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This gave me hope when I saw it yesterday morning. For once, some news that sounded like something the _heros_ of a cyberpunk novel would have been doing, instead of another corporation being even more horrible than a supposedly-parodic fictional corporation with a technology to abuse for profit.
It's funny to read this, as I have deeply offended people who had punk worldviews by suggesting they could make more money if they learned to negotiate better, but that's what this antiwork view ultimately resolves to.
What clicked is that the idea of being oppressed and dominated by other humans is the sacred axiom of a faith that defines an identity, and a subculture that is becoming a new world religion. Questioning it is like asking someone who believes in God why they can't just choose to be a better person, and maybe not only is it unncessary to believe in what appears to be a kind of divine North Korea to be good, but perhaps that aspect is even getting in their own way. That axiomatic gap is what makes views so irreconcilable.
I had some anarchist friends in the 90s who would go to socialist rallies and chant, "Lon-ger chains! Big-ger cag-es!" This went over as well as you might expect, but these antiwork people seem similar. If they persuade people to learn to negotiate for themselves, good on them, but if they convince people to sacrifice their agency and autonomy in the name of appeasing an idol that represents human domination, to me they're just another cargo cult. Still very funny though, well done.
> they could make more money if they learned to negotiate better
I donât know what line of work your friends were in, but prior to the current economic dustup, negotiation wasnât a thing for most jobs. And I donât mean that it was hard or rare. I mean you literally had no option to negotiate. Companies job offers were take it or leave it.
That sort of widespread treatment of workers as cogs and not an individual is part of the anger of the antiwork movement
They were artists and musicians, so not quite laborers, but to be a part of that antiwork movement, one has to believe in a paternalistic company providing jobs as a reward for compliant behavior, where you've already inferiorized yourself, and that underlying belief creates a failed expectation, which creates the resentment we end up moralizing into an oppressed identity.
Religious or spiritually oriented people don't have this issue as much, as their primary relationship and identity is to something greater than their circumstances, and this gives them faith in alternatives, which means leverage in that bargaining relationship with the world.
They're not just tugging on a leash and calling it freedom, as for them faith itself means there is no leash. There's an underlying belief in the punk and antiwork mentality that unless someone has suffered like they have, we can't understand their truth, but this ignores that nobody would choose to suffer like they did unless they had first given up their identity as having been created by someone invested in their happiness (e.g. being actually loved). It produces some great music and culture, but it's based on a solvable problem.
The whole punk ethos is predicated on an appeal for dignity by people who first believe they don't have it because it was taken from them somehow. Someone made them rage, probably with shame or humiliation. The political beliefs that flow from it are a full psychosexual orientation. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I am saying it is a distinct experience that can't always be shared, and that's what makes reconciling it with opposition almost impossible. Didn't expect to go there, but it's all pretty Freudian.
I don't think anti-work people generally primarily fight against paternalistic companies. They fight work ethos as a whole. See for example
https://www.krisis.org/1999/manifesto-against-labour/
> A corpse rules society â the corpse of labour. All powers around the globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German ecologists and French socialists. They donât know but one slogan: jobs, jobs, jobs!
I would argue the punk movement is not about rage but about anarchy and disobedience towards a conformist society. It's more about being an offensive social drop-out, a splinter under the bourgeois' skin - Not out of rage but out of revulsion.
I mean, this is still the case, for the vast, vast, VAST majority of jobs worldwide. Your negotiating options are 1. take it, or 2. leave it. Even in tech, which is supposedly red hot now, unless you have some extremely niche sought-after talent, or are already some CxO captain of your industry, you have no leverage negotiating yourself vs. a trillion dollar company.
Of course, everyone on HN has their anecdote about their brother's cousin's girlfriend's former roommate successfully negotiation $1M in stock options at Facebook, but those cases are likely 4-5 standard deviation outliers.
This is negotiating. Take it or leave it represents a choice. Where I live, which is obviously privileged (California) the workers have a huge advantage currently with this choice.
Also, people should be treated well wether they are good negotiators or not.
How can you treat someone well and give someone what they want when they canât tell you what they? If I donât want to work Friday but canât articulate it and you asked me if I can and I said yes, are you at fault? Negotiations are not arguments.
In a world of generosity people would anticipate what their fellows want and help where they can to let them find what they want.
Are you generous enough to give me what I want right now? I donât know if you anticipate mind readers, but communication skills are essential, most people donât know what they themselves want and canât communicate with themselves even.
Well, we don't live in a world of generosity so it's not as simple as that. Anti-work people as well as punks at least to some extent usually strife for a world of generosity and what comes with it. And beyond that many religions do as well with various degrees of dedication. I think beside that it's a matter of human dignity to at least try to be generous to those who have it worse. Not because I might be in their shoes at some point in the future, but because I like the idea of a world full of generosity, even if I will not benefit from it directly. I currently live a happy stable privileged life and would still love to see my income to support a basic income for example. Even though it will probably never benefit me nor my family directly.
Isn't it as simple as embedding yourself in a world that understands you?
>Anti-work people as well as punks at least to some extent usually strife for a world of generosity and what comes with it.
I see a lot of expectations for others to be generous to them not the other way around, its the have nots that are complaining, the haves are able to fund this dream of making this true through charities or social experiments like places here.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973653719/california-program-...
>I like the idea of a world full of generosity
I do too, I like the idea of world peace, no crimes, and kindness everywhere. I've lived in places that had that kindness in poorer areas than where I live in "shitty countries". If you localize and select, its not impossible or even rare.
>I currently live a happy stable privileged life and would still love to see my income to support a basic income for example.
In Denmark, your dreams can come true, they tax at high rates (over 50% sometimes), have great social support, and then internet tells me it has some of the lowest corruption rates or is the lowest.
> I see a lot of expectations for others to be generous to them not the other way around
I don't see that at all. If you follow the /r/antiwork subreddit, then it's really not about people expecting free stuff or generosity for nothing in return. People just don't want to be treated like shit by their managers.
People expect not to be fired because they refused to come in on their day off for the 3rd time in a row. People expect to be able to attend family events that they told their boss weeks in advance. People just expect to be treated decent by their employer.
Nobody seriously expects stuff for free. Anti-work is about people saying, if you keep walking all over me just to feel good about yourself, then go do the work yourself, I don't need the paycheck enough to deal with your abuse.
>People just don't want to be treated like shit by their managers.
AKA expecting others to be generous.
>People expect not to be fired because they refused to come in on their day off for the 3rd time in a row.
They could take days off that aren't scheduled if they were skilled or non disposable workers or if they chose a job without a shitty boss. Whose fault is it to work with a shitty boss? If you stay in an abusive relationship, who chose to stay?
So your default is to treat others like shit?
Not treating someone like shit isn't the result of generosity, it's the result of not being an arsehole.
> So your default is to treat others like shit?
Thatâs rude and presumptious, like the very behavior you dislike.
My default is not to expect others to be nice and generous, like if you work for an asshole do you expect them not to be an asshole? Is that an intelligent assumption?
I have realistic expectations.
You're the one who's equating 'not treating people like shit' as being 'generous'.
Thatâs heavily dependent upon the role, not an âeconomic dustup.â
For a line cook at McDonaldâs, yes, replacement is easy so wages are lower and fixed.
For an account manager in a highly relational field, it is much harder to replace this role and so that individual could leverage that skill-scarcity into better wages.
