Anti-Work

[Threviel]

I've been getting into reddit these last few months, finding excellent sub-redit after sub-reddit (/askhistorians and /warcollege are great btw). I stumbled upon /anti-work and have been reading on it for a month or so now.

It's a US-centric subreddit about people being fed up with work, most often retail, storage or menial office work. The mods are socialist and anti-capitalism, so not my cup of tea, but the stories about work really resonates with me. Now, my work experience does not compare with the dystopic hell-hole that the US seems to be, but a lot of things struck close to home.

My wife, until very recently, worked in retail. She has had a string of bosses over the last fifteen years, everyone horrible in their own way. Most of them with obvious psychological issues that they took out on the workers. The one humane and nice boss she had was removed because she wasn't demanding enough on the workers, so upper management got rid of her. The local bosses, she worked on a large chain in Sweden so stores in every town, that were competent were immediately moved upwards in the hierarchy and every achievers goal was to work at HQ in Stockholm draining all local talent.

In the end, with kids and all, she gave up work. It simply wasn't possible to combine her working there with us living a good life. The demands were constantly rising and benefits constantly decreasing. No pragmatism with scheduling or vacations or anything really.

So the nightmarish stories from the US (and elsewhere) resonates with me. Working two jobs to survive, having bad bosses and barely any kind of legal protection against them, being completely replacable with an upper management cold and only interested in profit seems horrible. Traditionally in Sweden we have strong unions and strong laws protecting workers, and workers are still being exploited. And those strong laws and unions have been hollowed out since the nineties.

I've been thinking about starting a thread on the ThedaCare controversy and /anti-work in general. Apparently, in some midwestern city in the US, 7 nurses quit one department of a hospital run by ThedaCare to go work for their competitor. ThedaCare sued for an injunction (or whatever, some lawtalker can clarify) to stop them. https://nurse.org/articles/wisconsin-thedacare-nurses-lawsuit/. The ruling, which I can't find right now, was apparently quite amusing, with the judge tearing the case apart. At will employment works both ways still.

Today I saw an article in the BBC https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220126-the-rise-of-the-anti-work-movement that discusses the /anti-work and also yesterday /anti-work went private due to a mod doing a horrible interview for FOX and the backlash from that.

Anyone else been watching this stuff?

[Grey Fox]

I've been following antiwork & it's stories for months now. It is a fascinating glimpse of how far some US workers has to go to stop being treated like servants to capital.

I'm sad it went private, I'll miss the stories.

[Syt]

I've loosely been following that subreddit, but not really looking too closely. I do think that the current models of salaried and wage work do bear examination. Is the 40 hour (more realistically 50-60 hours and more for some) the be all end all, what responsibilities employers and employees should have towards another which seems to be very misaligned in some countries, and why is there such a high premium on work "a job, any job" and - as many do - see it as one of their prime foci in life, even if they hate their job. Especially when younger generations find it hard to make ends meet (esp. in the US) even when working long hours.

However, reading through some of the summaries of the events re: r/antiwork on r/outoftheloop it seems a mod thought they'd represent the whole sub and its folks on Fox News. And it seems they were a naive idealist with no idea what they were getting into or how to present themselves in such a situation. Obviously they delivered just what Fox was looking for.

For similar subs there's r/LateStageCapitalism and r/ABoringDystopa. It's a lot of repeating content, though, and a lot of stories posted are from years ago.

[Threviel]

Well, everything points to a 6-hour workday or 4-day week being just as productive as 40/5. But that only goes for us office-dwellers and we are not really the target audience here. The retail and fast-food registers have to be manned 24/7, so long work days are the optimum from the employers perspective.

The advances with working from home (I'm in my garage right now, ahrrrm working), shorter work week and so on is generally not something that the lower classes benefit from.

[Threviel]

Also very much tied into this is the cost of health care in the US. It seems Americans pay higher taxes than us, in general earn more than us and have to pay substantial amounts to bad health care insurance.

Once again doable for office dwellers, but it seems harsh if you're working two low paying jobs just to survive.

[Josquius]

Its a shocking implosion really. I didn't think the interview was THAT bad. And that it was done without permission. The guy looked a loser for sure but then he's a reddit mod, not someone presented as a leading thinker in the field.

It was an interesting sub to read a few months back but lately its standards have been dropping into the domain of "Yeah...that happened" with people farming for upvotes with ridiculous stories of how they showed up their arse hole boss.

[Syt]

It was an interesting sub to read a few months back but lately its standards have been dropping into the domain of "Yeah...that happened" with people farming for upvotes with ridiculous stories of how they showed up their arse hole boss.

A phase for many subs. Some grow out of it, some don't. And obviously some are entirely built around that.

[Habbaku]

I've been followed the sub for a while now and generally enjoy the actual anti-work posts much more than the whining, bleating anti-capitalist posts about having to work at all. The sub has plenty of good posts, but has been steadily declining in quality and becoming just another communist sub.

The mod did themselves zero favors by expressing that laziness is a virtue in the midst of an interview of what were, in hindsight, softball/bait questions designed to get them to hang themselves. They clearly did zero preparation for the interview and everything about it shows--at every opportunity given, they didn't try to express the whole AntiWork mentality in anything like a clear fashion. But, then, I suppose if they had the ethic to prepare for a news interview like that, they wouldn't be a mod of something called r/AntiWork. 

