It’s that time in the crisis cycle again: time for the self-righteous and wealthy to remind everyone how disconnected they really are. As America re-opens, and we have to make painful choices about how to rebuild the wreckage of our former economy, some people start boasting their privilege by whining about the injustice of it all. I just got accustomed to lockdown, whimper, why start back up again now?
First, cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider imposed upon Atlantic readers with “I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To.” Despite its promising title, it doesn’t address the implied theme of whether returning to our prior corporatist hellscape lives were worth it; Kreider instead mewls about how a lifestyle of “solitude, idleness, and nihilism” has become more appealing than work. Kreider needs less Pfizer, more Prozac.
Then a survey report emerged, saying that “64% of workers would pass up a $30k raise to work from home.” As big-tech and financial-services companies, which let millions of workers telecommute during the pandemic, desire a return to normality, many workers aren’t interested. They prefer work-from-home conditions, which allows them liberty to task-shift. Bored writing code or handling customer-service emails? Take fifteen to do laundry or heat a frozen burrito!
Both these voices sound superficially familiar. Who hasn’t yearned, periodically, to shirk work and malinger indoors, watching Netflix? And anybody who’s done white-collar work knows the eight-hour jive is moral rather than practical; we can’t focus that long on tasks for somebody else’s reward. Both the desire to jettison employment altogether, and the desire to work under home conditions, suggest a desire to refocus employment on workers, not bosses.
But.
Both stories bespeak mostly unexamined levels of privilege. Tim Kreider admits early that he doesn’t require an income, particularly; he crashes with friends. And the survey reports that supposed $30K refusal mainly among “Zillow, Twitter, and Microsoft employees.” We aren’t talking about people making sandwiches or scrubbing toilets, work that can’t be done remotely. Millions of Americans kept working through the pandemic, or didn’t get paid.
While Kreider didn’t need to work, and Microsoft restructured its work requirements, I and millions of others fell into a third category. Our jobs, declared “essential” for America’s thriving economy, kept going, and we needed to show up. These jobs weren’t without price, either; many low-paying service jobs became superspreader events. The media called grocery clerks “heroes” for doing their jobs, like they had a choice.
My construction labor was considered “essential.” But the things I worked to achieve, participation in community arts or amateur sports or just hanging out with friends, became suddenly lethal. Without a family, I moved from my apartment to my job and back like a convict on work-release. I had neither the luxury for chrysalis-like oblivion, like Kreider, nor liberty to schedule my own day, like the statistical Microsoft workers.
This leaves me a seemingly inevitable conclusion. I don’t need work tweaked, neither through a raise (though one would be nice), nor through telecommuting options. Rather, I question the structure of employment altogether. These sixteen months have made literal what Marx and Lenin considered metaphorically, that the ownership economy steals all meaning from work, while the rewards go to those who merely own things.
Fast-food franchisees complain that workers refuse employment because the government offers a pitiful stipend. ($300 per month amortizes to $15,600 per year—or approximately what Elon Musk makes every three seconds.) Others claim workers will return when they have other perquisites, like affordable child care, universal health insurance, and paid family leave. All these arguments assume people want rewards which have a detectable price tag.
But I’d contend workers want some meaningful connection between work and reward. Not a specific reward; they want control. The pandemic gave Tim Kreider the justification to indulge the moody self-abnegation inherent in his cartoons. It gave the abstract tech-industry workers freedom from being chained to the desk. It gave hourly workers freedom from… having anything to do or anywhere to go after hours. Not exactly the best trade-off for some.
These stories, and the traction they’ve received in the last several days, reflect the relative privilege held by the American punditocracy. The fact that cube farmers don’t want to return to the cube isn’t news; did they ever want to be there? Yet the existential rootlessness which the working class had amplified over the last sixteen months remains ignored. Unless, of course, it stops editors from getting their three-martini lunch.
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