This recent Anti work movement tends to apply to positions where negotiation isnât on the table. Those skills arenât going to help there. Even though wages in the US commonly popped up to 15/hr, itâs still set in stone at or around that rate, maybe some flux depending on experience. There just isnât anything to negotiate around because these positions will often be a straight contribution of time and labor. You probably canât offer twice the strength and speed of an average worker (definitely not 10x), so what are you negotiating with? The best thing those skills teach for these positions is to highlight that reality.
> so what are you negotiating with?
A group. You negotiate with a group. coordinated actions by groups of people or the threat of coordinated actions can be a form of negotiation. That's what the antiwork movement is about to me.
The recent John Deere strikes shows this - unity is the biggest asset workers have. If theyâre united, they can take on any monster corporation. That is why corporations try super hard to pit workers against each other. Example - providing certain benefits to senior workers but not new workers
> You probably canât offer twice the strength and speed of an average worker (definitely not 10x)
You couldn't be more wrong. First some numbers just for laughs:
Greatest weight lifted was 6270 lbs or 2844 kg while the safe limit for average men is 55 lbs or 25 kg.
Greatest speed was 43.99 km/h (27.33 mph) while average men do 10 km/h.
Then there is endurance too of course! Forget about strength and speed, 8 hours is a huuuuuge amount of time for any physical effort. Walking one could theoretically do 25 miles or 40 km in 8 hours but nurses walk only 4-5 and that is considered a lot. I'm not aware of any 8 hour races but Aleksandr Sorokin did 308 km in 24 hours which is 3 x 8 hours.
You probably wonder why I compare it to top sports. That is because in my humble opinion it is. If you don't treat physical labor like top sports, if you don't make an effort to adapt all parts of your lifestyle to it, then it you will destroy your body which will bring down productivity dramatically. The average worker is pretty used up.
In many such jobs not going insane also takes a huge effort. Its not as black and white as it seems. Most of us are partially nuts and make a constant effort to preserve sanity. Long before one jumps down the foxcon stairwell the insanity starts eating you.
If we didn't need them we wouldn't have weekends. You would just hire someone willing to work 7 days? Take it or leave it? 15 hour shifts anyone?
Who is the average worker anyway? Are we grouping 20 year olds with 60 year olds here? Your average 60 year old manual laborer (besides the insanity) has a laundry list of permanent injuries that prevent him from doing cardio. The have (besides experience) a high pain tolerance to work with.
Then there is quality. Focus isn't exactly equally divided among men.
Motivation. Besides from ability one can often chose to do less work or chose to do more. The difference between wanting to dot all the i's and waiting for the big bell to ring is huge.
People are also extremely different in how they think about tools and methods. For some they just are, for others they are a half baked work in progress. Everything can potentially be improved. What better time to think about it than during usage? The more mindless the grind the greater the opportunity. You don't have to be a genius, you get 40 hours per week to think about it.
Communication and social skills! I'm pretty good at this if everyone has his eyes on the ball. If everyone else is just waiting for the bell to ring I'm toxic, useless and I hate life. I want to marvel at my accomplishments regardless what the job is.
Ill do one funny story that can only be told in full: While wiring houses I got to see many companies build walls and ceilings. One day a team of 4 showed up that came in running with the largest size plasterboard that one can buy. They carried it inside slapped the first one onto the ceiling in less than 1 minute then ran off to get the second one. The secret of the formula was that the boss was 6.9 and the 3 employees were all over 7 feet tall.
The same day I worked on a different project where 6 old short carpenters with a thousand years of experience between them spend the better part of a week filling up a floor with scaffolding to do exactly the same job. (It was a pain moving my materials and equipment around.) They [had to] use small more manageable plasterboard which requires a lot more wood framing, a lot of sawing and a lot more screws. It took them 4 more days to put in the plasterboard, after that it was the usual patch work of seams that has to be plastered to be presentable.
I didn't see them put in the framing but it was simple by comparison. In 20 min the fast team covered a giant living room. It was surreal to look at. 4 pushed the plate against the ceiling, the 5th guy measured and cut it while they yell at him to work faster. Afterwards they spend 10 min laughing. I ask the entrepreneur among them how he found those giants. In the pub he said, I look over all the heads and point at the tall guy then yell, you should come work for me! What is the work? Well, we drive a lot!
I didn't see them do the wood frame but I wouldn't be surprised if it took them 1 hour. Lets say 2 hours for the whole job: 6 men 8 days vs 4 men 2 hours = 48 days vs 1 day. Almost 50 times more productive.
The anti-work folks are different than past activists. They may be anti something but they are not explicitly for an alternative. This is revealing.
They are actually for work, just a better kind. It's basically a corporation and capitalist friendly activism and as such is harmless.
>They are actually for work, just a better kind.
Then they seriously need a better slogan than "anti-work".
I like the antiwork people's spirit, as I used to read The Baffler, Adbusters, rtmark, and that whole thing, but you've nailed it that their corporate and government friendly activism is at the crux of it.
To extend a metaphor, I think the sales pitch was: "I am offering you liberation, redemption, freedom, and transformation, and all you need to do to achieve it is to be brave and heroic and tug on your leash! What's that you say? You don't have one? Well I have some right here! Just put one on and tug at it, and with enough suffering and blood, you shall overcome! Step right up! This work is guaranteed to set you free, or your money back!" Nobody wants to accept they've been swindled by a deceptive carnival barker working for the leash maker, but in a metaphysical comic book sort of way, I have come to suspect that's precisely what happened.
Goofy employees shouldn't be ruled out, either. I added fake menu items that printed from fortune, employee quotes, ASCII art, etc that went unnoticed and unchanged for years.
The items were originally created as printer tests, but it became too useful to prebuild regular catering orders, add delivery directions, and import internal notes like regular or VIP preferences from CRM. This also meant if you created a new customer profile, you could create a menu item tied to it that you could program to send to any printer, which probably four out of a few hundred ever did anything funny with.
> Goofy employees shouldn't be ruled out, either. I added fake menu items that printed from fortune, employee quotes, ASCII art, etc that went unnoticed and unchanged for years.
Yeah but:
> But Andrew Morris, the founder of GreyNoise, a cybersecurity firm that monitors the internet, told Motherboard that his firm has seen actual network traffic going to insecure receipt printers, and that it seems someone or multiple people are sending these printing jobs all over the internet indiscriminately, as if spraying or blasting them all over.
Cyber security as a service:
$ echo âIt was the Rooskies!!â;
You can make just left (or right) leg shoes in a shoe factory (some Japanese workers already did this), sew collars on one side of the shirt etc. basically anything that doesnât physically harm anyone should be interesting
haah I've done the same for our test system. to make it fun for myself, our test menu consists entirely of foreign names for foods no normal person would elect to eat. casa marzua and kiviak are among the items.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/casu-marzu
https://travelfoodatlas.com/kiviak-bizarre-greenland-inuit-d...
The article suggests it's probably just mass blasting to any open port 9100 (HP Jetdirect) on the internet. Hoping it's something more sophisticated, as the thought of random bosses having to police printers is pretty amusing.
Man, thatâs not antiwork. Thatâs anti-exploitation.
Now depending on your viewpoint you might say that wage labor is inherently exploitative
What work doesnât involve some exploitation? Either natural or human?
If youâre someone who does fishing for a living, self-employed, is the haggler exploiting you are you exploiting them? Is the other boat exploiting you if they undersell you?
If you barter with someone who hunts deer who is exploiting whom?
Or does exploitation only come into focus when itâs private capital (as opposed to state capital)?
Please note that none of your examples are wage labor. Not to speak for the other commenter, but I don't think the question of state/private is relevant either.
