Anti-Work

Psychological Investigations into Its Truths, Problems, and Solutions

George M. Alliger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000467840
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Psychology

The first book to delineate anti-work in a systematic fashion by identifying and compiling positions from a wide spread of literature, Anti- Work: Psychological Investigations into Its Truths, Problems, and Solutions defines the tenets of anti-work, reviews them from a psychological and historical point of view, and offers solutions to aid the average person in his or her struggle with work.

Anti-work thinkers have vigorously argued that work entails a submission of the human will that is constraining and even ultimately damaging. The author has refined 18 tenets of anti-work from the literature, which range from the suggestion that all jobs are bad, to the remarkable ability of modern capitalist enterprises to build "job engagement" among workers, to the proposal of alternative work- deemphasized worlds. Anti-Work begins with a discussion of these tenets, in particular the submission of the will required by work, followed by an overview of topics such as worker resistance, merit, and precarious work. The second part of the book unfolds various possible human responses to the work problem, such as detachment, thinking while working, and right livelihood. In the third part, several lessons about anti-work are drawn from parables, koans, and tales. Discussions of cults and work, working from home, unions, and cooperatives, as well as lessons from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity, offer additional perspectives on the topic of work and provide guidance on developing a helpful attitude toward it.

By highlighting the tensions that exist between anti-work and pro-work positions, the book provides new ways to view and plan life, and will give thought- provoking and valuable insights for students, instructors, and practitioners in industrial and organizational psychology and related fields, as well as all people who have worked, will work, have never worked, or will never work.

PART One In Which Anti-Work Is Given Serious Consideration

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164319-2

Chapter OneThe Tenets of Anti-Work

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164319-3

Each of the “tenets” offered in the Introduction is discussed more fully here. As an aside to those who skip introductions, these are an unsystematic grouping of themes I have encountered in the anti-work literature.

Tenet 1

Work demands submission and is damaging to the human psyche

This is a central belief of the pure anti-work stance, and is reviewed later in greater detail. This tenet takes no prisoners: regardless of your job, work actively demands submission. It is true whether you are fully aware of it or not, whether you “love your job” or have come to regard it as a major source of irritation and drain, or whether you feel that regardless of the actual state of things “people just have to deal with life as they find it.” It is true if you are a construction worker and true if you are in a C-suite. It is true even in those cases of the employers or owners who report to no one – these are still caught in a web of dependence; as thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu and Simone Weil insist, bosses are not themselves free, being themselves dominated.

But what kind of submission runs up and down the power hierarchy, sparing none or few? As we shall see, submission at work is basically having to agree to do other than you would have wished to do had you been free. Rather than carrying out what you might wish, someone else’s plans, goals, desires, and whims govern your own. This is the case even if you feel yourself to be fully aligned with those plans, goals, desires, and whims of the other – because no one can so align themselves without some loss of will.

The operation of this principle is frequently invisible due to the widespread and routine acceptance by most people of the world-as-it-is. But readers should ask themselves whether their jobs in the past did not, and their current job does not, in fact, to some degree require precisely this harmful abrogation of their own preferences and desires.

That resented but required submission is hurtful seems obvious – who wants to lead a will-thwarted life, or would suggest that being substantially thwarted does not create missed opportunities, damaging bitterness, low spirits? At the same time, the apparent fact that some people do not claim to be hurt by the purported will-denying aspect of engaging in work is a kind of conundrum for anti-work thinkers.

Tenet 2

Work as a “good” is a modern and deleterious development

Communication scholar Dennis Mumby maintains that until recently work in the western world was not seen as a good thing by anybody. That this negative viewpoint was prevalent in the past is taken as proved; the intriguing problem then facing Mumby and other anti-work writers is how it is that work became “valorized” – how is it, that it is now often seen as valuable and providing meaning? He asks, “How did we go from seeing work as a marginal, rather distasteful activity not discussed in polite society to something intrinsic to our self-definition as fully rounded human beings?” Because, he muses,

