Labor as it was, is, and could be
Reviewed:
Down and Out in the New Economy How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today by Ilana Gershon (2017)
Before the Market by DN Wang (2018)
The story of modernity is the story of atomization. From enclosure to the gig economy, human communities, relations, and even the very concept of self, have been dissected and processed to be of market value and little else. Workers were once thought of to exchange their labor power for compensation but now consider themselves (and when convenient, are considered by employers as) selves-as-businesses. In Down and Out in the New Economy — How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Ilana Gershon probes the history, mechanisms, and contradictions of these trends in the 21st century. Relying on the voices of job seekers, hiring managers, recruiters, and other segments of today’s labor force, she richly illustrates how people manage their presentation of self while trying not to lose their own sense of self. For workers of a certain age, this story uncomfortably reflects their life experiences.
A cog in an extraordinary, invisible, infernal machine
As I sat getting oriented in one of my first jobs after college, I remember scoffing as the HR manager told me that “if and when” I decided to leave the organization there were steps to take in order to manage my various benefits. Those benefits consisted of an HSA and vacation days I never managed to use properly. At my next job, which began not even a year after the first one, I had a similar reaction to hearing that after five years, I’d earn even greater retirement benefits. For a wide-eyed new entrant into the workforce, leaving a full-time, somewhat prestigious position seemed ludicrous. However, with a little experience, staying at one seemed just as absurd. I had absorbed from the Beltway ether the desire to always be in motion, bouncing from one think tank or policy institution to the next, gradually working my way up some type of meritocratic ladder. Still, it became clear to me early on that I wasn’t a good match for this place and I sought quieter employment elsewhere.
The year I spent as a receptionist in an old-school law firm remains one of my fondest working experiences. I got the call to interview for this position while lazily sitting in my room, covered in crumbs from a late breakfast, likely browsing craigslist or Monster or CareerBuilder for more places to grace with my resume. While having few fond memories around anyone’s dinner table, when the HR director said the office was more like a family than a business, I was sold. It was a low-stakes position where answering the phone, making small talk with clients, and handling mail made up the bulk of my responsibilities. Would it get me above-the-fold in The Washington Post or The Baltimore Sun? No. But it would pay the bills and not give me an ulcer.
Three years (including two of graduate school in California) later, I was back on the job market and headed to Texas. While in the Lone Star State, I moonlighted as a community college professor and theatre actor before finally completing training to teach English abroad. The community college gig grew out of a search for leftist book clubs; I was invited to audition for a play because of the strength of my karaoke performance at a bar.
I found a job tutoring high schoolers before even having packed my bags thanks to craigslist. This main source of employment of that period required thousands of miles of local travel a year, visiting dozens of teenagers in the Greater Houston area to provide academic support. For the first couple of years, there was little mileage compensation or hourly pay for travel time. All of the scheduling was managed on workers’ personal devices, and benefits outside of infrequent happy hours and holiday parties were non-existent. It was not unheard of for concerned parents to call workers after hours for feedback about their children’s progress or to lash out when feeling affronted by lackluster exam scores.
What I want to illustrate through this biographical detour is that in many ways, my most interesting professional opportunities came to me the old-fashioned way: through personal connections and chance. True, craigslist did land me two of the aforementioned positions, but craigslist is decidedly Web 1.0.
I’d like to add you to my professional network
In Down and Out… Gershon’s picture of the modern workplace and all of the poorly defined social context around it, harken back to what many leftist intellectuals see as the birth of modern capitalism: enclosure. On the BBC’s In Our Time podcast, Rosemary Sweet, citing EP Thompson, describes enclosure thusly: “the destruction of one form of economy, what he called a moral economy, based on mutual obligations, customary right..and a market economy,” that is, a capitalist one, governed by “exchange value” as one of her fellow guests adds. Having to manage one’s plot on common land required acknowledging the existence and needs of one’s neighbors and, ultimately of deliberation and cooperation. The kind of individualistic, zero-sum economic thinking that is “common sense” today grew out of this arrangement.
