Next year management will act surprised why readership has dropped so much. Will blame the SEO team and replace them all with AI as well. The year after...
Antiwork means the revolutionary abolition of the world of work and all that entails: a waged-labor
BBC World News recently covered a trend of employees quitting the conventional style of work. These workers reject the culture of breaking one’s back bending over backwards to satisfy their boss’s every wish. The concept is for workers to put their own well-being above the corporate bottom line, which generally means forgoing¹ promotions, raises and advancement in the company because it’s just not worth it. To own the work, and work at a comfortable pace and comfortable fashion.
I don’t recall what term they used for this trendy new view, but “antiwork” could be taken to be a more general concept that covers the extremes of complete abolition of work as well as the less extreme concept of simply rejecting unwanted excessive overwork. Before reading your post I would have assumed “antiwork” would include “antiworkmyassoff”.
¹ by “forgoing” I don’t mean rejecting offers, but just accepting that promotions and significant raises won’t typically be offered.
So I have been asking myself why I held some of my beliefs, and the answer is that I "learnt" them at a really young age, maybe 4-10 years old. It was an age where I basically knew "nothing" and I guess I filed it away for clarification later and that "later" never came. All of a sudden I'm much, much older and asking myself why I even believe this strange thing and the answer is "they got me when I was young". If I wasn't exposed to other thinkers who asked me to re-evaluate my ideas, I might never have questioned them.
The statement is factual in some instances, we saw that with Brexit. After kicking out all the Poles, noone in the UK wanted to do the harvesting. Undoubtedly often because it didn't pay enough, but even farmers that were offering good pay rates were struggling. Turns out, most people don't want to do a seasonal job that would require them to either drive a whole lot to get to all the fields, or stay in temporary accomodations close to the fields for a prolonged time. People from areas with a lower median income were much more incentivized to do those kinds of work.
that is some perceptive insight. I probably think about brexit a lot more than most US citizens - mostly along the lines of 'what's it gonna take to reverse this shit show' - but your confirmation of an equivalent over there struck me. Thanks for the insight.
People are really inconsistent in general. Most people don't seem to have a defined moral code even when they're religious. This is a really good example of the issue, though. I've seen this too and it's hella frustrating. I don't know if there's really a solution. Capitalism encourages this phenomena though, for sure.
People do stop working when it's all provided. Anyone with simple pattern recognition has seen that happen, not everyone of course, but a lot give up. Like this pattern I noticed of people saying stuff like this pretending to be altruistic and empathetic but really are just salty they don't have the money to lie around all day.
I won't deny that a portion of the population would definitely do this, but I don't think it's a majority. There's a nontrivial number of people who would stop working because they don't need to anymore, eg, working mom's with supportive spouses who work a menial job just to help cover the bills. They would definitely leave their work and spend time with kids and being a homemaker. Some would quit and do nothing because they're lazy. Sure.
I don't think that's the majority of the workforce. Many people, such as myself, do it mainly because they want to be productive and/or help people. Those like me, who are also happy with their employer (I presently am quite pleased with my boss/management), would not really do anything differently.
I think the root of what you're seeing is that if the basic needs were covered, people would quit bad jobs. Bluntly, there are a lot of bad jobs out there. I would venture a guess to say it's the majority. If someone hates their workplace but they need to make rent, they're more likely to stay with a bad job so they can have a place to live; these people, if their needs were met, would walk out in droves. That would be enough to move the needle over to a majority.
My argument from your statement can be rephrased as: if we met everyone's needs, they would have no reason to stay working at jobs they hate.
Yeah if people's basic needs were met, everyone would quit at my company and they would actually have to pay people a livable wage to get anyone to work for them.
That's not what UBI tests have shown us in practice.
Anecdotally, a close friend of mine made enough to retire several years ago and now he just works a job he finds fulfilling instead of the highest paying one. IMHO humans instinctively want to contribute to the tribe.
The biggest recipients of government handouts are the billionaires. And how do they repay us? By evading over $150 billion in taxes every year. That's more than every EBT and WIC program combined.
Are these billionaires providing goods and services?
Are the recipients of EBT/WIC programs providing anything to the market? Anything at all? Granted a sum of them get off the programs and do provide to the market.
When I first started my business I had to rely on food stamps to stay afloat for a few months after my savings ran out, but it let me keep trying and now I've been gainfully in business for over 15 years. Just anecdotal, but I would have had to give up or starve without assistance.
People dislike government handouts to corporations, banks and the already-wealthy. Taxing Billionaires could pay the entire cost of Welfare four times over.
AKA, Billionaires are stealing 4x as much money as all of the 'Welfare queens' you try to demonize.
I demonize welfare abusers who instead of using these programs to get themselves back on their feet, they rather pop more babies for bigger payouts at the expense of American tax payers. These are the kinds of people (regardless of race, don't come at me with racism) who will easily prove socialism or even UBI would fail, immediately.
