightly connecting “worth” and “gainful employment” without any assessment of whether that work it is a net good, neutral, or overwhelmingly bad seems off-base, at best. Something’s not quite right, and certainly not universally true about this construction.
But where does this cultural compulsion to work come from? There may be explanations hidden deeply in the stories that Mother Culture has steeped into our subconscious collective rearing under the school of modernity. Recognizing this, we might begin to wonder: How has the way we’ve been told we are to exist in the world shaped our perception of work? Let’s unpack the cultural cosmologies, the origin stories of our human ancestors, and the oral and written traditions of both ancient and modern religions that have danced through generations of workers.
In the story of Adam and Eve, told and shared widely in all the Abrahamic religions, work is framed as a kind of punishment. After Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they are exiled from the Garden of Eden—a place of divine abundance—and cast into a world where they must labor to survive. Work becomes toil, a burden born of disobedience and separation from the sacred. This cosmology undergirds a dominant worldview in which humans are seen as fundamentally apart from nature, and the Earth as something to be subdued in order to meet our needs. In this telling, knowledge leads to rupture; labor is retribution.
This severance has shaped how modernity imagines work: not as something relational, creative, or regenerative, but as a chore—an individual obligation to earn survival in a world of scarcity. Even the idiom “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, once a sarcastic quip about doing the impossible, has become a badge of honor. In this framing, struggle is sanctified, and success is privatized.
But in another land, a different story took root.
In various versions of the Turtle Island creation story, shared among many Indigenous nations across North America, humans are not cast out for seeking knowledge. Instead, they are born into a collective project of world-building. When Sky Woman falls from the sky, she is caught by the geese and rests on the back of a great turtle. The animals work together to gather soil from the depths of the water so that land can form on the turtle’s back. Sky Woman plants seeds she brought with her, and life begins.
This story emphasizes collaboration, reciprocity, and mutual aid across species. The Earth is not a punishment, but a gift. Work is not exile, but participation in the ongoing weaving of life. Animals are honored as kin and co-creators, and humans are invited into a relationship of gratitude, responsibility, and interdependence. Knowledge here does not sever; it binds.
In yet another tradition, across the Atlantic and rooted in West Africa, the Yoruba creation story speaks of Obatala, an Orisha entrusted by the Supreme Creator, Olodumare, with shaping the Earth. Obatala descends from the heavens carrying a snail shell filled with sand, a hen, a palm nut, and a black cat. He pours the sand upon the primordial waters, and the hen scratches it out to form the land. The palm nut becomes the first tree. The black cat becomes his companion.
Here, again, we see a cosmology of co-creation. Work is not punishment, but sacred trust. The world is formed not through divine fiat or human dominance, but through relationship and cooperation with other beings. The story reminds us that land is not made solely by gods or humans, but by hens and seeds and soil and rhythm. And that true power—àṣẹ—flows not from control, but from harmony with the animating force in all things.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass:
“Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.”
We are steeped in stories about our very existence in the world, and those stories shape our ways of living, relating, and laboring. The Edenic narrative has deeply influenced modern, Western consciousness—positioning humans outside of, and often against, nature. But the stories of Skywoman and Obatala (among many others) offer different instructions. They tell us that work can be a gesture of care, that labor can be regenerative, and that our place in the world is not as lords over it, but as participants in its unfolding.
To return to these stories—or let them return to us—is to begin healing a deep wound. Not through nostalgia or appropriation, but through honoring the plurality of ways that humans have understood their role in the web of life. These stories do not erase hardship—but they frame it within relationship, reciprocity, and reverence. And perhaps, in this time of unraveling, such stories can help us remember not just how to survive through hard work, but how to belong, in part, through our labors.
What might it look like if our justifications for work were rooted more deeply in an understanding of our interconnectedness with the life that surrounds us? What is the work of sustenance meant to look like for human beings on these lands? What if the work of surviving was rooted in reciprocity? If we told ourselves a new story, what could work begin to look like?
Exploitation of Work
It’s Monday. Since money is tight this month, you picked up some extra shifts at the restaurant down the street you used to work at. The food service industry is always hiring – no one gets paid or appreciated enough to have any obligation to stay. You finally kick off your shoes after the longest workday ever – a 45 minute commute ($4 in tolls each way, $20 parking fee, daily gas budget), 8 hours of data entry, and then 5 hours of waiting tables –and then open your freezer to reheat a $4 frozen dinner. The freezer options are looking low, and the week is only just getting started. Luckily, Amazon has great deals. How do they keep their prices so low?