Selling my fish is in practice, wage labor. You, the buyer/eater, is paying me for having harvested from the seas rather than you doing it yourself.
I am paying for a product in a certain state. No one is paying for your services. You could have purchased that fish from someone else first. People are paying for fish.
Now that "_in practice_" is erasing a key distinction on your side of the fence while insisting on precise definition for the other side (what does exploitation mean).
exploit verb
Definition of exploit (Entry 2 of 2)
1 : to make productive use of : UTILIZE
exploiting your talents
exploit your opponent's weakness
2 : to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage
Is it unfair if you both mutually agree upon the trade?
I think the only place where there is no exploitation, is if you're self-sufficient and have no interaction with anyone else.
If there is a transaction, there is always a risk of exploitation. Someone has the upper hand and someone is the party under more duress --sometimes the little guy and sometimes the big gal. Even when working towards a communal goal as someone in the thread mentioned. Maybe I don't care if the communal canal doesn't get built. Maybe I'm okay with dying of thirst, etc.
I think the problem is 1. incentivises the exploiter to dehumanize the exploited. They are interested in the productive use of a person, not the person themselves. As such, exploitation has an inherently and strongly abusive tendency, whether or not that's actually manifested or not.
The purchaser of a service shouldnât be interested in every aspect of the person providing that service. There may be some human rights that need to be respected, but those are codified into law.
Also, I donât think it follows that because someone does not care about all aspects of a person they are therefore dehumanizing them.
Who of us ever really cares about every single aspect of another person? Even your spouse or close family member will have parts of them that you donât care to engage with. In fact they may choose to keep those aspects private from you, meaning you cannot care about them.
In an employer employee relationship I expect it is similar. The employer shouldnât be allowed to delve into the parts of the employees life that are unrelated to the âtradeâ of service for wage. This type of snooping would be expected and maybe required if the employer was supposed to care about the person themselves.
Fundamentally this is about the right of the individual to alienate their labor. I can sell my labor to others, but nothing else. To sell your whole person is slavery. It seems wage earning is an innovation not an exploitation.
The problem is we have one word that has gradually assumed an almost universally negative connotation. We should just stop using it for definition number 1 at this point.
So much of this stuff is just semantics.
My personal opinion is that every economic interaction within capitalism is exploitative in one way or another. The only way for it not to be is if we all worked towards a shared goal, with pooled resources.
Most people on this site would disagree with that view though.
All that does is move the exploitation into the treatment of dissenters against those âsharedâ goals.
That's not really exploitation though. No surplus value is stolen.
Being born is still exploitative when one does not have a choice in the matter. You are essentially being signed up for a life of survival. This is the basis for anti-natalism.
Let's call BS.
It's inane to claim existence being the root of all evil, because, yeah, it's the root of friggin' _everything_.
Nothing is forced on "you" because without existence there is no "you". Or anti-natalists could just as easily be blamed of "depriving" the non-born of their chance to live. Ouch.
I, for one, enjoy life (and don't you dare tell me I just don't realise it sucks). I even like working on the hard bits, like underpaid shopkeepers and inhumane working hours, thank you.
> It's inane to claim existence being the root of all evil, because, yeah, it's the root of friggin' _everything_.
It is not a matter of fact that conscious existence is the root of all things. To state such, is to take an unprovable philosophical position.
> Nothing is forced on "you" because without existence there is no "you". Or anti-natalists could just as easily be blamed of "depriving" the non-born of their chance to live. Ouch.
Not relevant. The forcing only happens during one's existence. Thus, stating an individual is forced to survive is not some semantic null pointer error. Furthermore, one cannot be blamed for depriving non-born of life, because they do not actually exist. That is a null pointer error. Your examples actually support my position.
> I, for one, enjoy life (and don't you dare tell me I just don't realise it sucks). I even like working on the hard bits, like underpaid shopkeepers and inhumane working hours, thank you.
You seem rather embittered about life, so much so that you take everything I've said out of context. Helpings others is a virtue. Life is still cruel though. I did not say life is sucky. Sucky is a sophomoric adjective that ill describes something as complex as life.
I get it, you are invested in convincing yourself that you love/like your life. Even if that is the case, in actuality, it doesn't change the nature of life for everyone, including your future self. By all means, if we are here, we should do be the best we can to enjoy the ride and help make this place better for those who come next. But let's not be in denial about the nature of life.
For all the ice cream you eat, the sex that you have, the loving relationships you share, it won't nullify the abyssal horrors experienced by unlucky living beings [1]
I don't see how anyone sane could think that living an enjoyable life somehow balances out the lives of those who endure absolute horrors.
[1]
Dude... Null pointer exception, really.
I wish you the best of luck reasoning about life and happiness in Java. Just don't attribute the ensuing frustrations to being born.
What a dark view of the world. I choose not to subscribe to it.
You can choose not to subscribe but that doesn't make it any less true.
So life in general is exploitative, be it microorganism or the largest animal?
Indeed.
Could be a good business opportunity for cyber security consultants.
Turn off port forwarding on the businessâ router. âI have stopped the hackers for good, that will be $10,000.â
Turning off port forwarding: $5.
Knowing where to turn off port forwarding: $9995
Continuous security monitoring (i.e. checking to make sure nobody turned it on again): $500/month
"hackers".. I'd like to see what sort of "hacking" was involved. Most likely the wifi password where the printer sits was shared with everyone and the dog, and now everyone is a hacker.
Why are you putting "hacking" in quotes like it's inaccurate here?
What do you think the majority of hacking, as in what security professionals / malicious attackers do, entail? A small number of security vulnerabilities are low level or clever tricks, the majority are finding holes in people, processes, and systems that are blatantly obvious.
Hacking does not equate to what security professionals do, despite what you seem to think. That is nowadays mostly a beaurocracy-pushing job with little exploration.
I am referring to the correct definition of the term where you are supposed to hack something.
> I am referring to the correct definition of the term where you are supposed to hack something.
Oh I see. Your contribution here was semantics? The press misused the term as you saw it even if it was obvious what they were referring to? How novel.
[pedantic mode]
Acctttually cracker is the correct term. Hacker: someone who hacks on software.[0]
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker#General_definition
Originally, hacker simply meant advanced computer technology enthusiast (both hardware and software) and adherent of programming subculture; see hacker culture.[3]
Sounds like printers improperly accessible by internet.
Just wait till they level up with View Source! Straight to hacker jail!
Even worker bees can fly away,
The queen is their slave
Ah yes- freedom and hive death
Dozens of printers across the internet
Oh my, itâs serious then.
It is by r/antiwork - "Antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!"
Easy to do when small businesses don't know much about cybersec and have zero firewalls between their gateway and their machines. LPD is pretty "dumb". Send it text, it prints the text.
Seems like a more helpful message would be to hire computer security firms.
Wait, maybe that is the message and maybe that is the sender.
earlier post and discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29438300
also it is already old news by a few days by now, come on
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29427838
As if it's effective.
discuss their pay with coworkers, and pressure their employers
It took me a little while to digest this, as I went through a series of reactions.
First reaction: this confuses me, but looking at the subreddit, "antiwork" seems to be a synonym for "labor." I guess when you want to bring something back into style, you give it a fresh name. "Antiwork" is in the clickbait tradition of "abolish the police," or if "clickbait" feels too harsh, maybe it's more fair to say it's a feel-good way to combine progressive goals with radical feelings, tactics, and rhetoric.
