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/ (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 (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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quote from: Tyr on January 27, 2022, 09:31:10 AM
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. :P
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. :P
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.
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.
Quote from: Berkut on January 27, 2022, 10:55:38 AM
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.
So people here have mainly been reading about this anti-work issue whilst at on their computer at work? :hmm:
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) ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2020_report (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.
QuoteThe 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.
Quote from: Tyr on January 27, 2022, 11:07:49 AM
Quote from: Berkut on January 27, 2022, 10:55:38 AM
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.
That isn't what good qual is though. Self selected qual is pretty much a bad approach.
Bring back unions :contract: (Seriously though I think bringing back unions and building more housing would solve a lot of problems in our first world worlds)
QuoteFrom 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).
Is that such a lunatic and fringe position? I like my job well enough but if I didn't have to I wouldn't work. I also think there should be a right to laziness - I think it is a virtue, though perhaps in moderation. Annual leave, weekends, ability to ignore your phone etc are all on the one hand lazy and on the other a huge chunk of what makes life worth living - whether it's doing your hobbies, chilling with your family, reading a book I think that's the stuff we do often value and should value more.
And I am in a comfortable and well-paid job. I pretty much just hated it when I worked in retail (I actually loved working in cafes and bars so that's different - and I didn't have to rely on tips which maybe encourages/facilitates laziness on my part). If I was working in logistics which is a boom sector as we order more online - I'm not sure I wouldn't just hate that job all the time.
I think an enjoyable life absolutely includes laziness - I also hate the North American language point of the phrase "do the work" to refer to things that aren't work because it always strikes me as just a bit of Protestant ethics that even things outside of work like "self-care" (which whenever I look it up just seems like a mental health description of relaxing) or reading about equality issues must have productive value. They can't be done from a place of laziness or pleasure because they are not virtuous.
We have strong unions here and they are not the answer. Traditionally the useless and lazy workers that everyone want gone have been voted into the union and after 50 years of that the unions are run by lazy half-wits and have no fight left in them.
There are still some strong active unions, the electricians union for one, and they do good work. But they are a niche union, all the big ones are useless.
Dear kindly social worker
They tell me get a job
Like be a soda jerker
Which means I'd be a slob
It's not I'm anti-social
I'm only anti-work
Gloryosky that's why I'm a jerk.
I've been anti-work for 20 years. I don't recommend it.
Quote from: Sheilbh on January 27, 2022, 12:26:31 PM
Bring back unions :contract: (Seriously though I think bringing back unions and building more housing would solve a lot of problems in our first world worlds)
QuoteFrom 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).
Is that such a lunatic and fringe position? I like my job well enough but if I didn't have to I wouldn't work. I also think there should be a right to laziness - I think it is a virtue, though perhaps in moderation. Annual leave, weekends, ability to ignore your phone etc are all on the one hand lazy and on the other a huge chunk of what makes life worth living - whether it's doing your hobbies, chilling with your family, reading a book I think that's the stuff we do often value and should value more.
And I am in a comfortable and well-paid job. I pretty much just hated it when I worked in retail (I actually loved working in cafes and bars so that's different - and I didn't have to rely on tips which maybe encourages/facilitates laziness on my part). If I was working in logistics which is a boom sector as we order more online - I'm not sure I wouldn't just hate that job all the time.
I think an enjoyable life absolutely includes laziness - I also hate the North American language point of the phrase "do the work" to refer to things that aren't work because it always strikes me as just a bit of Protestant ethics that even things outside of work like "self-care" (which whenever I look it up just seems like a mental health description of relaxing) or reading about equality issues must have productive value. They can't be done from a place of laziness or pleasure because they are not virtuous.
Hating the necessity to work is not a lunatic position. Hating the intrusive nature of modern work is not a lunatic position.
Believing that you have the right to have others work so you can eat, be housed, and enjoy your hobbies at their expense is, however, a lunatic position.
Hence the distinction between "reforming work" (that is, making it more humane, imposing limits on what employers can demand, mandating holidays and the like) on the one hand, and being against the very concept of work on the other.
The problem with that sub appears to be that many of the posters there were on one side of that dichotomy, while the mod interviewed was on the other.