Slavery is “that form [of exploitation] towards which the master always strives” – Pierre Dockes in Medieval Slavery and Liberation (as quoted by Sylvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch)
The very notion of profit which our economic system depends upon rests on a foundation of exploitation. There are two ways to increase profit margins in a market economy: get cheap or free inputs (materials or labor) or sell at a price way above cost. Simple math supports capitalist conclusion: low costs make for the most profit. And so, it is not entirely surprising that the wealth of the richest country in the world originated with “free inputs” – a phrase that obscures a host of violent and abhorrent practices. More plainly, the establishment of United States of America was only made possible through theft, claiming land and resources from indigenous peoples without any valid forms of exchange, compensation, or reciprocation. On top of that, American capitalism’s economic ascendance – and its first profitable business – was made possible only by the enslavement of millions of black and brown bodies. Wealth was won through genocide, kidnapping, and coercion: cheap materials came from the land and all its abundance, and cheap labor came via the work of the land, the human beings indentured or enslaved, and the uncompensated caretaking of women who made it possible for men to do wage work and reproduced a cheap labor force. Thus, a new, horrific form of profit-motivated capitalism was born. These stains cannot be overlooked in the foundational history of this nation and the economy it built, which we continue to operate under today.
Under modern capitalism, preceded by the processes of Primitive Accumulation and the enclosure of the commons, both greed and lust for profit have taken advantage of both the survival-motivated understanding of work and the desire for purpose. Predictably, this severely complicates our relationship to work. No longer directly or primarily related to securing subsistence, our working energy is now drawn into and traded on a market for goods and services. People become dependent on wages for survival. Our work creates an output, which generates profit, some of which is used to compensate our labor (although rarely does the compensation equal the value created by the work). By coercing people to meet their material needs through wage labor (typically solitary efforts) rather than subsistence arrangements (typically collective efforts), the dominant economic system invented clear separation between people’s lives (in all the ways that matter) and the work they do.
Sometimes referred to as the alienation of labor, this process of disconnection between the worker and their work becomes a key component to making profits under capitalism. For maximization of profits, work must be compensated at less than its true value. When laborers receive less than the full value of their work, the working class – all who are compelled to work for another person or entity to earn wages so they can pay for their necessities – find themselves in an inherently exploitative arrangement (degrees of exploitation to be expanded on shortly.) In this system, people are able to meet their needs by using someone else’s energy without reciprocation.
Important to note here is that such arrangements are only a few centuries old. In feudal Europe, prior to the waves of enclosures, it was uncommon for peasants to remain in wage labor relationships their entire lives, as described by David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs:
“[W]hile wage labor did exist in Northern Europe, centuries before the dawn of capitalism, almost everyone in the Middle Ages assumed that it was something respectable people engaged in only in the first phase of their working life… [U]ltimately, disciplined work under the direction of an adult head of a household was to transform the young into self-disciplined adults, at which point they would no longer have to work for others but would be self-employed.”
This graduation from a state of externally-directed wage labor to self-managed work makes sense in a culture in which the work is closely tied to the land, immediately tangible material world, and care for the close-knit community it serves. But through extensive and ongoing enclosure and privatization of the land and the resources it both provides and produces, the work of graduating from this arrangement of wage labor has been made increasingly difficult, if not impossible. The growth of global capitalism, a system based on endless violent accumulation, exploitation, dispossession, and alienation, has left us dependent on wage labor to meet our needs, and therefore seemingly dependent on its many violences for individual survival.
This economic system also relies on a hierarchy of exploitation to function. Capitalists need folks who will buy their products, and buy them at prices above cost-to-produce. If all workers were slaves, who would pay the for consumer goods? Henry Ford, the famous industrialist, understood this; he is said to have paid his workers enough to afford a Ford automobile. (This may be apocryphal; more likely, workers’ buying power resulted from a slack economy and triumphs of the labor movement in the early 20th century.) Nevertheless, within a profit-oriented system, people making the products generally need to earn less than those people buying them.
Sylvia Federici identifies the 1650s, decades after the advent of chattel slavery, as the point of emergence for what we now call “the middle class”.
“[T]he metropolitan wage became the vehicle by which the goods produced by enslaved workers went to the market, and the value of the products of enslaved-labor realized. In this way, as with female domestic work, the integration of enslaved labor into the production and reproduction of the metropolitan work-force was further established, and the wage further redefined as an instrument of accumulation, that is, as a lever for mobilizing not only the labor of the workers paid by it, also for the labor of a multitude of workers hidden by it, because of the unwaged conditions of their work.”