Second reaction: on second thought, this has nothing in common with old-fashioned labor. It seems like it's just a bunch of people discovering that they already have the privilege of leaving jobs, turning down jobs, and demanding more in the market. These aren't the people who need a labor movement. They aren't organizing. They're getting what they want because they already have the individual power to get it.
Third reaction: wait, is "antiwork" just teaching people how to be good middle-class capitalist citizens? It sure seems like it. A decent percentage of the submissions seem to be complaining about some kinds advice for how to be successful at work (work hard, love what you do) while celebrating other kinds of advice about how to be successful at work (negotiate pay, negotiate time off, use your market power, walk away from bad situations.) All stuff that middle-class professionals take for granted, no mention of organized labor, just teaching the younger generation to act like good capitalists while they talk like radicals, no chance at all they'll carry this habit with them when they reach positions of authority and power....
Would it be overly conspiratorial to think this is the brainchild of some edgy gen-Z nerds at a conservative think tank?
A post that is linked in their FAQ:
Should I burn my savings and take a year off?
Iâm thinking of taking a year off to just study some online course, paint, write and play video games
From the top answer:
I would suggest that you request some extended time off first. Make up a family emergency if you have to. A month or two might be enough to recharge
This is a hilarious. A guide to enjoying a privileged position within capitalism, framed as anti-capitalism.
EDIT: I just remembered this has a name: culture jamming. This is a picture-perfect example of it. You appropriate the style and medium of an established cultural force and use them ironically to undermine the force. In this case, using a lowbrow forum, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and the grievances of workers against management to make the pro-capitalist point that the market gives individuals the power to protect their own interests.
Or, removing the cynicism and conspiratorial elements from your analysis:
Millions of people raised on labor/union/socialist/far-left dogma that was relevant in the 1800s and 1900s are realizing that the modern economy is in fact quite different. But because of a mixture of lack of knowledge and adversarial beliefs about capitalism and corporations, they failed to thrive in the system and are now learning the tools to succeed.
The system is flawed. You can work to fix the flaws without thinking you need to burn the whole thing down.
> labor/union/socialist/far-left dogma
This doesn't exist. Unions are not socialist or far-left. In fact, many union members are conservatives and vote that way.
can we spam them with barcodes taking over the PoS, getting into their network, and showing "stop using in-band signalling" manifestos?
It's really sad that the people who post to r/antiwork do not seem to understand that the fact of work is a fact of nature and not a product of society.
They seem to think everyone could just choose to live in leisure and not wind up starving and naked in the cold and dark. It's completely absurd.
Work is not an option. To be against work is to be willing to be a burden on others who will work, and to mistake that laziness as virtue.
And no, they aren't just protesting bad labor practices. I've spent a lot of time reading their views. They really think work itself is the product of capitalism, as though it isn't part of the human condition and a necessary part of every society that has ever existed.
Could you please:
(a) not use HN primarily for ideological battle
(b) stop posting flamewar comments
(c) not use trollish usernames (
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
)
(d) stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I'm not fartattack and have no affiliation, but HN is the only site I know of that violates its own guidelines _in the guidelines._ It's hard to take guidelines (aka rules) like that seriously, to be honest.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
> It's a semi-noob illusion...
These things are subject to interpretation, of course, but "noob" isn't a pejorative in the sense we use it - it just means a new user - so 'semi-noob' means a somewhat new user, and 'illusion' isn't calling a name. It seems like a pretty straightforward sentence to me.
I've definitely seen some bad takes on /r/antiwork, and my general opinion is that the community on any large subreddit (political or otherwise) gets pretty toxic pretty quickly if not heavily moderated, but it's hard to deny that the rise in popularity of the anti-work movement is a reaction to really bad labor conditions in the USA that have only been further strained during COVID. Lots of people are suffering and they're expressing that, even if some of them are not diagnosing the root problem correctly.
I don't understand why those people don't simply start their own companies that treat their employees better.
Afaik the r/antiwork subreddit also publicly proclaims that they are socialists. Haven't looked it up now, though.
Yes it's like i always say, if poor people don't like being poor, why don't they simply buy more money?
No, they should work towards not being poor. For example by starting businesses that are run in the way they like.
Even if you make the argument that the individuals are too poor to do anything, if they would pool their money they would be able to start businesses.
That comment aged poorly because thatâs what early Bitcoin adopters did.
Which early bitcoin adopters? The tech people who worked on the protocols and had the ability to save up enough money to go work on a startup? Or do you mean the people who bought bitcoin early which was literally gambling that happened to pay off.
Did the comment age poorly because lottery winners are well off now?
All of them, unless your point is that Bitcoin was never accessible to anyone except tech people since the beginning. MtGox was originally an MTG card trading exchange. People also mined it on their crappy computer.
> Or do you mean the people who bought bitcoin early which was literally gambling that happened to pay off.
Life is a gamble.
Thatâs not buying more money. They didnât build anything or purchase money. They purchased a commodity with no real expectation of growth beyond a pipe dream that happened to work out, and even with those winners the bitcoin millionaires were exceptional enough from the norm to get into the news.
If you think people gambling on a brand new asset class becoming valuable is equivalent to things like getting low interest loans against your stock holdings that you arenât forced to liquidate when it comes to buying more money, than we just have incompatible world views
If you donât see buying BTC as buying more money yes, I donât think weâre going to agree on this.
also that despite centuries of purportedly labor-saving invention, all but the most privileged experience not a corresponding increase in leisure but an explosion of more or less amusing diversions from this condition
Or maybe thats just lifestyle creep? I'm sure you can live with much more leisure if you're willing to accept medieval living standards.
What are these really bad labor conditions? Are they all working at restaurants? Rather than goingâanti workâ they could find another job, itâs painfully obvious.
Why is the onus on employees to "find another job," instead on their managers to improve the labor conditions?
Some of the stories on that sub are an incredible indictment on how wage workers are treated. I don't care what decisions that person made to end up in a minimum wage job, but I do care that they get treated with some respect and dignity.
The same reason why people move. Relying on others to do everything to benefit you is wishful but deluded.
If you care, what are you doing to improve their conditions? Would you like to be that manager or are you currently doing that? It isnât bad to be that way, but who is willing to put in that work?
We rely on the restaurant not serving bad food because of regulation.
We rely on good safety standards in a workplace, so that people working in chemical factories do not die from breathing in toxic fumes.
So to be clear, we rely on other people and other people doing things for us all the time, so the discussion is not about relying on other people, but in this case what are work conditions which are acceptable.
I think that fire at will for example is a bad idea, but I don't live in the USA, so my view comes from a different perspective.
> We rely on the restaurant not serving bad food because of regulation.
I don't think you can rely on that being the only reason a restaurant doesn't serve bad food. I think it's better if they are motivated to serve good food rather than being afraid of being punished for serving bad food.
> So to be clear, we rely on other people and other people doing things for us all the time, so the discussion is not about relying on other people, but in this case what are work conditions which are acceptable.
I am not clear whether this negates your previous two sentences or not. I agree with this statement in isolation though!
Hmmm, maybe I had bad examples, my point was that we rely a lot in our daily life that other people do their job right and that even if they don't there will be checks in place that catch problems.
We even rely on organizations and parties to lobby for our interests.
So we kind of accept that we need to rely on other people.
I probably should have said "We relay that the people in the restaurant know how to cook and keep their ingriedients clean and fresh and we rely on checks that catches mistakes"?
> we even rely on organizations and parties to lobby for our interests.