According to Gershon, everyone in the white collar world has LinkedIn, and no one knows exactly how to use it. I remember once during a meeting at the tutoring firm where management berated workers for not publicizing a company event on their personal Facebook pages, one colleague responded that he used his LinkedIn for business and his Facebook for personal affairs. But how many high schoolers are looking for free mock SATs on LinkedIn? The conflict illustrated the liminal state (at the time, anyway: this was in 2011 or so) of social media, self-as-business, and work-life boundaries.
Gershon writes that the modern model is problematic for a simple reason: “people are not in fact businesses: they need health care, food, shelter, education, and so on.” It is precisely these needs that the market has been pitilessly monetizing since it became the dominant form of economic activity. While a society of mutually competitive individuals-as-businesses could, theoretically, operate were some degree of material security provided (Gershon cites job search platform providers supporting universal health insurance or even unconditional basic income as a logical consequence of creating a labor force of freelancers), such policies, sensible as they may be, remain at the outer limits of American politics.
Gershon’s book does an excellent job of articulating some of the lived contradictions for today’s workers. They are expected to bring with themselves assorted forms of “human” capital along with actual capital in the forms of vehicles, tools, and computer technology but for the use of firms whose obligations to them are often defined by their non-existence. Show me a Millennial worker who hasn’t had her mobile phone drafted into the performance of workplace tasks.
Besides the economic anxiety that such an arrangement can inspire, there remains the psychological burden of having to always be hustling, planning, Keeping-Up-with-the-Zuckerbergs, etc. The modern workplace and the modern workday doesn’t let workers be people, an idea that would be of no surprise to any number of 19th century bearded intellectuals. In both identity and action, today’s workers are both always — and never — at work.
Looking backward to move forward
While the precariat finds little material succor in its purported “independence,” the language of workers being self-sufficient, flexible, and not at the demand of the clock (even though they most certainly are) reveals what kind of lifestyle modern people may actually aspire to. Those quick to interrupt with cries of “globalization” or “automation” or, less sophisticatedly, “China” ought to take pause. In fact, such social relations need not be considered utopian at all. In DH Wang’s Before the Market, a novel interpretation of Ancient Greek society and economics, such a world is shown not only to have once existed but to have flourished.
The animating principle in Wang’s thought is the liberatory power of democracy, defined as a participatory form of social organization that extends far beyond the act of voting, including public deliberation of matters great and small. Connected through a common religious/spiritual understanding of the world at large and their community in particular, Greeks at the time of Olympianism, Wang argues, constructed a society where each individual was given ample space to flourish to the best of their ability (which allows for some measure of legitimate economic and social inequality).
Drawing on both ancient economic history and Homeric epics, Wang makes a case for drastically limiting the reach of the state and market into social life. The model of homo faber, man the maker, an independent artisan or farmer, sounds not too far removed from a Jeffersonian pastoral ideal.
While on its face, this fact may suggest timeless wisdom in the argument, it is rather a sign of the text’s gravest shortcomings. Flaws which, appositely, reflect the American Founders and their mythologized place in history. Wang spends a significant portion of the book illustrating how Greek slavery and militarism operated in contradiction to the nobler Olympian ideals that governed an otherwise desirable society.
Sincere as these protestations may be, they sound akin to those who insist on the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, relegating the horrors they institutionalized as incidental mistakes rather than intentional exercises of power over their fellow man. From the start of the text, Wang states how Olympian values were based on several Truths that animated the moral order of Ancient Greece. Would it be possible to reach those same ideals without the cultural and historical peculiarities that bred them initially?
What makes Wang’s volume interesting is that it does not harken back to the postwar consensus or noble savage narratives. Where the text falls short is in making religion the argument’s centerpiece. Building a new moral consensus for social reform is an absolutely worthy project, but uniting insights from diverse fields like anthropology, feminist history, and psychology would do more to advance this aim than a reliance on superstition.
Both Gershon and Wang focus on the fact that labor is indeed the work of life. How it looks now is hardly a reflection of any enduring permanence of its character, nor is it a prescription for how it should look. With both more technological and moral imagination, a different world is always possible. Truly liberating today’s workers, no matter their particular station, does require centering their intrinsic worth as human beings rather than echoing Gompers’ demand for “more.”
This isn’t to dismiss the material reality of wealth, income, and power inequality: these considerations ought to be at the forefront of any revolutionary project. Still, mobilizing people to think outside of the capitalist box will require some imagination: a willingness to say yes to life and no to myth.
