So, this post is inspired by a conversation with a friend. We were talking about concepts work as a job, work as play, and whether people should be paid for time or effort. And honestly, I personally am of the camp it doesn't matter a ton how work is organized as long as it's coercive. As long as there's ability to walk away, all models have the possibility to become abusive. Still, there is talk about which model can be better within that framework.
The traditional hourly job
So, imagine that you're reading this at 3 AM as I am writing this stuff. You stayed up way too late and you gotta get up at 6 AM because you have a traditional job. You are told by your employer you have to be at work and punched in at exactly 8 AM. You will work a set block until around 12:15 PM or so, where you will have a half hour lunch break. And then you will return to work at 12:45 PM and work until exactly 5 PM. Somewhere in those two blocks there will be additional 15 minute breaks to use the bathroom, etc. But your day is already decided before you get up. You have to get up at a certain time, dress a certain way, be at work at a certain time, and spend your time on the clock WORKING. If your business is slow and you try to chit chat with a coworker, your boss might chew you out because you aren't being paid to sit around and chat, even if things ARE slow. No, you're being paid based on time, and your employer OWNS your time. And you have no control over it. You are your boss's slave, for as long as you're on the clock.
This is how a traditional job works, and it actually tends to have a lot of downsides. First of all, because an employer DOES own your time while you're on the clock, you are required to look busy at all times. Even if you're not actually doing anything. If you can finish your nice office job in 15 hours a week, you might stretch your time to make it look like you're busy for 40, because you have to look busy. If you get your work done early, the reward is more work. If you work in retail or food service it's even worse. If you have time to lean, as they say, you have time to clean. So you have to continue to clean and exert physical energy to avoid being seen as "lazy." In the American work ethic, doing something other than work during these types of jobs is looked down upon, because you're stealing from your employer if you do so. it's not your time, it's theirs. They're paying you for it. You're a rent a slave.
Americans, and the west in general, tend to romanticize these kinds of jobs. 40 hours a week is seen as the "proper" amount of work effort, where any less is considered "lazy." Many jobs will force people to work 40 hours a week and not give them flexibility. Why? because our labor laws make that the "full time job", and we decide that's the amount of sweat and tears people have to put in to justify their existence. If you want to work less, your employer might laugh at you and tell you you're fired. if you agree to the job, you agree to your employer's terms on hours. And if you work less, you're often denied benefits like healthcare and the like too.
Wages are often designed around the 40 hour week, with many "part time" jobs that allow you to work less not giving people enough money to live on in the first place. And because we have an employer based healthcare system, these jobs are sought after because that's how you get the healthcare you need. You're not really allowed to work less, the system doesn't allow it. And you have to pretend to put up with the grind even if it's absurd because again, you're being paid on time.
Honestly, while many people, including much of the left, tends to glorify these jobs, this whole structure feels like slavery to me. When you're an employee, you're a roundabout slave. You're selling time on an employer's terms, and the employer owns that time. It's no longer yours. And you better do what the boss man says or you lose your money and your healthcare. You're free to go but given how society is structured, without a UBI and M4A, are you ever truly free?
The Salary Job
Salary jobs are a lot like hourly jobs, but a bit different. They tend to be prestigious and highly sought after due to high pay and benefits, but do offer some pros and cons relative to hourly jobs. On the one hand, it relieves the stress associated with being paid for time. You're not. You're paid to do a job, no matter how many hours this takes. This can be both good and bad. It's good in the sense that if you happen to get your work done early, you can go home early. or stay around in the office and goof off. A lot of tech jobs are like this. During slow seasons, people might work very little or not at all. They might install video games on their computer and play them while waiting for actual work to come in. The problem is, this isn't normally what happens. Rather than being underworked, salaried positions are overworked. Salary is also a nice way to skirt overtime regulations, where an hourly employee has to be compensated extra pay (time and a half), and as such many salaried jobs are inherently jobs that require long hours. Managers are often on salary, and they can work 60+ hours a week. A lot of software engineers have to do crunch time to meet delivery deadlines for various projects and have to work long hours. If a job can be done in fewer hours, generally, it will be an hourly position. Jobs that require a lot of hours, or round the clock availability are often salary.
The pros of salary jobs can include some level of flexibility where you're not being watched at every minute, as well as higher pay, benefits and prestige. But such jobs are often worse in terms of work life balance, and make the "wage slavery" issue worse. You might be generally paid and treated better, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're "free". Your life is tied to your job, for better or for worse, and I see many of these jobs as relatively unfree. While some jobs are best done this way, you normally have to be very motivated to be able to tolerate this structure, and many are often only there for the pay. I don't really see it being an ideal work structure overall for most kinds of work.
The Gig Economy
So, the gig economy gets a lot of late. Mainly because as it exists, it seems to be a way for employers to replace traditional jobs with a traditional benefit structure with a new structure that pays less money, benefits, and generally evades the responsibilities many employers have to employees. For example, with a traditional taxi industry, everything is highly regulated. Prices are high, but so are wages, salaries, and benefits. But with the gig economy and ride sharing like uber employers get around that. Hours are flexible. Employees are no longer employees, they're "independent contractors". They are free to work as many or as few hours as they want, but are paid more flat rates for work. They also are denied benefits. In the case of ride sharing apps, workers might be asked to provide their own vehicles, and they are liable for any damages, whereas with taxis they provide the vehicles and own them.