The middle class, another vague and polite term, is really just a group of somewhat less exploited laborers who make enough money to purchase the goods and services produced by workers who are exploited even more. Neither the so-called “middle class” nor the “working class” can get by without selling their labor — but those in the middle are granted higher social status, more appealing aesthetics, and maybe some small amount of savings that could buffer a relatively brief period without wages. As industrialization opened up mass production and consumerism became another way to increase profits, the middle class enlarged.
And even with the supposed abolition of chattel slavery, the lifestyles of middle-class proletariat continue to be reliant on the cheap extraction of labor and materials from the Global South, forced labor of incarcerated folks, and energy slaves in the form of fossil energy, even while they themselves are squeezed by their employers through waged work and unpaid domestic labor subsidies to capital. We must recognize that even as a majority of working class people experience the low-intensity struggle of labor exploitation, those of us in the Global North live lifestyles that even royalty in pre-modern eras could not imagine. We are the benefactors of energy produced by the exploited labor of human bodies and the combustion of fossilized bodies that we could never produce ourselves or reciprocate fully.
“It is hard to convey the degree to which the global north derives its wealth from the global south while presenting itself as an altruistic ‘helper’.” – Vanessa Andreotti
A sense of dependency on an inherently violent system that provides no more than the bare minimum for survival is no healthy way to live, nor is it sustainable. But for those struggling to meet their basic needs, working long hours in exhausting jobs, or under the stresses of living paycheck to paycheck, it becomes impossible to scrounge up the time or energy to imagine anything else. The system is highly effective at pushing us just up to the edge of tolerable discomfort, where many of us begin to notice that something just isn’t right, but leaving us utterly incapable of escaping it, if we can even articulate it.
It turns out, being coerced into spending a majority of our adult lives in infantalizing, non-democratic work arrangements prevents us from holistically growing up: practicing responsibility and autonomy over our lives (never mind all the other dominant forces and oppressions that take away autonomy over our lives). Squeezed from above but promised the ostensible security and freedom of the American Dream (or some similar narrative of civilization and upward mobility), we feel entitled to some form of individual reward — self-actualization and worldy possessions — for our sacrifices. This is all worth it so long as you get to fulfill your dream of skydiving, a yearly vacation to Disneyland, your dream sofa, the latest BOGO smartphone deal, a caramel macchiato after work, and Pad Thai from the new place down the street that is to die for. Would you kill for them?
In Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Andreotti “heed[s] the Indigenous insight that amongst all other animals humans are the youngest, and amongst all human cultures the modern culture is the youngest and is caught up in a loop of immature, irresponsible, and self-infantilizing behaviors.” Perhaps reclaiming our relationship to our working lives and healing the “schizophrenic rift” between work and life (first inflicted with primitive accumulation and which continues to fester and tear with each new instance of privatization) is one way we might show up, as grown ups, to the real work that needs to be done.
How might we begin to extract ourselves from the systems of exploitation that capitalism relies on?
How can we build networks of subsistence that release us from a sense of dependency on capitalism’s exploitation of work?
Can our working energy be put to use for subsistence again?
How can we show up to do the work that is responsible and necessary to this moment in history?
Devaluation of Necessary Work
It’s Tuesday. The babysitter called out sick, and the kids get out of school two hours before you typically finish up work. Far from any immediate family, the next in line on your emergency call chain are the neighbors next door. Their four kids receive care from their grandmother, and last time you talked, she lovingly expressed her ability to help out if needed. “What’s two more?” she joked. A part of you wishes you could just take on the full-time labor of caretaker for the children you’re raising, along with being able to pay forward the help of the grandmother next door to other parents struggling too. But there’s no salary in that work, and someone needs to pay the bills to put food on the table…
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown restrictions offered a time for clear distinction between the work that proved to be necessary for the basic functioning of society, and the work that was not. Non-essential work was either put on pause in exchange for a government stipend, or transferred to a remote workplace where “work” could be done from home if the nature of the job allowed for it. Essential workers, on the other hand were sent to the frontlines of the crisis, risking their own health to perform the work required to maintain modernity. Stripped bare of so many of modernity’s illusions and distractions, this state of emergency exposed the vital lifelines of the systems that sustain life and the greater systems we’ve come to depend on to sustain it. Healthcare workers, those in food and supply chains, and the many individuals tasked with various forms of care work felt the pressures of a demand for labor. While a majority of the working world was forced to recognize the necessity and grave importance of essential work, little to no lasting changes were implemented to acknowledge this shift. Healthcare workers are still grossly under valued, agricultural and food systems workers continue to face extreme levels of exploitation, safety hazards, and food insecurity, and care work continues to be undervalued, underpaid, and invisibilized.
