March 3, 2024

✨ four-day work weeks and other signs of moral decay

this headline is sarcastic i promise lmao ... on work and what we "deserve," feat INVENTING THE FUTURE by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams

Dear friend—

I wrote this essay almost a year ago but never hit publish (see: dated Silicon Valley bank reference. I actually, totally forgot SVB had been a thing until I opened this draft this past week).

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of vlogs about people quitting their jobs and video essays about quiet quitting and Gen Z’s disillusionment with the promises of college → secure employment → A Good Life™. I’ve been thinking more about what it means to do “good work” and the absolute ridiculousness/infuriation/injustice of how I get paid a good salary to typetypetype from my bedroom nine to five, while others work 60+ hour work weeks and barely get by. So I revisited this essay and thought it worth a publish. I hope you do too, lol :)

A while back, I got an installment of Grist’s Looking Forward newsletter in my email inbox. The topic: the climate benefits of a four-day work week.

Since the pandemic, the four-day work-week has gotten more buzz and more companies and organizations around the world have experimented with one. It has been a hit with employees for obvious reasons, and some of these experiments have become permanent, as companies discover higher morale and equal or greater productivity with one less day. Beyond that, as Dr. Juliet Schor says, shorter working weeks are also associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions.

In the newsletter, Dr. Schor, who researches the relationship between climate and work, poses that workers use more energy-intensive conveniences when they work longer hours. Pressed for time, we may drive to work instead of riding public transit or walking. We may order dinner delivery instead of cooking at home.

Shorter work weeks, Schor suggests, allows us the time and energy to pursue more earth-friendly options. When we aren’t so frazzled, we can be more intentional with our day-to-day habits.

The newsletter piqued my interest because, as my time post-grad continues to expand, I am thinking more about work and time and our1 relationship to both. And I had recently read Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book Inventing the Future. In the book, the authors argue that leftist movements should work toward a post-work world—or, at least, a post-employment world.

The nature of work is changing—from the rise of on-demand positions, to growing gig work and freelancing, to ever-faster implementation of automation and AI. And this change is marked by a lot more uncertainty and precarity. Many workers feel less like an irreplaceable asset to their company and more like a number that could be cut at any time.

One classic example: Uber. Uber drivers can supposedly can make money anywhere, but they lose out on benefits and stability and face much higher barriers to organizing. For instance, it's much harder to organize when you're not working elbow-to-elbow with your peers and are dispersed across time and space.

At the same time, Uber's technology has decreased the value that accomplished taxi drivers used to claim: intimate knowledge of the streets of their city. A cab driver knew the best shortcuts and the worst times to use the main roads; they could get you from place to place faster than anyone.

But with Uber and GPS, that skill was no longer so valuable. And when a worker's skill becomes less valuable, they have less power (economic and political) in the market and vis-a-vis the company they work for.

So far, technologies like personal computers, AI, and automation have tended to de-skill and de-value workers. This kind of technology has contributed to growing precarity and the growing income/wealth gap.

In other turbulent times, like those in the early 1900s, liberals called for full employment as a way to ensure a good life for everyone. That’s how we got programs like the Public Works Administration during the Great Depression. With the PWA, the federal government essentially made up jobs for people to do and paid them to do them.

But Inventing the Future argues that, instead, we should strive for a world with zero employment, in which no one has to work to survive or thrive. Not “jobs for everyone”, but rather “jobs [required] for no one” as a means to ensure the sustained and growing flourishing of all people.

When I first read this, my gut told me this was ridiculous, naive, impossible (more on that later). My brain wanted to see the argument through.

For starters, this actually isn’t an unprecedented idea. As Srnicek and Williams detail, the 40-hour work week arrived around the same time that automation became prevalent in many industries. It essentially distributed what used to be 60- or 80-hour work weeks across more people working less hours, ensuring that more people could be employed (while also raising the quality-of-life, work-life balance, whatever you want to call it, for working folks).

So what if we took this further and gradually reduced work weeks (while achieving a strong social safety net and universal basic income) with an eventual goal of zero employment? This becomes even more urgent, the authors argue, because automation, AI, et al. threaten to devour the job market in whole industries.

