By Jim Miller
Recently the New York Times did a thorough exposé of life inside Amazon’s “bruising workplace” where the managers celebrate what they call “Purposeful Darwinism.” The focus of the piece was not on the poor folks turning around the goods in the warehouses but on the presumably more privileged white-collar workers who are encouraged to regularly challenge and report on one another when they are not busy answering texts at 3:00 AM or pushing themselves to work 80 hours a week.
In the jungle of Amazon, everyone is subject to this kind of sadistic postmodern Taylorism, and they have the choice to either like it or leave.
Of course, only a fraction of those who start at Amazon stay for any length of time, but that is all OK according to the good folks there because their survival of the fittest model helps them keep only the best.
Indeed, as the story tells us, some of these fortunate Übermensches even teach their kids the Amazon way, presumably so they’ll be able to survive the rigors of late capitalism while their less fit friends and classmates are thrown on the junk heap of history.
This might just be a story about the excesses of one corporate giant but, sadly, it is not. As the Times notes:
Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,” said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change.
So it goes on relentlessly with millions of us slaving away at jobs that steal our lives from us in the service of moving products that millions of the rest of us don’t need.
In an economy that thrives on heedless overconsumption and waste (and all the excess carbon and related environmental devastation that comes with it), most of us are killing ourselves in an effort that is literally killing the world.
It’s death-in-life and death for the planet, a daily dystopia of our own making.
Call me crazy, but this might just be why more and more of us hate work.
In another recent New York Times piece, “Rethinking Work,” Barry Schwartz confirms this:
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
Schwartz then goes on to explore why this might be as he ponders whether:
One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay. “It is the interest of every man,” he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at his ease as he can.”
This idea has been enormously influential. About a century later, it helped shape the scientific management movement, which created systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill and close attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.
Today, in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to. The call center employee is monitored to ensure that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s keystrokes are overseen to guarantee productivity.
But Schwartz rejects Adam Smith’s view of human nature and goes on to cite several studies showing that people are frequently more motivated to work better and more efficiently when they are given jobs that deliver them a sense of social value and personal satisfaction. For many of us, he insists, meaning is more important than money.
If you are thinking that this is not rocket science, Schwartz agrees, but his analysis of why so many of us labor in ways that dehumanize, demoralize, and depress us is worth considering:
This is admittedly not news. But that only raises a deeper question: In the face of longstanding evidence that routinization and an overemphasis on pay lead to worse performance in the workplace, why have we continued to tolerate and even embrace that approach to work?
The answer, I think, is that the ideas of Adam Smith have become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: They gave rise to a world of work in which his gloomy assumptions about human beings became true. When you take all opportunities for meaning and engagement out of the work that people do, why would they work, except for the wage? What Smith and his descendants failed to realize is that rather than exploiting a fact about human nature, they were creating a fact about human nature . . .
Work that is adequately compensated is an important social good. But so is work that is worth doing. Half of our waking lives is a terrible thing to waste.
And the wasting of lives is the business of the modern world where we’ve become so accustomed to sucking on the sugar-coated turd that we have come to confuse it with chocolate. Hence, we lie to ourselves and it is only in moments of unexpected revelation or crisis that we recognize the truth that we’ve been lying to ourselves all along.
Such was the realization of Linds Redding, a New Zealand-based ad executive who, before he recently died of cancer at age 52, published a remarkable essay where he rejects “The wholesale industrialization and mechanization of the creative process” and the cult of speed, hyper efficiency, and the fetishization of technology that comes with it.
In sum, Redding takes on the Amazonization of the advertising world and, more devastatingly, the big lie at the heart of most of our work lives. Indeed, he comes out against work as we know it:
And here’s the thing.
It turns out I didn’t actually like my old life nearly as much as I thought I did. I know this now because I occasionally catch up with my old colleagues and work-mates. They fall over each other to enthusiastically show me the latest project they’re working on. Ask my opinion. Proudly show off their technical prowess (which is not inconsiderable.) I find myself glazing over but politely listen as they brag about who’s had the least sleep and the most takeaway food. “I haven’t seen my wife since January, I can’t feel my legs any more and I think I have scurvy but another three weeks and we’ll be done. It’s got to be done by then. The client’s going on holiday.
What do I think?”
What do I think?
I think you’re all fucking mad. Deranged. So disengaged from reality it’s not even funny. It’s a fucking TV commercial. Nobody gives a shit.
This has come as quite a shock I can tell you. I think, I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a bit of a con. A scam. An elaborate hoax.
Countless late nights and weekends, holidays, birthdays, school recitals and anniversary dinners were willingly sacrificed at the altar of some intangible but infinitely worthy higher cause. It would all be worth it in the long run…
This was the con. Convincing myself that there was nowhere I’d rather be was just a coping mechanism. I can see that now. It wasn’t really important. Or of any consequence at all really. How could it be. We were just shifting product. Our product, and the clients’. Just meeting the quota. Feeding the beast as I called it on my more cynical days.
So was it worth it?
Well of course not. It turns out it was just advertising. There was no higher calling.