The exploitation required to continue capitalism’s delusional dream of endless economic growth is made possible through a series of devaluation and invisibilization of necessary work; if we cannot see the source of all labor, it cannot be properly credited. We know that work must be done to keep the world turning (and less glamorously, the machine running), but to assign appropriate value to that work would require that we completely reshape the way we conceive of, relate to, and participate in labor, compensation, and the economic system of capitalism which shapes both.
Like the loving labor of plants that convert sunlight into a chemical form that is usable to us humans to sustain ourselves, the loving labor of those doing the work of care is absolutely essential to the functioning of our societies.
Mother and author Angela Garbes says,
“Care work and domestic labor… is the work that makes all other work possible.”
Without the generous and exhaustive work of caregivers, no other work – be it essential or not, paid or unpaid, white collar or blue – could be done. How would the next generation of our kind (and assumedly the future of our workforce) come to be without the work of caregivers? Human babies are born highly dependent on caregivers for survival, especially when compared to the horses and giraffes who learn to walk on their first day of life, or the sea turtle hatchlings who must race to the shore break and learn to navigate the oceans waters. There are benefits to this extended period of helplessness seen in our species, but a clear cost (if we chose to assess the situation or nurturing newborns in a costs/benefits analysis) is that bringing a child into this world requires an extended period of caregiving necessary to develop independent, capable young humans. As was made evident to all those humans impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, in the genocide in Gaza, the BP Oil Spill, the Canadian tar sands, factory farming and feedlots, Agent Orange and other chemical weapons (we could go on), this extremely necessary labor of love becomes all the more difficult when our economic and political systems do active violence to the children, bodies, and ecosystems we are trying to care for.
In the same ways that the birth of capitalism depended on the exploitation of labor and resources, the modern form of capitalism we are living through continues to rely on the subsidies of exploitation of under and unpaid domestic and care work to make a profit on any other business endeavor. It is estimated that if all unpaid care workers were compensated minimum wage for the work they do it would amount to $1.5 trillion per year. Within the industry of carework, an overwhelming majority of the work is done by women, with a disproportionate amount by women of color. That this widely under-compensated and devalued labor force is also gendered and racialized is no accident – while the Fair Standard Labor Act of 1938 is often seen as a triumph in the greater historical Labor movement, its intentional exclusion of domestic labor provided no opportunities or protections for the majority-black women that comprised this labor sector. (It also excluded agricultural workers – historically the enslaved and later migrants.) The long-term effects of that initial exclusion are still seen today and attempts to remediate those harms done have not been taken.
Second wave feminism was about increasing women’s autonomy to choose the work they do, assuming that these choices will lead them to find fulfilling jobs with proper compensation and thus free their livelihoods from a dependence on men (and potentially toxic, manipulative, or otherwise unhealthy relationships). Alternatives to carework and domestic labor are seen as liberatory and noble, but analysis of what those alternatives actually entail for the liberated feminist are somewhat shortsighted. Bringing more people out of carework and subsistence runs the risk of bringing those same workers into the exploitative labor force, while outsourcing that carework to some less-paid babysitter, teacher, nanny, or perhaps elder. This form of neoliberal girl-boss feminism places women who dream of carework and subsistence in a position of either heresy, class/gender treason, or in pursuit of extreme privilege and access to the ill-gotten gains of exploitative economies (while also making carework less viable for people of all genders.)
Yet the desire to perform the fulfilling labor of carework is both understandable and so clearly necessary. Perhaps a next wave of inclusionary feminism will acknowledge this, shift away from shaming women into other forms of labor exploitation and instead celebrate and uplift the work of care to its appropriate point of recognition. From there, we may begin to compost what we’ve internally digested regarding the value of carework so that we may find ways to properly provide the work that needs to be done, and properly compensate those willing and able to do it.
What is the work that needs to be done?
How do we assign value to necessary work?
How do our own needs, wants, and entitlements shape the way we value work?
How much essential work is not well-resourced enough to bring out our natural inclination to show love through our work?
What might it look like to exist in an economy that valued (and perhaps compensated) carework properly?
Creation of Unnecessary Work
It’s Wednesday. Hump day. Half-way through the week. At your job, you spend most of your time doing online trainings, filling out paperwork and writing reports you have a suspicion no one reads. In the middle of reshuffling your stack of papers you wonder, “Is this really solving the problems? Or just decorating them? Is it creating new problems? I’m in a mission-driven organization; why doesn’t work feel as fulfilling as advertised?”