To reach this goal, they argue that we should push technology faster and faster toward this aim, by intentionally automating a lot of jobs, maybe all jobs.

There are several facets of their proposal that I’m wrestling with.

First, the technology. The writers’ optimism toward technology went against my every instinct thanks to all the thinking I’ve been doing about the many ways tech fucks us up.

But Inventing the Future reminds me of a quote from sci-fi writer Ted Chiang—that most of our anxieties about technology seem to really be about capitalism.

Our current mode of capitalism calls for more better faster toward one goal: profit for a few. This ethos is embedded in technologies like AI and automation, and in the industry that makes them. But what if we reoriented these technologies toward a different goal? Could automation not only be good, but a moral imperative? Could we, as Srnicek and Williams suggest, unlock the potential of these technologies for public good?

I don’t have the answer (I’m no futurist), but it’s an alternative I hadn’t given thorough thought to yet.

Inventing the Future also ignores or doesn’t fully address some important issues. For instance, the ethical concerns around technology like AI, and the question of power beyond capitalism. Regarding the latter: technology is power, and absolute power doesn’t need capitalism to corrupt absolutely.

Technology without capitalism can still be wielded toward repression and all manners of -isms and -phobias. The authors didn’t seem to have any answer to this except to say that labor movements have historically jived with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements. They seem to imply that these will fall naturally in lockstep, as though there haven’t been strains of labor organizing throughout history that have also been xenophobic, sexist, ableist, etc.

However, what really snagged my attention was Srnicek and Williams’ ideas on “inventing the future,” which starts with ideas.

They talk about shifting hegemony, meaning something like dominant culture/ideology/politics; as the writers call it, the “political common sense” we all swim through.

Hegemony creates the borders around what we think is possible, often not because of science or example, but because of what does and doesn’t fit into our worldview—what feels rational or moral. And that’s cultural and political.

Right now, many would argue we live in a neoliberal hegemony. Neoliberalism is an economic ideology that prizes free-markets and free trade, economic growth as key to human progress, and as small a role for government in the economy as possible.

Inventing the Future traces how a small group of economists built the groundwork for the emergence of neoliberal hegemony in the late 20th century. Building that groundwork involved establishing and funding think tanks, shaping higher education and university research, writing books and materials for the public (not just academics), and getting academics in magazines and on television.

And this all happened during the postwar era of Keynesianism, which touted the role of the government to help manage the economy. In policy circles and in much of academia, neoliberalism was fringe. So at the time, there was little hope that neoliberals would influence policy. But that was okay for them. Milton Friedman, one of the foremost neoliberal economists at the time, talked about playing a “long game.”

Because, as Inventing the Future recounts, when there came a crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s, neoliberal framing and policy prescriptions were waiting in the wings.

Neoliberalism wasn’t the only intellectual response to the crisis, but it was culturally powerful. The foundation had been laid. The lawmakers and the public, through all that research and publicity neoliberals did for decades, had been primed to see neoliberalism as a “common-sense” explanation and basis for policy responses to the crisis.

The result: Reaganomics, deregulation, huge cuts to social programs, bigger and bigger corporations, and growing wealth inequality.

At the same time, neoliberalism was bolstered by cultural ideas about work, value, and deservingness. The cultural explanation for cuts to social programs including concepts like “boot-strapping"; the idea that people just had to work hard and be strong and smart and fend for themselves to be successful in the economy. Meanwhile, corporations were not thought of in the same way. Finance, business, etc. = unfettered good, and so American policy supports and protects them in ways it does not for people.

Take, for instance, the response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Almost overnight, our federal government marshaled billions to aid the bank and ensure its (mostly rich or at least comfortable) customers could access their money.

Conversely, as Jerusalem Demsas wrote in The Atlantic soon after SVB’s collapse, any national efforts to aid poor and working class people in the United States have been weak and slow for decades.

Housing and food assistance programs are labyrinthine and exclusionary. We allow millions to go hungry and unhoused every day in this country. Where is their quick rescue?