This may be some of the cultural divide that's flummoxing this conversation. In the US, many if not most of us have lost faith that this process is even remotely reliable. We have studies that back this up - policy decisions are made in favor of the wealthy very reliably, but for the rest of us, it's luck of the draw when we get what we want.
Having eaten in countries with no safety regulations for food, I doubt those regulations are beneficial for anyone and only hurt poor entrepreneurs. Iâve also eaten plenty of illegal elote with no regulations in the US, Iâm still alive.
OSHA regulation is like the EU, some of it is ridiculous and nobody follows it. An example of both is Casu martzu, politics destroying culture.
In the event that youâre unaware.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
The food regulations in the US didnât spring unexpectedly and wholly formed from the minds of politicians like some legal Athena. They were in response to actual, documented issues with food preparation. They are explicitly beneficial for the populace unless you think getting food poisoning commonly is a good thing
I read the jungle and I know about it. I initially agreed, the conditions were terrible. But even without regulations people make rational decisions like not eat at restaurants that make them sick and not buying Chinese baby milk products even before regulation, post regulation hasnât stopped them from buying America baby formula either. If you think we need the government to stop people eating at cockroach infested buildings, youâre ignoring common sense.
Do we need the FDA to decide marijuana has no medical value, or that people were too stupid and only ate rank food that caused them illness with no ability to eat food that wasnât sickening before the FDA saved everyone?
> not eat at restaurants that make them sick
Or, you know, not have restaurants that make people sick.
> not buying Chinese baby milk products even before regulation
What makes you think baby milk in whatever country you live in would be better without regulation? Do you think that maybe lack of regulation/enforcement is why Chinese baby milk contributed to that particular scandal?
> Do you think that maybe lack of regulation/enforcement is why Chinese baby milk contributed to that particular scandal?
No, because they still donât trust it today, with Chinese oversight. Regulations donât stop restaurants from making people sick, accidents like e Coli poisonings occur with or without regulation, the FDA doesnât need to step in, the company will have no business if they serve poor quality products. Did Chinese regulations make a difference?
> It had been estimated in 2018 that up to 80% to 90% of infant formula purchased in Australia was destined for China.
Bayer has poisoned aspirin, their reaction to it without regulation made them trustworthy.
I don't know what goes on in every restaurant kitchen in my city and I don't want to have to deal with the cognitive overhead of finding out, so I delegate that responsibility.
Instead of me having to deal with all that shit, we can have professional food inspectors deal with it. This has the added advantage of them having powers to gain access to kitchen and shut down unsanitary ones that I wouldn't have.
Why would I possibly not want this? What's the advantage of your approach, other than satisfying some irrational anti-government ideology?
> I don't know what goes on in every restaurant kitchen in my city and I don't want to have to deal with the cognitive overhead of finding out, so I delegate that responsibility.
Some people donât put effort into what food they eat and donât look up reviews and enter any restaurant, you do look up reviews donât you? I buy elote from unlicensed sellers sometimes, whatâs the harm?
> What's the advantage of your approach, other than satisfying some irrational anti-government ideology?
Thatâs rude.
I donât like excessive barriers of entry for entrepreneurs especially immigrants, food trucks are not common where I am, California has tons of $1 tacos of excellent quality for instance, the quality of food overseas shows me you donât need regulations. Regulation can be done well, it often isnât. Excessive regulations like legalese, and complex English contracts is a huge barrier to immigrants with poor English who could otherwise participate and sell some fucking good food for cheap without it being âillegalâ.
I donât care if the FDA doesnât approve weed. Does I being a schedule 1 drug with no benefits stop you from ever partaking in marijuana usage? Did the war on drugs by the government help you or the world? Regulations sound great, but theyâre often used nefariously, taking away freedom from common people and placing it in the hands of the wealthy, the effects have been disastrous.
China's meteoric rise with low regulations is another example, gutter oil for instance was said to be a huge problem online but I never ate anything with gutter oil it was isolated, and it was mostly propaganda when the truth was that oil recovery was used for biofuel, not unlike the same spent oil being used in the US in the same way.
Okay so street food is common where I'm from, too, with lots of immigrants (mostly Turkish in my neck of the woods) selling it - but i don't see how that's related.
Food safety regulations shouldn't be a problem for anyone selling sanitary, safe food. If they don't, then I don't think it's fair to call that a "barrier to entry", I think calling it a "barrier to poisoning" is more accurate and I'm glad that exists.
I'm also not sure where immigrants come in, I don't care who makes the food as long as it's sanitary. Are you implying immigrants are unsanitary? If so, I strongly disagree with that notion.
So the way I see it the only person who doesn't want food safety regulation is somebody knowingly trying to sell unsafe food. In that case, I'm glad they're being stopped.
So I'm not entirely sure where your problem lies. Are you disagreeing with the base concept of food safety? Or just with the specific regulations in place? Cause I'm happy to have an evidence-based debate of the latter, but the former is not really negotiable imo.
>Food safety regulations shouldn't be a problem for anyone selling sanitary, safe food. If they don't, then I don't think it's fair to call that a "barrier to entry", I think calling it a "barrier to poisoning" is more accurate and I'm glad that exists.
Restaurant can still make people sick with regulations. People can see filth, cockroaches, rats, and poor prep coming from a restaurant. What food problems are you trying to prevent? E coli poisoning from salad mixes they get at a supply store which they have no control over? What regulation prevents that? Undercooked chicken with salmonella? (Salmonella bacteria can be completely eradicated in meat and poultry through exposure to high temperatures, such as cooking meat and poultry to a minimum internal temperature of 165° F). You are likely thinking of supply issues not restaurants, mad cow disease can't be prevented by more restaurant regulation, you are thinking of supply chain regulations which are different.
I am not against all regulation, but the truth is that its used by the wealthy in nefarious ways to keep common man and immigrants from succeeding by putting in a barrier to entry with complex English.
>So the way I see it the only person who doesn't want food safety regulation is somebody knowingly trying to sell unsafe food. In that case, I'm glad they're being stopped.
What if I want to buy elote from the illegally operating business? Why is it the government's business to stop me aside from oppressing poor immigrants trying to sell cheap delicious food, with poor English skills, and trying to work? What if I don't want to eat at corporate or they don't have food I want? I want to make my own choices, not have paranoia about food poisoning.
>I'm happy to have an evidence-based debate of the latter, but the former is not really negotiable imo.
Sure, here is the requirements for a food truck in Chicago, this is not even everything, I just quoted a few random ones.
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/mobile_...
>The MFV shall be enclosed with top and sides, hand wash sink, hot and cold water, equipment to maintain temperatures, waste water retention tank and the business name and license number legibly painted in letters and figures at least two inches in height in a conspicuous place on each lateral side of the MFV.
>No food that is sold or served from a mobile food vehicle may be stored or prepared in a residential home. All operators must work in conjunction with a commissary or shared kitchen to store and prepare food.
>MFVs may operate from a designated food stand not to exceed a 4-hour service limit. No other MFV may park or operate on such block of the designated stand.
>A. All MFVs must be equipped with an operational Global Positioning System (GPS) device. The device must meet the requirements set forth in Section 7-38-115 of the Municipal Code of the City of Chicago, as well as the following:
> The device must be permanently installed in, or on, the MFV.
The device must be an âactiveâ, not âpassiveâ device that sends real-time location data to a GPS service provider; the device is not required to send location data directly to the City.
The device must be accurate no less than 95% of the time.
The device must function while the MFV is vending food or otherwise open for business to the public, and when the MFV is being serviced at a commissary as required by Section 7-38-138 of the Municipal Code of the City of Chicago or these regulations. The device must function during these times regardless of whether the engine is on or off.