Many jobs that exist primarily to create profit for shareholders, and which workers are compelled to take to pay increasing costs-of-living, preclude workers from performing domestic labor themselves. Exhausted and busy workers then become reliant on costly goods and services and on exploiting careworkers below them in the wage hierarchy. While examining the exclusion of essential labor in work valued with wage exchange, we might call into question the validity of certain non-essential jobs that are included and highly valued in terms of comparative compensation.
David Graeber identifies the proliferation of meaningless, or pointless jobs, which he defines as
“A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
Most of us exist in a state of alienation that amounts to having two full time jobs — the work for wages and the work for ourselves, leaving little energy left for (the work of) pursuing passions and participating in community. To add insult to injury, as many wage-labor jobs have been automated or accelerated by technology, the amount of decidedly unessential work people do has skyrocketed.
Why do are we doing so much unnecessary work? In part, because it generates profit for someone, somewhere. In part, because few places have pro-social systems of wealth distribution or even adequate social safety nets. Additionally, there is so much important work that isn’t being done or isn’t properly compensated because it is not profitable to capital. Rather than redistributing the work that is essential to more people and reducing our working hours, we have been squeezed into working faster and longer – often in roles that add little actual (off-balance sheet) value to society, and don’t provide a sense of purpose (beyond earning a paycheck). Many of us spend the majority of our waking lives doing work that is unnecessary at best (and more often exploitative or degenerative) to eke out some semblance of individual security in an uncertain world.
Graeber posits that the proliferation of such jobs also keeps the working class too busy and precarious to realize what’s being done to their lives (in the name of someone else’s profits), and then organize and rebel. It’s Orwellian:
“I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.” — George Orwell (as cited by David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs)
Some unnecessary jobs only exist to give those at the top of the class hierarchy more money and power. For example, working as a telemarketer beguiling unsuspecting seniors out of their fixed incomes using misleading and unsavory tactics. Or in Graeber’s typology of bullshit jobs, he also describes the layoffs and Taylorization of essential workers, like delivery drivers, while profits go toward hiring “feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies,” whose jobs are to make the boss feel and appear important, while doing nothing of actual importance themselves. If these jobs disappeared altogether the world would remain unchanged (or might even be improved). Other necessary jobs have been filled to the brim with unnecessary bureaucracy that could be streamlined, but not eliminated. Still others are necessary because of the way our economy is arranged, but make up what David Fleming refers to as the “intermediate economy”:
The intermediate economy exists in various forms in every large civic society; it is the signature of large scale. The big intermediate economy of the industrial age is not a way of making life in giant cities better, it is a way of making it possible. It is a necessity—a regrettable necessity; the goods and services of the intermediate economy deliver no joy in their own right: we need these things to enable us to get by.
What aspects of the intermediate economy might we realize aren’t worth the time we put into working on them? For example, as we do more work to localize foodsheds and regional food autonomy, jobs that once enabled the complex supply chains – the ones that let us eat bananas from Honduras during December in Vermont – could go away. If we weren’t spraying pesticides on our crops would we still need honey bee researchers to address pollinator population decline? With fewer poisons, would we need as many cancer treatment centers, hospital receptionists, and construction crews? Even some forms of care work amount to fulfilling the needs of the intermediate economy. If we weren’t so busy means-testing welfare programs and negotiating insurance settlements, would we still need to pay someone to walk our dog and do our laundry for us? What are we willing to give up in exchange for greater autonomy over how we spend our time and allocate necessary labor?
Fleming again:
“[We] are conditioned by the market economy; [we] have to be competitive, and cannot forgo an immediate advantage from which [we] would individually benefit in favor of a future (and larger) advantage from which everyone would benefit.”
In a time of overlapping crises and transition to new ways of living, there is so much necessary work to do. We cannot afford to continue twiddling our thumbs. Nor can we afford to be burning all our candles at both ends doing the kinds of work that only have value within late capitalism and to dying modernity. But many of us feel trapped in meaningless jobs that maintain an unsustainable system that is downright harmful to virtually all aspects of life on earth. We need to grow up, and then show up, differently. This involves assessing what we’d be better off without, discerning what the necessary labor is now, and distributing both the necessary work and fruits of that labor much more equitably. How might we recreate a culture that would allow us to slow down and get to work?