[FunkMonk]

Yeah I've been following that sub for a while. A lot of it is trash but there are some stories that are actually interesting and revealing about how "unskilled labor" is treated, especially in the United States.

It's certainly not a cohesive movement at all, but if someone could harness the pain, suffering, and resentment of a lot these types of people then they could be a force to deal with in the future.

[Berkut]

I think the ideas are interesting and worth considering.

I think "stories" in these kind of context are nearly useless. They don't actually tell you much of anything about systemic problems or solutions. By definition you are only seeing the stories from the disgruntled, and you only get to see their side of that story. There is zero fact checking, and no actual data.

The idea that the US is some kind of dystopian hell hole seems to be assumed to be simply true, but there isn't any actual data that I've seen that suggests that is true. And without data, it is impossible to develop actual responses, rather then just feeling good about looking out for the downtrodden. There is data from OECD that suggests that the US overall pretty much sucks in worklife balance compared to other OECD countries, and that is almost entirely legislative.

I think we should absolutely be looking at our assumptions about work, work hours, taxes on workers, insurance, child care. I think the US likely has radical room for improvement in all of these areas, since basically nothing has been done around any of them for a couple decades now.

But I want data.

[Josquius]

I think the ideas are interesting and worth considering.

I think "stories" in these kind of context are nearly useless. They don't actually tell you much of anything about systemic problems or solutions. By definition you are only seeing the stories from the disgruntled, and you only get to see their side of that story. There is zero fact checking, and no actual data.

The idea that the US is some kind of dystopian hell hole seems to be assumed to be simply true, but there isn't any actual data that I've seen that suggests that is true. And without data, it is impossible to develop actual responses, rather then just feeling good about looking out for the downtrodden. There is data from OECD that suggests that the US overall pretty much sucks in worklife balance compared to other OECD countries, and that is almost entirely legislative.

I think we should absolutely be looking at our assumptions about work, work hours, taxes on workers, insurance, child care. I think the US likely has radical room for improvement in all of these areas, since basically nothing has been done around any of them for a couple decades now.

But I want data.

Qual has its advantages over quant.
The data around this stuff is pretty widely known I think, its interesting that you rarely see the stories behind the data.

[mongers]

So people here have mainly been reading about this anti-work issue whilst at on their computer at work? 

[Malthus]

The basic problem is that actual workers lack a political constituency these days, particularly it seems in the US. Every event appears to make their lot worse, and there is no push from any side to make their lot better - the left is *supposed* to do that, but appears to be more interested in a host of other issues. So it is left to the lunatic fringe.

From what I know of the sub "antiwork", it basically started off lunatic fringe - literally, people who hate work and see laziness as a virtue (like the person interviewed, who was the main moderator of the site). However, over time, it attracted people telling stories about how they were screwed by their bosses, and other posters who had actual ideas about reforming how work is done ... problem is, when Fox came to interview their representative, it was the old mod with he lunatic fringe ideas who got interviewed, and they exhibited every stereotype Fox could want.

The people who posted on the site apparently did not approve of someone being interviewed as representative of the site (wisely), and were pissed off at being cast as complete slackers, leading to the site melting down and being closed. Apparently, there is a new site that many migrated to called reform work or something like that. Which is more accurate to what the non-lunatic faction actually is into.

It's somewhat similar to that whole "defund the police" thing. A lunatic fringe literally believes in abolishing police; others join up, with various more rational ideas (like moving some police funding into social work) ...

[Threviel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2020_report Implies that the US is one of the worlds happiest countries, mainly on the strengths of its economy and not life expectancy or freedom to make life choices.

So no, in a global sense it is not a dystopic hell hole in any way.

Compared to its peers, other long term stable and well developed western countries it's in the middle of the pack.

But a lot of things in the US is different. The silly religious shenanigans, worker protections, unions, politics, the idolisation of the military, police work, health care, the obsession with race, even views on sex and violence as entertainment differ from the main stream western views. So from my (obviously far superior) perspective the US can seem like a dystopic hell hole where women rights are trampled on, where there's racism everywhere and the government cannot be trusted and everything is on the way to become a christian taliban state.

But that is just perspective and biases based on cherry picked anecdotes from a state where the absolute majority of 300 million people live good lives.

I don't really have any point with this, just some stream of consciousness thoughts. It's complicated and as Berkie says, more data is needed.

[Josquius]

The basic problem is that actual workers lack a political constituency these days, particularly it seems in the US. Every event appears to make their lot worse, and there is no push from any side to make their lot better - the left is *supposed* to do that, but appears to be more interested in a host of other issues. So it is left to the lunatic fringe.

I'm not sure I'd agree here.
The problem is more that its muddied who is looking out for workers.
The left are still doing so...But the right have realised they have to at least pretend to do so to get anywhere, so they invent identity politics narratives about how the left also caring about gay people means they don't care about workers and have lost touch, and only the right with their brilliant business links and COMMON SENSE can improve things for workers.