If you don't like what the billionaires are doing, well.. close the loopholes. Even Trump called out Hilary on it, because he knows, she and her friends would never shoot themselves in the foot. Don't hate the player, hate the game - don't hate the billionaires, hate the financial policies/laws/regulations and the loopholes that the government implemented and wont change. :)
That's... how the game is created and evolves. So those politicians who take advantage of these loopholes, along with many other wealthy citizens, call them out. And demand to close the specific loopholes.
Those people would be NOTHING if not for all other workers. It's a team game and the entire team should be rewarded and treated with respect. I'm not saying we should pay every job the same wage, I'm saying that all of the money shouldn't flow to the few select people while the rest gets scrumbles.
Having power does not imply great effort to hold it. The bourgeois state does that, all Billionaires need do is collect profit while they sleep, or take a visit to Epstein's island.
Well, almost nothing would be. Yours is a NONargument because it completely kills the discourse. But that's beside the point. Some billionares do work hard because they happened across a smart idea and they were able to make it flourish.
Not saying that Bezos in 2023 deserves all the money he has because I dislike Amazon, but you still can't deny that it was an idea that changed in just a decade the entire way a society thinks about shopping.
So because he had an idea and workers realized that idea for him and those workers make that idea be maintained for him makes it fine for them to be exploited? Also I doubt that those people at the top manage shit, they just have another workers manage this stuff for them.
That's just dingeneous and completely disregarding how things actually work. Did he clean the bathrooms? Of course not. But he did coordinate his team of workers by creating other teams of worker where at the end there were people who coded and shipped everything. If you think that would be easy to do you have a rude awakening waiting for you lmao.
I mean to say, that it is probably the hardest or among the hardest roles.
The one who works hard is the worker you depend on. That worker can go work elsewhere, but you need him. Pay him his worth, because he's literally the support pillar. I'm sure you know what happens when there's no support pillar.
It's not because you tell people what to do that you work harder. Those people could have done it themselves, but they didn't have the money to start something as big as amazon. It's all about how much money you have to invest, not hard work.
Some billionares do work hard because they happened across a smart idea and they were able to make it flourish.
How much you make has never been related to how hard/strenuous the work is.
Ditch digging is a body-destroying job. But because basically any able-bodied person can do it, no individual can command a very high wage for it, because the more potential candidates there are, the more likely that there's someone who's willing to do the same job for less than you're willing to do it for.
On the other side, if there's hypothetically a very specialized job with 5 openings, 1 each at 5 different companies, and you're the one and only person with the required skillset to do it, you can basically name your price, and those 5 companies will fight each other to get you.
Acquiring skills that are as valued and rare as possible, is the way to accelerate your earning, not working as "hard" as possible.
Also it's crazy to think that someone who has that much money works harder (proportionally to the amount they make) than someone who can't even take a piss break without fear of being fired.
(sorry for the 2 deleted comments, my client bugged out big time)
so "people won't work if their needs are met" is patently untrue
It's not true or untrue for "people" as a monolith. People differ.
Lots of people are happy to do literally nothing productive, if they could.
And lots of people hate being professionally idle, so much so that they can't stand not finding at least a part-time job, even after they've "retired". At my current job, we had a 99 year old who was basically FORCED to retire (for the second time, she had 'retired' already, before she came to work here) by management, after she had a health scare at work. She was literally angry and grumbling about it during her retirement party, lol.
Different people are wired differently. Nuance is important.
Well you'd need to define productive, bc if by productive you mean work 9 to 5 esc job then sure maybe, but people like doing stuff especially when they can do that with others
And those people can take "risks" multiple times with their connections made through money because they can afford that. Oh? What are you saying? If they can take the risks safely it means they aren't actually risks? Oh well...
I have no problem with people making money. Why would I have a problem with people making money if they're successful?
These people are not successful because of their talent, they are successful because they have money. Success breeds success and riches breed more riches. If they do well enough they can stick everything in a high interest saver account and live off the interest.
So it's a bit rich when they claim to be some big shot and to lecture everyone else on their secret magic talent, which is usually nothing else other than they were lucky with their birthright.
See Donald Trump is a classic example of this. The man couldn't think his out way out a wet paper bag, and yet he's fabulously wealthy even if he's lying about 90% of his income he still has more money than most people would know what to do with. Everything he is is because of his father, all of his success has been despite his personal "accomplishments" not because of them.
People can live comfortably and still work hard. It's almost like poverty doesn't encourage work, but infact only makes life more difficult and stressful in myriad ways, ultimately decreasing effective productivity.
Billionaires are special job creators without whom jobs could not be created. Prior to having billionaires we all wandered around aimlessly looking for snacks or TV shows.
They're also the people that think minimum wage is enough, working a minimum wage job is easy (so much easier than their job), and, have and would never work a minimum wage job in their life.
Minimum wage jobs aren't easy, but becoming a successful doctor or engineer or attorney is so much harder, but I guess that thought wouldn't fit in your mind
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