For most of recorded human history, work was an activity in which only slaves, serfs, cloistered monks, or prisoners engaged. It was … viewed largely as punishment or penance. Work was performed out of necessity, or through coercion, but (almost) never as a matter of choice and rarely with alacrity. Indeed, early industrial capitalism’s biggest (and most difficult) task was to transform the human orientation to work rooted in the organic rhythms of the seasons to one rooted in the temporal discipline of the factory regime.¹

Mumby is not alone in maintaining that modernity’s view of work as good is new. “For a long time,” Lewis Hyman argues, “the very idea of a ‘good’ ‘job’ was a contradiction. Until the twentieth century, it was self-evident that there was nothing good about a job.”² And it is true that the etymology of the French le travail and Spanish el trabajo seems traceable to a Latin word meaning torture. Toil may have origins suggesting struggle or strife. And most ancient philosophers viewed “eudaimonia” or happiness as the freedom to think and converse, free from labor.

Still, it seems a stretch to say that work used to be understood only as a “marginal, rather distasteful activity.” While slavery and serfdom were bad and certainly represent an affront to our concepts of human good, can we believe that, invariably, potters hated their wheels and pots, craftsman viewed their membership in guilds as penance, monks considered the act of illuminating manuscripts a kind of punishment?³ In any case, the central idea of this tenet is that labor was viewed as something very negative previously, which means in turn that something is odd about how we view work now. Perhaps we moderns are being misled whenever we think of work as providing a dignity, purpose, or meaning.

Tenet 3

The tedious, boring, and grinding aspects of work characterize most of the time spent in many and probably even all jobs

Robert Anton Wilson maintained that “Most ‘work’ in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating, usually pointless and basically consists of the agonizing process of being slowly bored to death over a period of about 40 to 45 years of drudgery.”⁴ When I included this quote in a presentation to a group of graduate students studying work psychology, it elicited some amusement and the question: “Who is this man and what does he do for a living?” The short answer is, perhaps not surprisingly, that Wilson was a mystic/anarchist thinker in the cultural mold of a Timothy Leary. So his “job” was thinking about how to describe and escape the robotic state he thought characterizes most of the people most of the time.

We can’t automatically discount this tenet, which is a recurring note in anti-work writing. It is true that work tasks can often be monotonous (possessing a sameness in stimuli and required actions), which can lead to boredom (an unpleasant affective state apparently arising from the lack of novelty). And work can be arduous, resulting in fatigue or injury. Work or parts of work may feel at times and in a profound way pointless. Presumably many of us can look back at our work life and see many consonant examples. And sometimes, of course, people choose to change their jobs, engage in some kind of resistance on the job, or not work at all in response to deadening aspects of their employment. One way to weigh our own experienced job boredom is to consider that in a job we trade our time for money. There may be times when this seems completely worthwhile, and others when it appears we are making a bad deal.

Of course, some people may prefer the same kinds of repetitive work that others could not comfortably tolerate. This could be because some are able to perceive and be engrossed by slight differences in stimuli, where others see only a sea of sameness. Too, monotonous jobs can be cognitively undemanding, which might be a benefit in some cases. This is because, in the same way that routine jobs are usually the easiest to automate, an individual may be able after practice to do such jobs with cognitive automaticity, leaving a large portion of her mental workspace free. This freedom, in turn, may be used in any number of ways – mentally solving a puzzle or designing the next work of art, for example.

Ultimately, his tenet makes an extreme case, suggesting that possibly all jobs are pointless most of the time. And it is true that, despite all the research on job satisfaction, we cannot really know what percent of employees feel the way about their work that the quote from Wilson implies they should, or how often they feel that way. Still, there are plenty of results from surveys and other sources that job satisfaction and the sense of meaning derived from jobs are high for many. Whether one trusts typical surveys to get at these important affects in a useful, valid way is another question.

