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<h1 class="reader-title">How to escape the tyranny of work under
capitalism</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Posted Thursday 17th June
2021 /</div>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">11-14 minutes</div>
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<section>
<p> In her new book, writer and researcher Amelia
Horgan explores the many problems facing workers
today and why fixing them will mean radically
changing the very foundations of society.</p>
</section>
<span>Let’s face it: work isn’t all it’s cracked up to
be. For a generation faced with less opportunities,
less security and less pay, the many lies sold to us
about work have been shattered. And yet, with so much
of our identities bound up with our jobs – we do,
after all, spend <a
href="https://www.gettysburg.edu/news/stories?id=79db7b34-630c-4f49-ad32-4ab9ea48e72b&pageTitle=1%2F3+of+your+life+is+spent+at+work">a
third of our lives</a> at work – it can be hard to
envisage an alternative. </span>
<section itemprop="articleBody">
<p><span>Writer and researcher <a
href="https://twitter.com/AmeliaHorgan?">Amelia
Horgan’</a>s new book, </span><a
href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340913/lost-in-work/"><i><span>Lost
in Work: Escaping Capitalism</span></i></a><span>
(Pluto Press)</span><span>, sets out to debunk
work’s fantasy, and to offer a radical new vision
of what society could look like. In the context of
Covid-19 – which has led to <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/15/uk-unemployment-rate-falls-staff-jobs-covid-restrictions">staggering
levels of unemployment</a> and seen workers
exposed to vastly different levels of risk – its
release could not feel more timely. </span></p>
<p><i><span>Huck</span></i><span> spoke to Amelia
about coming to the realisation that work does, in
fact, suck, rethinking unemployment, and why
unions must be at the heart of every
organisation. </span></p>
<p><b>You started writing <em>Lost in Work</em>
before Covid-19. Did the pandemic shape the
outcome of this book? </b></p>
<p><span>I think the conclusions of the book would
have been the same before Covid. But one thing
that the pandemic threw into sharp relief is the
relationships of power at work. And I think that,
in some ways, it made the book an easier case to
make, because the mythology of work was kind of
punctured. This ‘we are a family’ stuff doesn’t
really hold when people are being made to go into
really dangerous working environments.</span></p>
<p><span>In terms of my own kind of experience with
the book, people often expect a confession of
being an overproductive person or someone who is
too into hustle culture. Even though that’s a very
common kind of pathology, I am completely the
opposite. I’m a fundamentally lazy person, so it
didn’t really cause me to reassess my relationship
to work. <em>[Laughs]</em></span></p>
<p><b>When did you start to realise that work, as we
currently know it, sucks?</b></p>
<p><span>For me, it was in those first jobs as a
teenager. I was working for a catering agency and
you’d have to arrive at some horrible o’clock.
Once, we had to go to this person’s house dressed
up in morph suits. [We felt like] there has to be
a better way of organising human life than this! </span></p>
<p><span>Whereas in the office jobs I’ve had, I’ve
been quite lucky, in that I’ve had the kinds of
jobs that are meaningful – so charity or third
sector kind of stuff. But I think there’s still a
fantasy of working life where you go in and you’re
wearing the perfect office wear, and it’s all
sleek and stylish, and you do a really good
elevator pitch, or a really good report… I
remember finding that my experience of the office
was very different to that. </span></p>
<p><span>But it was more those early experiences with
service work, where the naked power relations are
often pretty visible [that made me realise work
sucks]. Especially where there’s gender dynamics
at play, because of just how routine sexual
harassment is. </span></p>
<p><b>So many jobs, such as hospitality, have become
so much harder during the pandemic, with <a
href="https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/the-hospitality-workers-losing-out-on-tips-amid-covid/">staff
becoming rule-enforcers</a>, essentially. </b></p>
<p><span>It’s really awful, and something I’ve been
thinking about in terms of returning to
face-to-face teaching at university, and how much
the expectation would be that academics have to
police students. And, how awful that is for social
relations if you’re bar staff or an Uber driver. </span></p>
<p><span>Having to police people, especially if you
don’t have very much power, and especially in that
really precarious gig work, where your future
ability to get work depends on your online rating…
you just are not necessarily going to be in a
position to say ‘no’. That’s the kind of the
tyranny of the customer ‘always being right’,
which is made so much more powerful by this
platform gig work. </span></p>
<p><b>You include quite a surprising stat at the
beginning of the book about a 2017 poll which
found that two thirds of people in the UK claim to
like or love their job. Why was that stat
important to include? </b></p>
<p><span>I include that stat because I think it’s
really important for people who are critics of
work and of capitalism to reckon with. People </span><i><span>do</span></i><span>
report enjoying their work. So what does that
mean? There are a few ways you could approach it. </span></p>
<p><span>One, is that people find things enjoyable in
their work that aren’t necessarily really to do
with their work: it might be that they get on with
their colleagues, they go to the pub after work,
or it might be that there are elements of a job
which they find rewarding. </span></p>
<p><span>The other point is that we don’t have many
other opportunities for self-fulfillment, and for
developing ourselves, other than work. So much of
our lives is at work: especially now, where people
often work across multiple jobs, or in precarious
work, where people are worried about what job is
coming next. So, work time is not just literally
the time you spend at work. </span></p>
<p><span>So there’s a question around that: What would
people do instead [of work]? I think it’s
important for critics of work under capitalism not
to be prescriptive or moralistic about what people
can be doing. But I think there are all kinds of
other ways of being together, other ways of
creating and living together. This kind of stuff
is suppressed, or the possibilities for them are
reduced, in contemporary capitalism. </span></p>
<p><span>That’s an important element of why it is that
people find enjoyment in work as well, because
there’s not necessarily much else to find
enjoyment in.</span></p>
<p><b>How has this sense that you should love your job
only made things worse for workers? </b></p>
<p><span>That element is really important. This idea
that we find freedom through the market and we
realise ourselves through the jobs available to us
is common, but it takes on perhaps a particularly
pernicious form when it comes with these jobs that
we’re supposed to love. </span></p>
<p><span>You can see that this kind of stuff is thrown
back in the face of workers when they’re trying to
organise. [It’s the idea that] ‘If you really
cared about this organisation, or this cause
you’re working for, you wouldn’t go on strike’,
‘Do you not care about this?’… Or, if you love
your job, you would stay longer, you would work
for free.</span></p>
<p><span>It stops you seeing yourself as a worker, and
this is something I see in academia a lot. It’s
not limited to that, of course, but it’s very
common.</span></p>
<p><b>The conversation around a four-day week is often
accompanied by an argument that it will make
workers more productive on the days they do work.