When the GPS device is required to function, the device will transmit GPS coordinates to the GPS service provider no less frequently than once every five (5) minutes.
>If the MFV has a gasoline, diesel or electric generator, propane or compressed natural gas, type II exhaust hood or fire suppression system, then the license applicant will be provided with an MFV Fire Safety Permit application which must be completed and submitted to the Chicago Fire Department (CFD) for approval; if not, then the applicant may skip the Fire Safety Permit step below.
>A certificate of commercial general liability insurance, with limits of not less than $350,000.00 per occurrence, required for applicants that will use a propane tank or natural gas in the mobile food vehicle.
>Are you disagreeing with the base concept of food safety?
Yes, what is the definition of "food safety"? Do I want to be poisoned? No. Do I think food safety regulations are helping? They hurt more than they help. Should we have regulations? Yes, but not excessive ones that only serve bureaucracy and are unfounded paranoia. The question is what cost is the food safety interference, going to countries or other states with looser regulation did not kill, sicken, or injure me. The extra regulations are not helping.
marching in the streets, calling local politicians, organizing in my community. not everyone is selfish and some folks work hard to push society forward.
So walking in the street expecting your actions to make other people do it?
> Relying on others to do everything to benefit you is wishful but deluded.
Isn't that exactly what these companies and managers are doing when they exploit workers?
Is it working?
For whom?
Congratulations, you've just discovered the point of unions.
Employers won't give you what you want if you just ask for it. But it's not deluded to think you can get it anyways. Through industrial action and worker solidarity you can force their hand, get what you want and change society for the better.
Because nobody owns anybody else a job.
The proper reaction if somebody makes you a bad proposal is to reject it. Plain and simple.
If nobody owes anybody else a job, why are they required to live then?
> The proper reaction if somebody makes you a bad proposal is to reject it. Plain and simple.
What luxury you must have to be able to reject a job. Not everyone has that luxury.
"If nobody owes anybody else a job, why are they required to live then?"
Have you tried thinking about that question? Lots of interesting aspects would come to light.
Maybe there was a time when food just grew into people's mouth. But eventually there were too many people, so they had to resort to actively hunting and gathering stuff to feed everybody (a ka work). So I guess you should blame people having babies for having to work.
You're missing the entire point, which is that people _don't_ have options because not everyone is privileged enough to be able to take time off to look for a job, or go any time without a paycheck.
Also, a lot of the work with growing food could easily be scaled back and done by people with plenty of time to spare for their own lives, or even partially automated. We're already quite a lot more efficient than before. There's no reason we _have_ to have people suffer shit jobs just to live.
Some people don't have jobs to begin with. I really don't know what you are going on about. Who is supposed to create a job for you, just because you need one?
As for the "Bullshit Jobs" theory, yes a couple of farmers can produce a lot of food. People don't only need food, though.
What are you going on about, you seem to be implying there should be a basic income? Or what is the alternative to working you envision? That has not been proven to be workable yet. And somebody will still have to do the work.
The government is expected to. The TSA isn't proven to prevent terrorist acts, most contraband gets through ( According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General's report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.1 Jun 2015 ", and they are paid quite well, I already think we live in a world where people don't need to "work" the way "work" is seen as backbreaking menial jobs, this system has been working underneath our noses, like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_centers
or most department of educational funding going to administration rather than teachers and students.
What I see is excessive bureaucracy generating pointless jobs that drain a lot of resources, and a lot of work being done with lower waged illegal laborers, or in non regulated sectors. I don't know how long it will continue.
To me the advice of "If your current job has bad labor conditions, find a better one" has an implicit meaning of "Certain jobs have bad labor conditions, and this is fine".
People are realizing this shouldn't be, and between protesting and quitting, are making themselves heard.
If there is an opportunity in the market to create a better job, then someone should capitalize on the opportunity. If the opportunity does not exist or cannot be manifested into existence due to a lack of imagination, who is to blame?
Bad is better than worse. Any incremental improvement is better still, but Utopia is always unattainable. The world is an unfair place. We can work to make it better. However conditions will never be ideal.
These bad jobs are still better than worse jobs. The premise is an appeal to Utopia. The logic is regressive. Unfair is subjective. Working conditions have generally improved over the years. Given the choice, laborers of the past would prefer the present. In the present unfairness can always be appealed to.
The ideal job might be to collect money while enjoying a leisure activity or pursuing a passion. One role of the entrepreneur is to manifest these situations into profitable enterprises. This is the kind of work which improves labor conditions.
Regressive appeals to unfairness will not get us there.
You might not have a better choice, and choose it. You might not appreciate the flexible hours of McDonaldâs, but that is no reason to force your choice upon the world as your experiences are the correct one. If I donât like programming should all programming jobs be banned? I donât like cooking, is that reason no cooking jobs should exist?
"If I don't like to be exploited, shouldn't others still be able to?"
No. No, they shouldn't. Some working conditions are straight up bad and exploitative and nobody should be forced to put up with them.
Who is forced? Those jobs interviews werenât held at gunpoint.
If (You personally donât like a job)
{
Ban anyone from doing it even if they like it.
}
People that have no other means of supporting their family are forced though economic means.
Do you really think anybody works the night shift at a fast food joint because they enjoy spending their time that way?
No, but they do it because otherwise their kid starves.
Exploitative capitalism doesn't often need to resort to guns. Usually the threat of starvation or dying from preventable disease is coercive enough.
> Do you really think anybody works the night shift at a fast food joint because they enjoy spending their time that way?
Yes. I did and others who are night owls and wanted to fuck around, give people extra food, and not work did, but you want to take away our happiness at hanging out not working hard at night instead of staring at the ceiling.
Yea, sometimes if you engage in a behavior that creates negative externalities (like providing companies the ability to exploit others by bidding your rights to the floor) then we put limitations on your behavior. It is not a novel concept
Your comment would be relevant if it was minimum wage, but the strawman youâre generating isnât rooted in any reality.
>People that have no other means of supporting their family are forced though economic means.
What's the alternative then? _forcing_ other people to support those people?
Realistically they make BS government jobs like the TSA.
"just find another job" like it's that easy for everyone
Its much easier to stay at an unfulfilling job you hate, have it crush your soul, post memes on Reddit, and resent it, but is that really a good choice? They are on a path they donât like, do you think itâs a good idea to change trajectory?
Our service economy that we live in is structured around there being a poorly paid and poorly treated underclass. Sure some in that class could leave but there aren't enough good jobs for everyone. We're talking about a structural problem, which can't be solved by individual action. I understand that can be hard to conceptualize for some.
It isnât hard to conceptualize because it doesnât exist as you imagine,there are great service jobs, and calling them all bad is prejudice and shows a lack of experience with any good ones.
I know college graduates that work as servers and hosts/hostesses, they love the social life, the tips they make are more than their college required job, and they made a rational decision.
The service industry isnât a monolithic evil.
> The service industry isnât a monolithic evil.
It does somewhat seem that people don't like working in it. From reading the antiwork subreddit, the general feeling appears to be that they want to improve the conditions (by rejecting bad jobs, or unionising) which suggests there is something to be desired.
Antiwork people donât like their service job so itâs universally hated? Seems biased to me.
Photography is a service job but I donât see anything but negativity of that kind, it doesnât mean that all photography jobs suck.
I have only taken a short look at r/antiwork, but you seem to be mostly arguing against a straw man of the thing most people are arguing for there, which is much more "work shouldn't have to be shitty and all-consuming" than "don't work at all".