This is a clear statement of values, Demsas writes. Those cultural values like bootstrapping, hard work, and individual freedom and responsibility make huge mobilizations of public assistance now unthinkable. We don’t do “handouts” in the United States, etc.

When it comes to public spending on assistance, anything more than the minimum is too expensive—even at the expense of widespread suffering for millions. Our government has decided that a failing bank is more worthy of help than hungry people, because there is a small chance that aid will go to someone who isn’t “working hard enough” for it—and therefore doesn’t deserve it.

This has a long historical context that goes way back before neoliberalism. While modern capitalism developed, the U.S. saw a cultural counterpart that helped fuel the expanding commerce—the Protestant work ethic.

The Protestant work ethic made work a holy thing. Sweating is close to Godliness. And while the Christian elements have fallen away in our more secular society, the moral implications of work have not.

Informed by this, it seems to me that to be considered legitimate, respectable, i.e. “good” and “deserving,” work must do one of two things (ideally, both):

• Make money or make someone else money

• Make some personal sacrifice (e.g. health, energy, time)

The more money we make, the more time we spend in the workplace, the more hours we put in, the more we suffer for our work, the more moral capital and prestige we can claim. The more we deserve whatever other luxuries/privileges we get in life. I remember in college, in some circles, you wore your hours of sleep last night like a badge of honor. The less the better. (tf???)

These ideas of “good” work are not only unhealthy; they exclude activities that involve joy, community, self-fulfillment, care, and love, i.e. much of what makes a meaningful, generous life. They don’t count vital and nourishing activities like caring for sick family members and friends, cultivating a community garden, cooking or creating art or playing music.

This is all especially dire because the U.S. government makes a very narrow definition of work (employment) the requirement for even the barest of basic needs assistance, like food, healthcare, and medicine. To receive many kinds of assistance, folks need to prove that they’re employed or pursuing employment. “Work” = “morally correct” = “deserving of help.” And this intertwines with our culture, which immediately assigns moral (de)value on unemployment. Like a lot of things in this world, this is an ableist point of view that makes life harder for everybody.

It’s bonkers that our government makes a 40-hour work week the bare minimum to access slightly more affordable healthcare, while banks and wars get billions in free money every year!!

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The authors of Inventing the Future, I assume, are not calling for an end of effort or discipline. They aren’t advocating for a world of instant gratification and idleness.

But my initial instinct to see the idea of “universal unemployment” through this frame, to at first forget important activities that don’t involve making money and undue sacrifices, is hegemony in action.

Our current culture, I think Srnicek and Williams would argue, has warped our sense of what is valuable. The concern that everyone is employed and contributes to the economy now supersedes the concern that everyone gets enough to eat.

Prefaced this way, Inventing the Future’s call for a post-work and post-employment world no longer seems ridiculous. Instead, it’s even more outrageous that we don’t ensure everyone can thrive, without creating some kind of arbitrary moral yardstick of suffering and labor they must reach for before we even help them survive. It’s more outrageous that we give so much credence to things as subjective as “hard work” or “economic productivity”—things that, in many cases and many sectors, are actively destroying our communities and the planet.

Inventing the Future asks us to explore what would be possible with better technology and better systems and better ideas at the foundation.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for AI-run communes or state-owned bot farming or any techno-utopia. (I’m not sure Srnicek and Williams would, either). Even after this book, I think I still lean more luddite than not, lol.

But Inventing the Future contributed a lot to my thoughts on how our ideas about work, deservingness, morality, and care don’t serve us, and what could be possible when we start to change them.

Our society used to believe 100-hour work weeks, chain gangs, and child labor were all morally defensible ways of organizing labor and the economy.2 Who’s to say our notion of good work can’t transform even further? Right now, our neoliberal hegemony says so.

So then the question becomes, how do we dethrone it? How do we create a new “political commonsense”? How do we change, on a huge societal level, our ideas of sensible, moral, “good” work in order to build a happier and more just future?

Maybe we could start with a four-day work week :-)

Thanks for reading, take care,

—mia xx