Pro work leftists freak at these sorts of things and reminisce about the good old hourly job. You just pay your dues, put in your time, and you get rewarded for it. They see employers as trying to avoid their duties to their employees, wanting work, without wanting to pay them properly or give them the stability a job provides. But, I'm going to be honest, is the normal 40 hour job that great? As I said above, you're basically a slave during the hours you're on the clock. And everything wrong with those jobs goes back to that. Sure, they provide more stability, but given my own views, shouldn't we be relying more on a UBI and universal healthcare of some kind to provide for people instead? I mean, assuming people have the same protections and the right to say no I want with other jobs, is the gig economy that bad? You get a lot more flexibility, can work as much or as little as you want, work at your own pace, etc. Isn't that better than an hourly job which seems to function like a de facto rent a slave position? Like this is where I diverge from lefties. They still value work and see a shift toward the gig economy as a bad thing, wanting to preserve the 20th century ideal of the "full time job". I understand this type of job always kinda sucked and think shifting toward a system with UBI and more voluntary work is a good thing, and I think a gig economy type environment can work if we provide for people in alternative ways where we dont insist jobs be the SOLE way for people to live. I get it. In our current economy, the gig economy sucks. people can't live like that. But with my fixes, I think it could be a new and novel way of working that could be more comfortable to someone like me who IS work adverse and would prefer to come and go as I please rather than being forced to contribute in a certain set way for a certain set amount of hours that are largely out of my control.
Work From Home
A new trend that has caught on since the pandemic is the idea of working from home. Due to not being able to go to the office because of COVID, many jobs have implemented systems in which people do their work from home. And now, as the pandemic is "over" (hint, it's not, we're just acting like it is), suddenly people wanna drag everyone back to the office. I discussed the pros and cons of work from home previously, but generally speaking work from home has given workers a lot more flexibility with their jobs, allowing them to work less without having to appear to look busy, as well as have less commute time and more relaxed dress codes. But, employers, being the control freaks that they are, don't like that they can't keep workers under their thumb as much and fear workers might realize there's more to life than...jobs. Oh noes, the horror. Anyway, this sounds good.
So what ARE the drawbacks? Well, I feel like work from home long term could risk a blending of work life balance. Like, a major issue I could potentially have is that due to the fact that you're working at home, there's less of a boundary between work, and home life. You might see the set 40 hour work week morph into this on call 24/7 thing with work and life blending together. I dont like that idea. But I could see it as a long term weakness here, as someone who would like a delineated difference between work and life.
I also think it might hurt those without experience, as offices provide on the job training. I imagine that would be harder to accomplish remotely. So, it would benefit current workers, but not new workers trying to get in.
Work as Play
An idealized model I see from a lot of the anti work crowd, particularly anarchists, is the idea of work as play. They too see the traditional job as an oppressive structure and want to replace it with an anarchistic society in which work is done in playful ways. Tasks turn into games. Stuff like that. I'm...not sure how viable this is. Like, it's been a concept even a lot of people who dislike the current system are critical of. Marx for example thought that someone would always have to do the dirty work and that there needed to be a solid line between work and life. But, people like Bookchin who I that video above is about, seemed to think we could have a realm in which work and play intersected.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I mean, I kind of feel like work IS unpleasant, and it doesnt matter how you gamify it, if I still have to do it, I ain't going to be happy. It's the coercion of having to do it that's the problem. The lack of freedom. I could be a millionaire twitch streamer who talks politics and plays video games all day and I would still hate my job because if i HAVE to do it, if I'm compelled by necessity TO do it, then that's going to be a problem for me. I mean, I have trouble doing things even if I want to sometimes. like this article. It's actually going on a lot longer than i thought and I thought I would've been done a long time ago with it. And it's wearing on me, but I just want to finish it already so i CAN play. So even enjoyable things I do without compulsion can still feel like work if I make myself do them. I don't know if it's better to view work as play or work as work, but either way, work should be made as voluntary as possible so that even if people do wanna do it, the choice is theirs and not forced on them.
So is there really an ideal form of work?
I don't know. All of them suck. Because they're work. And all of them have pros and cons. I feel like the traditional job is over emphasized in our society because of the security it provides and the fact that we expect employment to be the sole provider of peoples' basic needs with the state having a secondary role, if any role at all. And other forms of work, tend to disrupt that. But let's face it, our current system is basically wage slavery. Those jobs might pay better and have better benefits, but as far as the personal freedom they provide, well, they don't provide any. It's amazing how we Americans talk so much about freedom but then submit to the tyranny of the boss and the clock unquestioningly. This isn't free.
Alternative forms of work might provide more freedom, but they might start to struggle in other ways. They dont pay super well, but honestly, given I think everyone should have UBI and universal healthcare, my ideology would make these more viable. I'm also open to work from home and work as play, but also, without the ability to have the security of a UBI and healthcare, these jobs are still going to be coercive to people.
The fact is, I don't see any freedom under any of these organization models without a UBI, universal healthcare, and the right to say no that they provide. Work is inherently coercive and oppressive if people can't freely choose it. Jobs are oppressive in large part because you can't walk away. The gig economy could provide more freedom, but without the benefits. Work from home has the possibility of eroding the boundaries between work life and home life in uncomfortable and harmful ways. And work from play just seems even worse at that, intentionally blurring the lines.
At the same time, all modes of work could be improved by my UBI and healthcare ideas. I feel like providing healthcare and basic needs would make the traditional job structure slightly less appealing, leading people to flee it and pursue other, more sustainable models of work over time. I actually could see a rise of gig work over time, which seems to be happening anyway. I also would like to see workers resist calls to go back to the office if they don't want to.
While I will always think work has some oppressive qualities to it that deserve to be isolated from other parts of life, I think the most important feature of any system is that people be allowed to walk away. No one should be chained to a job they hate just to survive, and that people be allowed to work on their own terms. If people are not allowed such an opportunity, they are little better off than slaves. It doesn't even matter if the jobs pay well. As long as the structure remains the same, it's still oppressive. So, to me, this is why what matters to me more than anything is that people get a UBI and healthcare so that they can work on their own terms, or even, dare I say, not at all.
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