A coherent, ethical, democratic, mature society might identify what essential labor needs to be done, what needs to be done to adapt to change, and what additional amenities and luxuries we would like. Then, we might divide that labor up amongst ourselves. Those decisions would likely be very different depending on the demographic, ecological, and geographic features of each local community. Instead, we find ourselves in a taut, complex economy where workers have no leverage to exercise autonomy over their working lives for fear of being replaced by some other similarly desperate unemployed proletarian, who has no choice but to work in whatever conditions are available to meet their material needs.
In his book At Work in the Ruins, Dougald Hine identifies four lines of thinking that are necessary in a time of radical transition to simpler and less extractive and localized lifeways. These prompts also frame the critical consideration that we can bring to our reassessment of work:
- “Salvage the good that may be taken with us from the ruins of the world that is ending.”
- “Mourn the good that cannot be taken with us.”
- “Notice the things within our ways of living that were never as good as we told ourselves they were and the chance we are being given to walk away from these.”
- “Look for the dropped threads, the moments earlier in the story that have something to tell us.”
He says of them, “None of us should or could devote ourselves to all these kinds of task, nor do they exhaust the work that is called for. There is more to say about the work of resistance, for one thing. But part of the point of such a list is that it may help us to recognise that our different commitments are not at odds, that we may be occupying different positions along a winding front without needing a plan around which to unite.”
“All work is ultimately an extension of caring.” – David Graeber
How much work are we doing that doesn’t serve anyone?
Do we really need coercion or wage labor to motivate people to do work?
What if we could free ourselves to do that work which we want to be doing anyway as a caring species?
How might we begin to reclaim the value of our work in imagining a better future in which we focus our energy on people (all life, for that matter) over profits?
Reclamation of Work
Now jump forward 5 years. You’ve worked to reclaim your time and labor, and build some more intentional community for yourself. You’re no longer working that 9-5 desk job, nor are you picking up shifts for extra spending cash. Inspired by what people had shared in an Intentional Community Study Group, you went in with your college buddies on purchasing an old Victorian house, an investment which seems to be paying off! You’ve started a buyers club to get cheap wholesale deals on staples like bulk beans and rice and a large weekly local CSA in the summer. Now, the part-time cashier job at the cooperative grocery store is enough to pay the bills. With the extra free time you can take a little longer commuting, so you traded your car for a bus pass to save even more money. You often relish bumping into new people and striking up conversation. But on days when you are feeling less social, you also like reading while you ride. And now you take a bit longer on your bike rides to stop and pick up trash, or notice new plants you must’ve passed by a thousand times without noticing before. You’re volunteering at the community garden and the bicycle recycling shop more, keeping up with your book club reading, finally working through that pile of clothes you’ve been meaning to mend and you’re organizing a neighborhood child-care trade. You’re all working together to turn the basement into a community art studio for the neighborhood. There is harmony in the house because the dishes don’t pile up anymore; the back of the fridge isn’t a crime scene because you actually have time and extra hands to preserve the excess. You take a sunny nap in the window seat almost every day. It’s Thursday, but does it really matter? Like Mark Boyle said, “I work seven days a week, but it doesn’t really feel like work because it’s something I love to do.” When the work is aligned, we are freed from the time and energy constraints of the fabricated “work week”.
The history of labor organizing and peasant resistance gives those of us interested in reclaiming and reorienting our effort and attention a loaded toolbox to work with. Nevertheless, to heal the metabolic and spiritual rifts caused by the extent of alienation and exploitation of our working lives we will need to think way beyond the priorities of most labor organizers today. Incremental raises negotiated by labor unions (after decades of stagnation), better benefits, an end to just-in-time scheduling, and banning the box are valid harm reduction strategies under late capitalism. But what we need is to fundamentally use our labor power – including our power of refusal – to reclaim and re-essentialize work.
Divestment from the myths of progress and efficiency are a good place to start. Prefigurative Politics and democratized workplaces can take things a big step further. But we need to keep our focus on the real goals: re-establishing forms of shared subsistence and work-life integration that could end labor alienation, enable us to meet our needs without exploitation, and open up room for joy in good work and essential endeavor.
“[T]he whole discussion of work and leisure makes more sense when it starts with the aim of increasing working time in the informal economy, rather than of reducing working time in the formal economy, which is on course to decline whether we want it to or not.” – David Fleming
What diverse arrangements for getting the work done in a weird world can we imagine anew and return to?
How might we organize to withhold our labor from those that seek to profit off us while destroying the world? And how can we complement each other’s approach to work in an effort to get more of us free to engage in the work we find meaningful in a time of radical change and ever-after?