Tenet 4

Work is subjectively “alienating” and meaningless due to workers’ lack of honest connection to the organization and its goals and outcomes

This is basically a Marxist critique of work.⁵ Marx argued that capitalism is commodifying, in that it reduces even workers to a commodity. Alienation then is created via the drudgery of work and especially because the owner of the so-called “means of production” (such as a factory, its equipment, and access to needed supply chains) hires workers to produce part of a product for someone else. So instead of farmers or artisans who create a whole something in the first instance for themselves, modern workers cannot look at the outcome of their labor as part of themselves. As a result, Marx concluded that the modern laborer “does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”⁶

In a way, of course, Marx romanticizes the pre-industrial realities. Even many farmers and artisans had helpers who could be assigned to do the least interesting and hardest of the labor, so it not as if farmers were always working only on a complete product rather than part of one. Nor were farmers themselves, for example, fully free and independent agents. But work psychologists agree that being able to view and appreciate the whole, entire product is in fact one key to job satisfaction. While factories with high division of labor are efficient, it is highly desirable to create ways in which the whole product can be “owned,” at least psychologically, by the employees. So Marx is certainly correct in that doing small pieces of an overall process of production can be alienating.

Nor is it just the manual laborer who is alienated. Service workers are also deprived of ownership of the means of service. And, as we shall see when we examine merit, highly educated professionals have their share of alienation (Daniel Markovits argues, “alienated labor comes home to roost in the elite”⁷).

Tenet 5

Work is objectively meaningless due to the intentional generation of inconsequential “needs” in the consuming public and hence ultimately absurd products and services; this leads to meaningless jobs

The critiques of the “consumer economy” are well known: desires manufactured and heightened by advertising, too many and trivial products, creation of disposable items and lack of concern for the greater good, including the ecology of the planet, the ceaseless “hedonic treadmill” of making money and spending it on ever-more and ever-greater acquisitions so that there can be no real respite or soulful rest.

This begs the question of why, exactly, we continue to work once basic needs (for example, as stipulated by Henry David Thoreau, of lodging, food, and fuel) are met. As we think about this, our own demon of “keeping up with the Joneses” and its corollary of opioid-like shopping rushes may rise up and face us. What does work signify if it is just a means to a kind of consumerist self-enslavement outside of work? Or, what does our work signify if we are laboring to supply to society something that, after all, is not needed? Moreover, the anthropologist David Graeber notes this problem seems to increase with time:

Technology has been marshaled … to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, 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. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.⁸

The idea that some jobs exist to accomplish work that does not need to be performed is intriguing. Why would such jobs exist? The answer, of course, is that either they endure through a kind of inertia after their usefulness is ended or that they serve an organizational purpose of some kind, but not one that is valued or can be seen by the job-holder. An example of a job that apparently continues despite being unnecessary is the instance of a Spanish civil servant who simply stopped coming to work; his absence was never noted until, after years of non-attendance, he was caught out when his employer sought to give him a long-service award.⁹ The case where the job seems useless to the employee and perhaps others while still serving a larger purpose can be exemplified by, say, someone who is required to write reports that are never read by anyone – this happens.¹⁰ While this might reasonably discourage the writer, the organization itself may be able to tout the number of reports it produces in aggregate.

Note that this tenet and the previous one strike at the heart of the idea that work can and perhaps should provide meaning.

Tenet 6

Work is exploitative; workers are necessarily taken advantage of, whether they claim or appear to enjoy their work or not. Fundamentally, organizations/owners extract “excess value,” paying the workers less than the value of their work

Now in what way, exactly, can it be said that workers are exploited by an owner, regardless of their pay and benefits? The answer again goes back to Marx; he promulgated the concept of the “value theory of labor.” This posits (a) that the value of a produced good is determined by the work put into it, and (b) that workers are not fully compensated for the work they put in. This results in “excess value” – the value derived from the product is greater than what the worker has received. If each day a worker produces a product that, given the time put into it, is worth (sells for) $150 but that worker is paid $100, the excess value is $50, which goes to the owner. This is exploitation; the owner is using the not-fully-compensated labor of the worker to make money for himself. It follows then that if workers “owned the means ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: What Is Anti-Work?
• Part One In Which Anti-Work Is Given Serious Consideration
• Part Two In Which We Reflect on Some Possible Realities and Responses
• Part Three Coda: Lessons from Parables, Koans, and Tales
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index