Slave to the Grind

Forced to Love the Grind

Passion is the new workplace requirement — and one that should be resisted.

by Miya Tokumitsu

In the Name of Love

“Do what you love” is the mantra for today’s worker. Why should we assert our class interests if, according to DWYL elites like Steve Jobs, there’s no such thing as work?

by Miya Tokumitsu

Branko Milanović 08/11/2015 |  
Svi zaposleni i svi bez posla


Fotografije čitateljki, Mina Milenković
Pre nekoliko dana Steven Hill je u Centru za postdiplomske studije CUNY u Njujorku predstavio svoju novu knjigu Raw deal: how the ‘uber economy’ and runaway capitalism are screwing American workers / Deblji kraj: kako über ekonomija i neobuzdani kapitalizam upropašćuju američke radnike. U njoj se govori (oslanjam se na Stevenovu prezentaciju, još nisam pročitao knjigu) o odumiranju sindikata, budućnosti sveta rada i robotici. Kada se govori o budućnosti rada (u Stevenovoj prezentaciji i drugde), smenjuju se dva protivrečna narativa: onaj o automatizaciji gde naša radna mesta preuzimaju roboti, i onaj o tome kako sve više radimo i ostajemo bez slobodnog vremena: umesto da nam se obaveze smanjuju (što implicira prvi narativ), mi “slobodno” vreme koristimo za izdavanje svojih stanova ili taksiranje svojim kolima. Po prvom scenariju patimo od viška slobodnog vremena, a po drugom ostajemo bez njega.

nplusonemag.com

Against Email


In the early days of the inbox, it afforded the naive human organism a certain pleasure to receive an email. Ah, someone thinking of me . . . So a note or two of companionship whistled through the lonely day. Thanks to email, the residual eloquence of a moribund letter-writing culture received a rejuvenating jolt of immediacy. As late as the late ’90s and early ’00s, during the last days of dial-up, it still felt nice to send and receive the occasional squib, to play an epistolary game of catch with some friends. Sometimes you would even forward a joke, a larky practice that nowadays seems an unconscionable crime.
For it has lately become clear that nothing burdens a life like an email account. It’s the old story: the new efficient technology ends up costing far more time than it ever saves, because it breeds new expectations of what a person can possibly do. So commuters in their fast cars spend hours each day in slow traffic, and then at the office they read and send email.
Correct emailing practice does not exist. The true mood of the form is spontaneity, alacrity—the right time to reply to a message is right away. But do that and your life is gone. So you reject the spontaneous spirit of email; you hold off replying for hours, days, even weeks. By then the initiatory email has gone stale, and your reply is bound to be labored. You compensate for the offense with a needlessly elaborate message. You ask polite questions to which you pray there will never come an answer. Oh, but there will.
Of course you could always reply gruffly, and in lowercase. Moreover, you could refuse to reply at all except where some practical matter was at issue. But Western civilization has always reserved for correspondence its most refined gestures of courtesy, and a memory of the old days persists. Over email, you can be in touch with so very many people—and make each one mad at you. And they are mad at you, your former friends, because no more efficient vehicle for the transmission of rashness and spleen has ever been devised than the email. Nettled by something—often something imaginary, since no one’s tone comes across quite right, over email—you lash out instantaneously. You hit SEND and it’s too late. It’s too late because it’s too soon.
Email is good for one thing only: flirtation. The problem with flirtation has always been that the nervousness you feel in front of the object of your infatuation deprives you of your wittiness. But with email you can spend an hour refining a casual sally. You trade clever notes as weightless, pretty, and tickling as feathers. The email, like the Petrarchan sonnet, is properly a seduction device, and everyone knows that the SUBJECT line should really read PRETEXT.
But one has many correspondents, and few if any lovers. Individually, they’re all decent people; collectively, they form an army marching to invade your isolation and ransack your valuable time. Nietzsche declared that one should set aside an hour a week for reading letters; anything more was toxic. And now we read in the paper where Gloria Steinem is complaining that she spends three hours a day replying to email.
America, most efficient country on earth, is in fact a nightmare economy of squandered time. Our economic system condemns people to work in offices and send email; that’s what they do there. (And in order to cover their asses, they cc everyone about everything.) Then they go home and take with them all the work they were supposed to be doing all day. Their revenge upon those of us who don’t work in offices? To send us email from nine to five.
We too have sometimes been the have-nots in the email economy. In the role of supplicant emailer, we have labored to achieve the impossible right tone: so winning that others will have to write back, so casual you can pretend it doesn’t matter when they don’t. The whole thing is painful all around. And this, finally, is what must be understood: email, which presents itself as a convenience, a breeze, is in fact a stern disciplinary phenomenon. You must not stray too far from your desk. You must be polite, you must write back soon. And yet in order to strike the right note, you must not write when too giddy, angry, tired, or drunk. Always at the disposal of email, never, except guiltily, at the disposal of your moods. . . . It fits our phase of capitalism: the collective attitude is casual, natural-seeming, offhand; the discipline is constant and intense.
One now recalls those early days of sparse email traffic much as the cokehead recollects the first bumps of powder snorted sweetly up his nose. How quickly pleasure turned to compulsion and unhappiness! Nothing was left, in the end, but anxiety (who am I forgetting to reply to?) and guilt (I know who). And yet the compulsive emailer, addict of the insubstantial, is ultimately even worse off than the substance abuser: no clinic for him to check into. Western civilization has become a giant inbox; it will swell and groan but never be empty till it crashes.
Our sole consolation is the prospect of doom. For a while, email, in its efficiency, had seemed to serve very nicely the means of production and their owners. But lately, the business pages report a dialectical reversal whereby the means of communication overwhelm the means of production, so that the class of owners and managers can hardly do or even supervise any work; they can only discuss, over email, the things they should be doing. Sabotage and slowdown—old techniques of worker resistance—have become impossible to distinguish from white-collar office jobs. Yes, it may be that all of us together, tapping out ephemera at our keyboards, will bring down this civilization once and for all. But not before human flesh has turned to spam.