Here are some ideas already in play:
There is a lot of work in re-skilling and reorganizing our economy to support the essential work of life. This transition of course will not happen overnight. Proposed models range from radical subversion of systemic and individual working arrangements to soft-reform and harm reduction as the formal economy contracts.
- Decommodifying Survival: Top-down interventions for decommodifying survival would, in theory, support domestic and creative labor that is currently either not profitable to capital, or is actively threatening to it. These include universal free healthcare, education, child care, public transportation, water, utilities, and wifi. Redistributing excess wealth from centi-millionaires and billionaires, limiting second and subsequent homeownership, and placing other equity-enforcing limits on private accumulation could allow us to meet basic needs even while decreasing our overall consumption. Of course, questions of feasibility might arise. Some products like food, water, and energy are abundant in some geographies and not others, and equitable distribution without changing consumption patterns and relocalizing lifeways is not easy. Historically, demanding that the owning class give up extreme excess wealth has resulted in bloody conflict, and (unsurprisingly) those in power to make this change are currently those very same wealthy people. Graeber also argued that a universal basic income, paired with rent control and universal basic services like health care, would make waged-labor voluntary and free up time and energy to engage in labor that is important or meaningful.
- Jobs Guarantees: A jobs guarantee would be a way of making sure the necessary labor gets done, and would give workers leverage to leave positions that feel soul-suckingly pointless or exploitative. A democratic society with monetary sovereignty could decide to guarantee training and positions with livable wages and lower hours in ecologically and socially necessary jobs like education, childcare, health, transportation, and energy. A jobs guarantee contributes to adding slack to the economy. With more than enough trained workers excited to take on these essential roles, each could work fewer, and more flexible hours. With more workers in these roles, workweeks could be shorter — folks would be happier, better rested, and calling out sick or taking vacation days would not make colleagues scramble to cover a shift. This would also reduce exploitation in the private sector. To attract workers, private employers would have to improve their working conditions, or cease to exist. Who would take a minimum wage job telemarketing scams to the elderly when they can join the ranks of other trained nurses, teachers, and bus drivers making a livable wage and working 20-30 hours a week? That said, being guaranteed a waged-job alone does not heal the ancestral wounds of alienation and dispossession that many of us grieve deeply. As abolitionist Fredrick Douglass said, “Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”
- Compensated Carework: The Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s (in which Sylvia Federici was involved) sought to compensate the domestic care work that enables all other labor. For a while, this movement drew attention to the degree of exploitation and unpaid labor that capitalism relies on to profit. Ironically, or perhaps understandably, some domestic laborers recoiled at the notion of commodifying carework along with all other work. Today, campaigns like CARE INCOME NOW (which evolved from Wages for Housework) and organizations like Caring Across Generations are keeping carework in the spotlight and building the collective power of caregivers to change cultural narratives around carework, to advocate for programs that supports caregivers through parental leave, compensation for at-home elder, disability, and hospice care, and funding for affordable, quality childcare. But if we are called to do work that is at present not supported, we might need to look to more radical and unconventional approaches, because UBI, wages for housework, and jobs guarantees don’t appear to be on the horizon of most government priorities.
- Voluntary Simplification: A desire to be free, to be free of the yoke of the coerced job treadmill, to do the loving labor of carework and creation, to reciprocate fully for that which you take, might mean that the slowing down following the disruptions to the status quo (such as after natural disasters, or during the pandemic) are a relief — finally, the informal economy will be more valuable than the formal economy. Simplifying and relying more on the informal, or non-monetary economy, could feel like a salve, an escape hatch.
“Let me crystallize what collapse means: collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee. That’s what you mean by social collapse.” – Vinay Gupta
Big shifts toward subsistence are a way to dramatically reduce your own exploitation and your anonymized, compelled exploitation of others. But this requires a radical break from mainstream ideas of doing good and a profound reorientation of our desires. Such moves will not lift all boats, shelter the unhoused, or pull people out of poverty. You won’t be “saving” those who you’ve been conditioned to see as worthy-though-beneath-you in the the ranks of fortune. No, it likely means joining the “less fortunate.” (Some might frame this as voluntary poverty, neo-peasantry, or frugal hedonism, among countless other variations on the theme of choosing less). Downward mobility (or in some cases, intentional maintenance of a very modest lifestyle) does not have to mean immiseration. Certainly such lifeways are presently made harder-to-experience and enjoy through ongoing enclosures, privatization, disinvestment in public spaces and services, and criminalization of poverty. But taking on more direct responsibility for meeting your own needs and those of your community is a path to freedom and meaning. And if you want to work toward equity and justice, you might channel that energy into efforts that reverse enclosures and dedicate some of your reclaimed capacity to actively solidaristic efforts that return land and time back to those from whom it was stolen.