This is stark stuff from someone who made a good living practicing the craft of creating desires in order to sell us more things. But he’s right.
There are better lives to be had if we can gain the courage to start to say no– individually and collectively.
So maybe, if we believe there is something more to human existence than shifting product, we ought to stop, put down our various distracting devices, and think about what it means to be here, now, in this fleeting moment.
Jim Miller
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This same workaholic ethic also pervades Wall Street. Young people going to work there often don’t last very long. Sure they make millions of dollars but they’re expected to work 18 hour days in order to justify the millions they’re making.
All technology startup companies haven the same work ethic. Read Bill Gates’ biography. The MO was work till you drop, then sleep under your desk, drink Jolt Cola and eat pizza. Steve Jobs was the same way.
How do you think Qualcomm started? Irwin Jacobs was a total workaholic who expected the same from his associates. This is what the “survival of the fittest” ethic is seeking out: workaholics who have the stamina to put in these long hours without seeing their families or doing anything else that most humans require to have a decent life. In return they feel quite justified in taking home millions of dollars. After all they’ve worked hard for it.
It’s the anti-union ethic. Unions require that workers have vacations, breaks, 8 hour work days, time off etc. Workaholics don’t want any of these things for themselves or their workers.
When I worked at General Dynamics Convair, there were two classes of workers: hourly (which were unionized) and salaried (“professionals” like me who were college educated) who were expected to work to get the job done no matter how many hours it took.
I found myself one Sunday flying to the Electric Boat Division in Massachusetts. I was paid nothing for working on a Sunday. Sitting next to me was an hourly technician who, because of the union, was being paid double time for working on a Sunday.
Killing yourself to live. This song is appropriate. Lyrics attached.
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Studs Terkel from “Working”
A friend of mine is a professional musician, a class famously out of work no matter how proficient they may be. He took a job on a cruise ship as a do-everything shipmate by day so that he could join a very hot jazz group at night as their bassist. He had two jobs to make one salary. For his day job he was instructed by management to avoid all conversations with fellow employees while working, and to answer all polite thank yous from passengers with just one sentence: “It’s my pleasure.” That’s it. No other responses were considered appropriate.
My friend Steve’s experience aboard the Good Ship Capitalism is what your Linds Redding means when he speaks of “(t)he wholesale industrialization and mechanization of the creative process”
Interesting, isn’t it? Children in this country get 12 whole years of learning how to read, of English classes, literature and learning about the large textures of human existence through the classics, etc. — and all they want to do with it is get a job at Amazon.
A bit like buying a Ferrari, really. It means you can press your foot down on a pedal 4 inches like everybody else, and yet, people place so much more meaning onto this meaninglessness.
Part of my poem, Lively Hoods, that I think is relevant…
What if WE changed the rules,
and instead of being obliged to get a job
everyone had a RIGHT to a livelihood!
What if instead of working folks paying taxes
and interest
and student loans…
what if instead we could invest in local ventures
on level playing fields
where we could do what we love
in exchange for what we need?
What if some of us grew the food,
and some baked and cooked,
and some saved and packaged seed?
What if some of us built eco-homes
so everyone had a place to live,
and some of us sewed quilts and clothes,
and re-soled shoes,
and made furniture…
What if some of us fixed things,
and some of us painted and sculpted,
and played music and danced…
What if some of us took care of the children,
while others installed solar panels on every rooftop,
and generated all of the electricity we need
to power the trolleys and buses
for everyone
for free…
And what if some of us repaired the bike lanes and the bicycles,
and wrote computer programs that actually made our lives better,
and taught our children,
and nursed and doctored the sick,
and researched for ways to heal our planet…
and what if
we didn’t call it a JOB.
And what if we all did this for one another,
for the joy of it
and not to make some foreign investors a profit,
by changing just one word:
JOB
Because a job is something you get
by begging someone else to give to you.
But a living is something you make for yourself!
This is just a gentle suggestion,
as we come to terms with the futility
of asking those in power to give us anything
just so we can survive.
Working together,
we can stop begging,
and just begin to make our own
lively hoods.
Ever since my first job back when I was 16, I learned very quickly that all we’re doing today, is renting out half of our lives to the world’s worst renters, at a seriously depreciated rate.
And there’s also a ton of loopholes that allow them to get away with it, and believe you me, they use every one of these dirty tricks to, for example, make sure you never see a raise (for example, by keeping hours to 35-39 hours a week, so they won’t have to treat you like a full timer).
Or the 3 month probationary period, where they can fire you on a whim just as you’re about to finish, so they don’t have to give you benefits or a raise. And it won’t really reflect on you, they’ll do it to make their quarterlies look good, just kick off the guys who haven’t been around long enough to make seniority. Some even lie, for unknown reasons, when it comes to collecting unemployment after one of those “lay offs”.
If you look at any of the employment ads on Craigslist, at any given time, you’ll see some ads that look pretty attractive. Now come back to that page on Craigslist in 3 months. And what’s that you’ll see? The SAME ADS. It’s like they’re treating us as if we’re just a cheap alternative to hiring temps.