In this sense, do such solutions sometimes miss
the point? </b></p>
<p><span>I think one thing that’s important with
demanding less working time is that it has to come
without a reduction in wages. It has to be the
same conditions, but less time. A good thing about
a four-day week is that that extra time could also
be put to other political use. One of the things
that genuinely really hinders social movements, or
the organised left, is that people have to work so
much and don’t always know when they won’t be
working – the stats on the number of people who
don’t know when their next shift will be is really
huge. </span>
</p>
<section>
<p>In her new book, writer and researcher Amelia
Horgan explores the many problems facing today’s
underpaid, exhausted and disillusioned workforce
and why fixing them will mean radically changing
the very foundations of society.</p>
</section>
<p><span>We can put that time to good use; it’s not
about demanding it so we can all go to meetings on
our extra day off. And a lot of the attacks on our
time are attacks on our freedom to organise as
well as our ability to have leisure. I think
framing a four-day week in those terms can be
really helpful, too. Because people have had a
four-day week, with bank holidays, it’s one of
those demands that has a concreteness and
tangibility to it. </span></p>
<p><span>There is never going to be one quick fix: we
need to look into rebuilding union power, into
ownership within society, and into inequality.
It’s actually a long hard slog, but I do think the
four-day week is an important demand. </span></p>
<p><b>How do we square these kinds of ‘less work’
solutions with a more radical anti-work politics –
are these things at odds with each other? </b></p>
<p><span>I think there are different temporalities of
struggles. So on the one hand, we might be asking
for higher wages, but on the other hand, we might
eventually abolish the wage. I think it’s entirely
possible to be saying we want a bit less work now,
but in the future, we want the transformation of
work or the abolition of work as we know it. </span></p>
<p><b>So many people have lost jobs as a result of
Covid-19. Will our attitude to unemployment change
at all as a result? </b></p>
<p><span>It took a lot of ideology to make
unemployment appear as an individual failure,
rather than a social problem. What that suggests
is that it’s open to contestation. What Covid-19
has made us able to say is, ‘Look, the reason
people don’t have jobs is not because they need to
get off the sofa or whatever, it’s because the
jobs have gone.’</span></p>
<p><span>We’ve seen the government trying to talk
about unemployment in the face of the pandemic,
about how people are <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/06/anxiety-plans-cut-furlough-scheme-workers-chancellor-coronavirus-payout">addicted
to furlough</a>, or need to be weaned off. But I
don’t think it necessarily sticks as much as it
has done in the past. So, I think there’s an
openness to what unemployment means now. But there
is still a huge amount of stigma and shame and
these things which are fundamentally social
problems framed as individual failures. These
kinds of attitudes run really deep in our society
and challenging them isn’t easy. </span></p>
<p><b>How do you think attitudes need to change
towards unions so that they’re accepted as a
fundamental part of any organisation?</b></p>
<p><span>We need to see unions as playing an active
role rather than just being a kind of insurance
policy, basically. And I think a lot is changing.
The pandemic has shown that the unions are the
ones saying, ‘No, it’s not safe to go in’. </span></p>
<p><span>But there’s still this idea that trade unions
act selfishly, that they do things that will harm
the public to benefit their members. The
prevalence of anti-union attitudes is something we
really need to fight. And I think some of that
does come down to seeing it as this thing that
workplaces </span><i><span>should</span></i><span>
have. The idea that the workers should be
represented, and be able to stand up and fight for
their conditions, should be seen as completely
normal. </span></p>
<p><span>Changing people’s attitudes takes a long
time, because we’re up against a really pernicious
ideology. But it wasn’t that long ago that even
talking about the possibility of things being
different made you seem like someone who was just
on another planet. </span><span>[For example]
Austerity was seen as the necessary choice whereas
now, most people, even in the establishment will
say, ‘Okay, that was a political decision we made’
and there is an openness to politics that means we
can contest this stuff more. But we’re still up
against it: unions face ideological attacks, even
from within the Labour Party. </span></p>
<p><span>So, I think the popularity of this kind of
‘join a union’ meme is helpful, but we need to go
beyond that. It’s not just ‘join a union’, it’s
push it to be more active, push it to be more
militant, get more people involved, including in
sectors that have not been as historically
involved.</span></p>
<p><em>Interview has been edited for length and
clarity. </em></p>
<p><strong><a
href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340913/lost-in-work/"><em>Lost
in Work</em></a> is out to pre-order on Pluto
Press. </strong></p>
<p><strong>Daisy Schofield is <em>Huck</em>’s Digital
Editor. Follow her on <a
href="https://twitter.com/daisy_schofield">Twitter</a>.</strong></p>
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</section>
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