- Cultivating Intense Awareness of Money: Reducing your reliance on money and embracing interdependence with people you know is a millennia-tested way of securing a decent life. After all, no matter how much wealth you accumulate, you’re never truly independent. Someone still has to grow your food, build your shelter, care for your needs in ways you don’t see. Money does not make you self-sufficient — it just shifts your dependence from those you have relationships with to a mostly unknowable set of strangers you’ll never meet. Money doesn’t free you, it just changes and disguises the nature of your interdependence. While it’s not always feasible to do it all at once, when we take steps to reduce reliance on anonymizing transactional relationships and increase our reliance on each other through gift economies, worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, we can make ourselves that much less dependent upon exploitative wage-labor relationships. This strengthens the sovereignty over our labor and our ability to direct its benefits. Ran Prieur reminds us that while money “doesn’t grow on trees, …you have millions of years of biological memory of a world where what you want does grow on trees.” As such, “You need to constantly remind yourself that whatever you’re thinking of buying will cost you an hour, ten hours, 100 hours of dreary humiliating labor.” When you realize that “[y]our expenses are your chains[, r]educing them is not about punishing yourself or avoiding guilt — it’s about getting free.”
- Collaborating to Retain Complexity: While most of us certainly need to simplify substantial aspects of our lives, we may also find that collaborating in alternative configurations (including cosmolocally) can help us maintain access to some kinds of complexity, including appropriate technologies. For example, a cooperatively maintained makerspace can enable the kind of coordination needed to produce bicycle parts. There are plenty of examples of for-profit private production companies transitioning to worker or consumer cooperatives, so even existing infrastructure and consumer goods could be reclaimed, especially for products and services that are valuable to a community but are not particularly profitable. Additionally, hacking to unlock proprietary rights to repair for existing infrastructure like cars, electronics, and large machinery, can allow us to make the assets last longer, and can enable digital cooperation to maintain large and complex information and communications commons like Wikipedia and Signal.
- Finding Freedom in Friendship: Getting free has never been an individual project. We are interdependent, and cannot exist long-term as a species relying on a system of exploitation. Fannie Lou Hammer famously proclaimed, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” And we need to get really creative about how we use our various assets to get us there. Unregulated freedom in a neoliberal and individualistic society is the stuff of cautionary fairy tales such as The Tragedy of the Commons. Boogeymen of greed and violence lurk in the shadows and exhort the protections of private property, policing and crossing to the other side of the street. We are encouraged to exclude others in order to sure up our own personal hoard. To fight for our individual rights and entitlements without taking on the responsibilities of caring for others or reciprocating. If you are looking for instructions on how to pursue collective freedom, Next River offers encouraging precedent and an actionable framework. Their Freedom’s Revival paper showed that real freedom has always been a collective project — one of belonging, responsibility to others, and of seeing ourselves as a part of some larger whole.
- Separating Awareness of Complicity from Guilt: Vanessa Andreotti says in Hospicing Modernity that “[w]hile guilt, shame, and worthlessness are traps to be avoided, if we want to address the violence and unsustainability of modernity, there is no way around facing our complicity in social and ecological harm.” We can reorient our goals from carving out a good life no matter the external consequences towards getting free of the pyramid scheme of exploitation. If we can honor and reciprocate for the sacrifices that must be made to sustain ourselves, we might be able to establish lifeways that have a chance of continuing long term. With this awareness, we do not need to feel guilty for the compromises we are forced to make by sustaining ourselves in this system, but instead use them as constant reminders of the places we can to get creative to free one another. We can have our ways of finding small joys in the system as it is, while aiming to not need them anymore when we unlock greater joys elsewhere. We can be guided between these two worlds, once again, by the words of Ran Priuer, who reminds us:
“[t]o drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your ‘success’ means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others — it’s as if we’ve all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first, and then help the rest.”
The task of reclaiming work is going to be varied, radical, and collectively liberating. Depending on your personal desires, strengths, weaknesses, and material circumstances, the way you contribute to getting free, getting others free, and getting the work done is going to look really different. Re-commoning through an agrarian subsistence cooperative, joining a makerspace, squatting, dumpster diving, practicing post-capitalist childcare, weaponizing incompetence at your VC firm while releasing those resources to other cooperative labor movements, quiet quitting, joining a labor union, and petitioning your workplace to implement remote work and a 4-day workweek will all have their roles.