_>I have only taken a short look at r/antiwork, [...], which is much more "work shouldn't have to be shitty and all-consuming" than "don't work at all"._
I was curious about /r/antiwork based on your comment so I looked at it and the description says: _"A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life,"_
I also noticed these 2 links in the subreddit's "Intro" sidebar :
- The Mythology of Work:
https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-eigh...
:
_>What if nobody worked? [...] That depends on what you mean by âwork.â Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?_
- The Abolition of Work :
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolit...
:
_> No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil youâd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesnât mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art._
So if we assume that picking up garbage is not a form of "play" like fishing or art, nobody should have to _be_ garbage workers for society to function. It seems plausible that a garbage worker who is doing the job only for the pay instead of "joyful playing with trash" would post that sentiment on /r/antiwork as it's compatible with the 2 essays that the subreddit wants you to read.
See /r/detrashed [1]
[1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeTrashed/top/
It seems to me the subreddit has been appropriated somewhat by its users, rather than led by its moderators. I wouldn't expect anyone feels constrained by a "party line" of what's in the sidebar. I suspect many people using it on mobile (like me) haven't even seen those essays.
If you donât like your job find another one. I looked at the sub and the memes posted.
These antiworkers are blaming their own misfortune on a bunch of supposedly dumb conservatives because they themselves are too stupid or inept to find a job that they like, or that thereâs a such thing as enjoyable work, or that all rich kids just laze around instead of their family pushing them to get into good schools, even through nepotism why would they need to worry about reputation?
> "work shouldn't have to be shitty and all-consuming" than "don't work at all".
https://reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/r8rzk2/the_big_lie/
Nope it is literally donât want to work at all.
The 'find another job' aspect is one of the most common themes on that subreddit. It's full of people telling their manager they don't have to put up with any BS because they can find another job by tomorrow, and then doing that.
If you want a counterexample to your insistence that they don't want any jobs, here's one I found in thirty seconds of browsing the front page of r/antiwork:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/r8pkgk/i_think_i_...
I have a really good job with a good manager and r/antiwork has given me a lot of sympathy for what too many other people have to put up with.
I sorted my feed by rising so thatâs a nice thread about finding better work.
Just for contrast, this thread posted from someone claiming theyâd introduced perks at their company to keep their employees happy was pretty well celebrated:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qzgqnr/from_a_man...
And you don't seem to understand the magnitude of the productivity increase we've seen, even after the industrial revolution. And yet wages have not been keeping up with inflation, because this is all in servitude to wasteful diversity in consumer goods, setting lower prices (that only in some categories offset inflation) and a lot of bullshit jobs.
Sure, we need work, but with a different mode of production we wouldn't have stopped at 8 hours when reclaiming time for other things that can be equally or more productive, especially now.
The number of people in employment has increased by a lot, so the absolute wage payout has in fact risen a lot.
And so has the absolute amount of living expenses? Absolute payout values donât make sense when looking at growth patterns between two entities
Employers don't determine the living expenses.
Per-capita wages are obviously the metric weâre talking about, and what matters when it comes to putting roofs over heads.
People don't employ other people to put roofs over their heads, but because they have work that needs to be done.
Why don't you put a roof over the head of somebody in need?
This is the reason I am generally for the anti-work movement even though I am largely against the individual reasons motivating it. I think there is real negotiating power that has been unrealized by the working class and they are just starting to exercise them. But I think they should use that negotiating power to get better deals for themselves not destroy capitalism.
I agree that wages haven't kept pace with productivity gains. However, proposed solutions such as increased costs, regulations and further currency devaluation won't get us there. They are the causes rather than the solutions.
> And yet wages have not been keeping up with inflation,
Hmm. Over the last year, real wages declined by about 1%, but that's the inevitable result of our covid policies. Look, you tell a bunch of people to stay home and not work, so that means there aren't going to be as many real goods and services produced. Now the government chose a (reasonable) policy of mailing out checks to people, which does keep them employed, but it just means prices will go up, since at the end of the day real wages do need to fall if people are not producing as much as they used to. There is no way getting around that. People complain about the inflation but they don't really understand the alternatives.
But I think the covid stuff is special, and you need to be careful of using the last two years in a benchmark when talking about long term trends. Long term, real wages have been increasing, and it's just false to say that they haven't:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> because this is all in servitude to wasteful diversity in consumer goods, setting lower prices (that only in some categories offset inflation) and a lot of bullshit jobs.
These are some pretty bold claims that require some statistical evidence to support. Unfortunately everyone has a lot of strong opinions about the economy, but very few are willing to invest the time into testing their hypotheses, or even doing something like a basic cross country analysis.
This is just wrong (and forgive my language, but stupid). The federal minimum wage has increased by $7 since 1938. A $7 increase in 84 years. No one is saying work should be banned. People just want jobs that allow them to afford housing, health insurance, retirement, and to sustain a family, and today the US has failed to provide that except for a minority of industries.
I think the other thread here is even outside your average minimum wage job the link between work and reward is broken.
Holders of capital can speculate on property/real estate and make more (illiquid) money than a worker in a full year. Then to add insult to injury the worker hands over some large sum of their wage to said speculator. And is generally treated like crap into the bargain.
When idle parasitism makes more money than working and indeed forces people to work harder for longer, discontent from the generally capital poor workers is unsurprising.
Minimum wage does not mean you have to work for minimum wage. Try hiring a software developer for minimum wage.
What people want is also not really other people's problem? Or who should be responsible? Say you know 100 people who want housing, health care and secured retirement. If you don't know them, go to r/antiwork and pick out a few candidates.
Now go provide them with money and jobs. It is your responsibility now!
> People just want jobs that allow them to afford housing, health insurance, retirement, and to sustain a family, and today the US has failed to provide that except for a minority of industries.
https://reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/r8rzk2/the_big_lie/
Definitely people that donât want to work at all.
People might want California coastline affordable housing and Ferraris by working at McDonaldâs but the US failing to provide that isnât a failure of the US
A small number of extremists exist in any cause. I don't think cherry picking them out and redefining the whole thing with their extremist view is productive. By doing that you can just wholesale write off any idea or movement you want, it's intellectually dishonest in my opinion.
This is currently the top thread.
https://reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/r8udf5/keep_spreading...
They want âfree healthcareâ by taxing 4%, I am not cherry picking anything, despite Obamacare existing for the poorest people. That post was at the top when I looked.
I'm failing to understand how that has anything at all to do with 'people not wanting to work at all'.
And besides the point - I completely agree with it. Healthcare costs are absurd. Who decided that my eyes & teeth aren't part of my health, why do I pay separately for those? And what is the point of insurance if they can just deny anything they want or require me to pay thousands out of pocket before they get involved at all? And this is _after_ I pay hundreds a month to the insurance companies depending on plan. Speaking of plans - why is it the norm that I must try my best to predict the future 1 year in advance about whether I'll get sick or hurt this year? Guess wrong? - well good luck with that! The whole thing is ridiculous and unexpectedly throws people into impossible financial positions through no fault of their own regularly.
You said Iâm cherry picking extremists, Im just looking at the top posts.
Again - where is the extremism there that relates at all to your original statement of 'Definitely people that donât want to work at all.'..?
I think you're being intellectually dishonest and am choosing to exit this conversation now as I don't see you responding to the above query in good faith after giving you another chance already. Have a good weekend.
Itâs linked to late stage capitalism, do they want to work?
I sort all of Reddit by rising posts, which is why I think my feed is different.