---

At least, when we finally get there, the New York winter sunshine is the same. You see your breath in the glitter, and people are still out, all bundled up, in Union Square. So not everybody’s sitting home and emailing! There’s still hope for us.
“I’m just looking for somebody to talk to,” says a plaintive, kindly voice, its possessor’s back to us, sitting on the steps.
Boy, so are we. “Hello!”
Our new friend unhappily moves the cell phone from his face, points at it. “I’m, um, talking to my friend?”
“Ah,” we say. “Aha.”
We are a ghost.

 Book Review - White Collar Sweatshop by Jill Andresky Fraser  




Ellie Winninghoff posted Jan 31, 2002

 White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America
 

by Jill Andresky Fraser
WW Norton, 2001
$26.95, 352 pages
Buy this book from Powell's, an independent bookstore

America's white collar workers may be even worse off than their blue collar brethren.
In light of the Enron fiasco, that's no longer such a surprising conclusion. In White Collar Sweatshop, Jill Andresky Fraser looks at the lives of middle managers—the bulk of the men and women who run corporate America. This brilliant exposé is ultimately a description of the war on America's middle class by Wall Street investors and top corporate brass, an onslaught far more nuanced and subtle than sending blue collar jobs overseas or the sickening conditions under which workers in developing countries function as bona fide slaves.
Much of the information in this book is no secret to anybody trying to survive in the jungle economy of the millennium. Take compensation. Workers have been nickel-and-dimed to death, and Fraser cites all the statistics. It's not just that salaries have been cut and record numbers of jobs eliminated. Health care benefits have eroded and retirement funds have been converted so that employees rather than employers pay most of the bill. Small wonder that workers—not just CEOs—hoped to make up for their shortfalls with a killing in the stock market during the latter half of the 1990s. The CEOs did, but most workers did not.
Nor did workers make up for their sacrifices with an increase in leisure time. In fact, Fraser shows that free time has all but disappeared—thanks in no small part to personal computers, laptops, beepers, cell phones, and Palm Pilots. Fraser calls it “job spill,” as insidious and difficult to stop as an oil spill that seeps into a body of water. Lunch hour? An anachronism. Commuting time? A good chance to return phone calls. Sleep? Never mind if you were up until 2 am on the phone with a client across the globe. Be at the office at eight. These days, workers are expected to be on call 24/7—24 hours per day, seven days per week.
Stress—or rather, fear—is the new name of the game. Intel chairman Andy “Only the Paranoid Survive” Grove is not the only executive to use fear as a motivating force. Big Brother surveillance tools abound. Not just those hideous telephones and video cameras that complaining customers must put up with. Phone call tracking. Email monitoring. Software surreptitiously placed in employee computers to monitor what they are doing. My favorite passage in the book concerns something not usually associated with surveillance at all: those wretched office cubicles.
“Far from creating the collaborative, open environments that many top executives boast of when describing their “bullpen” designs, cubicles foster all kinds of negative feelings,” Fraser writes. “Their ticky-tacky one-size-fits-all, institutional-gray designs demean white-collar professionals just as surely as do the lack of a door and any illusion of privacy. Meanwhile, their very air of impermanence—since most can be set up, moved, or reconfigured at will—is a not-so-subtle daily reminder of the lack of stability and security in the corporate workplace. If there is any lesson that the 1980s and 1990s have taught white-collar workers, it is that they can be replaced easily.”
Perhaps the most unsettling fact of the corporate life that Fraser reports is the treatment of America's older workers—older, that is, than 40 years old. Once upon a time, a person whose job was not physical was thought to reach his or her prime at around age 55. No more. Now “experience” is more apt to imply that one's job skills are out of date.
One of the more outrageous parts of the book is Fraser's description of Intel's explicit strategy to eliminate these “older” workers from the payroll. She also describes displaced workers who have been shunned by the very outplacement agencies designed to help them. “If you are over 45, we can't help you,” one over-the-hill 40-something was told.
Even though the outlook for white collar workers is grim, Fraser is able to report some good news. Namely, she cites examples of white collar workers fighting back by using the Internet to regain the pension benefits their employers tried to take away. A website can attract disgruntled workers at one company, demonstrate to workers at other companies how the company really treats its employees, and attract the attention of journalists. Suddenly one is not fighting alone or in secret. Suddenly a corporation can be embarrassed into acting ethically.
Fraser acknowledges that the Internet by itself is not enough. Will white collar workers form unions? By the time they do, it will probably be too late. By then, many of them will have lost their jobs—and their pensions—by the ripe old age of 50.

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Ursula Huws | 01.06
The new economy makes it harder than ever to untangle capitalism from our daily lives.