My impression is that work experience in US can differ wildly depending on what kind of workplace you're in. In general, it seems like the more non-professional the workplace is (in a sense that the work is not done by people considered professionals), the more it's likely to be dominated by managers who view their workplace as an outlet for their authoritarian tendencies. Whether the authoritarian tendencies are kept in check or allowed to flourish depends a lot on the industry culture, the bargaining power of the non-managers, and the size of the company (bigger companies tend to be more cognizant of the legal risks of letting manager's abuse run unchecked).
Quote from: DGuller on January 27, 2022, 03:02:41 PM
My impression is that work experience in US can differ wildly depending on what kind of workplace you're in. In general, it seems like the more non-professional the workplace is (in a sense that the work is not done by people considered professionals), the more it's likely to be dominated by managers who view their workplace as an outlet for their authoritarian tendencies. Whether the authoritarian tendencies are kept in check or allowed to flourish depends a lot on the industry culture, the bargaining power of the non-managers, and the size of the company (bigger companies tend to be more cognizant of the legal risks of letting manager's abuse run unchecked).
I think the standard perceptual problem exists as well.
Most managers, even managers of restaurants or retail or some other "shitty" job are reasonable, if unexceptional, human beings doing the best they can, and being decent, normal people who care about their employees.
But nobody rights interesting stories on reddit about them. And nobody reads those stories if they do.
I worked in the restaurant industry for over ten years. I had a LOT of managers in that time, and was a manager myself for part of it. Some were jerks, some were assholes, but most of them were eminently forgettable. Just other workers trying to do their job as well.
I had not heard of this movement before this morning. That interview was amazing; it reminded me of this Dilbert strip:
(https://assets.amuniversal.com/ada5e2709e0e012f2fe500163e41dd5b)
Whatever value there may be in being anti-work, I don't think Doreen is going to join the movement.
I've been generally enjoying R/antiwork, though the drama yesterday was lame.
Thanks for the war college suggestion.
Quote from: DGuller on January 27, 2022, 03:02:41 PM
My impression is that work experience in US can differ wildly depending on what kind of workplace you're in. In general, it seems like the more non-professional the workplace is (in a sense that the work is not done by people considered professionals), the more it's likely to be dominated by managers who view their workplace as an outlet for their authoritarian tendencies. Whether the authoritarian tendencies are kept in check or allowed to flourish depends a lot on the industry culture, the bargaining power of the non-managers, and the size of the company (bigger companies tend to be more cognizant of the legal risks of letting manager's abuse run unchecked).
I'd add that workplaces like supermarkets, logistics hubs etc work on very small profit margins and a very tight approach to management to squeeze costs as much as possible and push productivity to the very limit in order to keep those margins and remain competitive. Naturally foremen, middle managers etc are subject to a plethora of KPIs and only those with authoritarian tendencies will get/keep the job.
Interesting therad and discussion.
I know a bunch of people who work in ASDA. Well. Worked in most cases as they've pretty much all retired in the past few years.
All of them report how it has really gone down hill in the past decade or so as a place to work. As you say perhaps inevitable as the squeeze grows ever tighter.
In contrast to this though I keep hearing great things about Costco looking after it's employees. I wonder how they manage.
Quote from: DGuller on January 27, 2022, 03:02:41 PM
My impression is that work experience in US can differ wildly depending on what kind of workplace you're in. In general, it seems like the more non-professional the workplace is (in a sense that the work is not done by people considered professionals), the more it's likely to be dominated by managers who view their workplace as an outlet for their authoritarian tendencies. Whether the authoritarian tendencies are kept in check or allowed to flourish depends a lot on the industry culture, the bargaining power of the non-managers, and the size of the company (bigger companies tend to be more cognizant of the legal risks of letting manager's abuse run unchecked).
I think that is the case everywhere, not only in the US, as my anecdote about my wife showed. I have also had shitty jobs in industrial environments and it's the same there, horrible.
Now, as an engineer, I'm treated well and respected. As a menial labourer I was not, and I did not have much of a voice either.
Minor anecdote: I worked as a labourer rented into a subcontractor to Volvo when they launched the XC90 in '04 or so. We were low on the rung and worked as quality inspectors, going around with a checklist and controlling the work of the real workers. We were not well liked.
Beside us, in our makeshift benches out in the storehouse, worked some Arabian immigrants, lower than us on the rung. They spoke no Swedish and we could not communicate with them. They glued together some last part on some console.
I heard afterwards that it was a highly toxic glue, normally used in very well ventilated controlled spaces. They were the low of the low and if I had no voice, they had nothing at all.