Work

Why Work? // Index

Welcome to CLAWS at whywork.org. We're a pro-leisure and anti-wage-slavery group of people dedicated to exploring the question: why work? This site provides information, support, and resources for those looking for alternatives to traditional employment.

I've started reading Tom Lutz' Doing Nothing: A history of loafers, loungers, slackers, and bums in America and hit this site to which he refers.

I'm thinking of joining CLAW, and the Leisure Party promoted at the site, but I'm not sure whether I really qualify. I don't like work--at least what I think of as "real work." But the main reason I don't like it is because it's not sufficiently strenuous, intellectually or physically, and because it's not individually productive. Before I got my first real job, I was a great Ayn Rand fan: the idea of exertion and energy, fighting, competing and striving appeals to me. What turned me off was the discovery that most real work isn't strenuous and doesn't produce results: you simply fill time and there's no way to exert yourself or achieve.

The book though is making me wonder whether I'm the authentic slacker I always assumed I was. But I don't do much slacking in the traditional sense. Apart from Washington Week and the weekly ritual of Keeping Up Appearances to which my husband and I are addicted, I don't watch TV. I don't play video games. I don't do any of the things most people regard as recreation. I write papers, prepare courses, read stuff for work and, being at the computer, on my breaks I blog. On mini-breaks--going to the kitchen to get a coke, I do little chores--wash the dishes, mop the floor, take out the trash, etc. I spend virtually all my waking hours either doing housework or my job, both of which I like. What bothered me most about the "real work" I did was that it wasn't sufficiently intense, physically or intellectually, and that there was no result.

The book poses a conceptual question: what counts as "work." It's the ambiguity that defenders of the work ethic which I so detest exploit. Work in one sense, strenuous intellectual or physical exertion that produces a result is fulfilling, satisfying and conducive to human flourishing. But most jobs are nothing like that: they're just drudgery and enforced idleness, doing dull, boring repetitious tasks and filling time in a confined space until the day is over. Moralists castigate the loafers, loungers, slackers and bums who don't, won't or can't do this drudge work, assuming that the alternative is, as one commentor or this blog suggested, playing Nintendo or simply vegging out. Work, they claim, is fulfilling, satisfying and conducive to human flourishing. But this is coming from the perspective of the tiny minority of individuals, at most 20% of the population, whose jobs are interesting, strenuous and productive, and who exploit the ambiguity to suggest that the rotten, mind-numbing drudgery that most people do is fulfilling, satisfying and conducive to human flourishing. Most people are scanning groceries, answering phones, inputting data, waiting tables, flipping burgers, sorting paper clips and shuffling papers to look busy, or just staring into space until they can get out. That's real work. It has to be done, but it doesn't benefit the people who are forced to do it in any way.

At least let's be honest about it. There are lousy jobs that have to be done--and most jobs are lousy. We have a life-lottery to see who will be sacrificed, as in the old Shirley Jackson story. The losers, the majority of the population, will have lives that are barely worth living. We underestimate the number of people who are sacrificed because we won the lottery and hang out with winners, and underestimate the sheer lousiness of the work others do because we've never done it for any extended period of time or imagined that we could be stuck doing it for all of our adult lives. We cover our tracks by moralizing and lying to ourselves: we pretend to believe, and maybe convince ourselves, that people who do lousy jobs don't suffer as much as we would if we did these jobs and that they could, if they chose, do better for themselves.

In Franz Werfel's strange futuristic fantasy, The Star of the Unborn, given advances in technology, most don't do any work. Imagine looking back historically from that future to the 21st Century where, even in affluent countries, even people who were relatively well off, most people were in effect imprisoned all day, 5 days a week for most of their adult lives working the rock pile.

No Free Ride

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=bumpy_ride

Clark, Morgan Steiner, and others are telling women on the playground that they won't get trapped staying home and can always go back to work. Such good news -- if only it were true. In the only actual quantitative study (meaning the kind of data collected according to generally accepted scientific methods from a statistically meaningful set of subjects), Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Center for Work-Life Policy found recently that just a little more than half of women who wanted to return to full-time work ever found full time work at all. And these weren't just any potential re-employees. The women in the center's study were "highly qualified," meaning they had earned nothing less than bachelors' degrees with honors or professional or graduate degrees...Not only do highly qualified, eager women not always get full time work, other studies have shown that the women never get back full time jobs comparable to the ones they left. Hewlett's data shows that you lose 37 percent of your earning power if you're off more than three years. Morgan Steiner's article places the point of no return at ten years.

I figured that out when I was 17--why is it so hard? Working as a clerk-typist at a bus company it was pretty obvious that the only alternative to a career was a job. My co-workers were young women, trying desperately to get pregnant so that they could quit and middle-aged women, forced back to work when their kids were grown. I went to college, and grad school, and made a career for myself, to avoid ever, ever having to to a job again.

How can any woman smart enough to get a good BA or graduate degree imagine, in the teeth of all empirical evidence, that after ten years off she will be able to hop back onto the fast track, into an interesting, well-paid career? It's hard enough to get interesting work even if you're right out of school pushing full steam ahead. After ten years out, the luckiest women, who've managed to snag high-yielding husbands (and avoided divorce), will spend the rest of their lives assing around, selling real estate part time. Most though will end up doing boring, dead-end, pink-collar drudge jobs for the rest of their working lives. Most people, women and men, spend their lives doing rotten, boring drudge work--and the only way to avoid that is to fight like a demon for a career.

Maybe what bothers me even more than the idiocy of this fantasy is the sense of entitlement that of women who imagine that they can pick up where they left off--the implicit assumption that the rules are different, and should be different for women. No one imagines that a man who dropped out to bum around at 30 should be able to take up where he left off ten years later. There aren't enough good jobs or good lives to go around, and if you want one of those very few good jobs you have to fight for all you're worth and sacrifice. If you choose to take ten years off, you pay for it--and that is as it should be, whether you're male or female, whether you spend those ten years traveling around the world, chaffeuring the kiddies to soccer practice, or lying on the street in a drunken stupor.