Being from a country with a national health service, I can appreciate why they'd want one. It is a reasonable thing to ask.
The US has Medicaid for elderly and people with disabilities, the VA for veterans, and Obamacare for those who canât afford it. Iâm very surprised the idea is national healthcare service doesnât exist. We can complain about quality of course, but most foreigners either think itâs all private or free healthcare doesnât exist.
We have a choice: free (often crappy care), pre regulation health trials, expensive experimental treatment , cutting edge medicine from specialists like the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic or University of Chicago, and healthcare from work off the top of my head.
LOL dude it's a subreddit with 30k followers. You should probably figure out how that translates to the real world and not panic just because a few people have made some posts that have gotten some comments.
Iâm pointing and laughing. Why would I or anyone panic about a subreddit of lazy people who arenât adept enough to find another job or donât want to work?
I think you may have misread: it has 30k people who are, at the time of writing, online. It has 1.3million followers.
Again you have completely exaggerated, and your citation reflects nothing of your exaggeration.
Less binarism please, _some_ work is an option.
Many work well beyond their base expenses; they actively trade personal and family time to further their career and bank balance. That's fine if they want that but it's not bad to take stock of what's important and redress that balance over your lifetime.
That said, the people here handling receipts are likely not earning enough to work less.
Why donât they get another job? These people are inept and blame situations like getting cancer on their job? Healthcare plans not a thing, or Obamacare not existing?
> Yes freedom!!!! From taxes (for the rich) and unions and the freedom to be forced into bankruptcy because you made the grave mistake of getting cancer.
Base means isnât forward thinking, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have enough money but what if they wants to give to do more? If you taxed estates to 100% what do you think would happen?
> Why donât they get another job? These people are inept and blame situations like getting cancer on their job?
You're suggesting that the entire service class get another job not in the service class? So now there's no more restaurants, fast food or otherwise, in the US? No more garbage men? If you agree that those jobs are essential to society's functioning, then don't you think we should treat and compensate them accordingly? It doesn't seem like your position is well thought out.
Is your position thought out or factual? Garbage men are well paid, why did you assume otherwise?
>The average hourly pay for a Garbage Man is $17.68. Visit PayScale to research garbage man hourly pay by city, experience, skill, employer and more.
I know college educated people who work at restaurants because they made more money there.
I havenât eaten at a restaurant, and COVID closed many, is it really essential?
Wow, 36k a year! What a livable wage! Even your cherry picked example doesn't really prove your point, but the vast majority of other service workers are treated worse. And if you're truly arguing society could function if we just deleted all jobs with poor working conditions, you're delusional. We haven't even mentioned factory workers in Asia yet.
> I havenât eaten at a restaurant, and COVID closed many, is it really essential?
Did you really just say that we should shut down all restaurants? Iâm assuming not so it would be nice if you could explain more.
Where did you get that or âallâ? They arenât essential and I donât care what happens to them the same way I donât care about bars I never went to shutting down.
This and its follow ups are a worrying stream of consciousness and I'm not entirely sure what _I said_ that you're trying to connect with.
> These people are inept and blame situations
Which people? People working service? As the thread goes, we can't just delete those roles, pay everyone enough to work less and expect our economy to function as it does. We rely on people having shitty jobs both locally and overseas to make our dream work. We can't get by on unicorn farts.
Which is to say there will _always_ be somebody working every hour of the day in these dead-end jobs, reading messages on hacked printers telling them they should just work less... But they don't have that choice. They can't _get good_ because education and opportunity are neither free, instant or even guaranteed. Nobody here is blaming anybody for that, I just think you don't understand how the world works.
> if they wants to give to do more?
This is at the other end of my argument, people actually being able to work less in their high-paying careers. This isn't affected by your theoretical monster taxes or them suddenly really wanting a yacht. If cost of living goes up, the sums change and they need to weigh things up again.
To add to this:
I work as a janitor, I can do the whole of my job in about 5 hours. I'm scheduled for 8 hours through the weekdays. 95% of the time _when_ I show up is totally unimportant, nonetheless I'm still beholden to the schedule. Given that I do choose to complete the work in 5 hours, I've got about 3 hours where I have to doddle around doing either worthless make-work, or I sit on my ass in which case work becomes closer kin to a prison. And the latter is kinda breaking the rules, which is a concern because where I work now, and at basically every other facility I've worked in the last 10 years, has a surveillance system. If I leave early, I take a loss in pay and open myself to a haranguing; or I spent pretty limited vacation to paper it over - both of those cases are, frankly, bullshit.
There's also just some really silly technicalities like waiting for the clock to turn to the point where it will round over. If the job is done, why make people wait an extra few minutes instead of manually entering and paying them on the per-diem basis? Who knows, maybe they can dodge traffic, which turns into a non-linear function which saves them 15 minutes. In my case, leaving 3 hours early when possible, leaves me with a lot of different options, like actually being able to study for school so I don't have to become a travelling carpet salesman. On the other side, which seems to be the dominant trend, my employer would just increase the volume of work exploiting me for 8 hours at no gain.
But hypothetically I could be paid per job: one clean facility being equivalent to 8-hours worth of pay. And if we take such a scenario, that means I'd be working about 25-30 hours, which is below revised the "full-time" standard, meaning that HR could presumably rescind my benefits package and other sorts of recourse. And ultimately that sort of behavior is selected for, it "saves" the company money. A bias towards the short run, certainly, which ultimately makes the bottom line leary of sticking around. I guess that's ultimately of no concern, somebody most certainly did the math and fingered out that high turnover is cheaper than well-trained, and highly capable long-term staff.
Now if we work from the logic that all of this is a fiction, from the schedule, to the time, to the considerations of the job title, it becomes pretty easy to see how it could be much more dynamic just by offering certain bargaining abilities to both employers and employees. In that scenario, there are a lot of historical indicators that point towards exploitative behavior the asymmetry between an employer and an employee is considerable. That's a cultural thing, that's what happens when you use the Hobbesian framework, when you institute acquisitive behavior as the selection parameter for social success. This is exacerbated by bureaucratic processes and arbitrary hierarchies which can extend the whole world over. Even further by creating a class of leadership that is so far removed from the daily considerations of 95% of people, so insulated from want, struggle, oppression, and legitimate work in many cases, that they simply don't seem to comprehend. It shouldn't be construed from that, that I'm saying it's purely a sociomechanical feature, necessarily. But it could also be psychopathy, or Dark Triad selection pressures, or some other form of rare derangement any of which in a state of nature would probably be maladaptive.
Probably the worst part of it is that the Hobbesian mode seems to be derived from observations made in the Mediterranean and Europe which really plainly from the modern perspective aren't representative of a realistic state of nature, and are instead inductive assumptions which we have overwhelmingly shaped ourselves into by assuming we're inherently greedy, that the state of affairs, hierarchy and complexes of control are an intrinsic necessity. The irony in that, is that given the Hobbesian proposition, no matter what state of affairs we erect it's liable to be corrupted by exploitative greed - and the state itself is a mechanism which holds by its nature the greatest conceivable risk.
This all feeds into a system where workers without the leverage to negotiate are constantly entrenched in a lowest-bidder situation which is patently ineffective in basically every category for the lowest common denominator. It concretes the standard hourly wage and set schedule, enforces the modal office worker. And if "Bullshit Jobs" is any indicator, there's a considerable amount of labor involved in keeping this shit turning that ultimately results in a net-negative not only for the individual, but probably through additive and multiplicative emergent processes - exponentially for society.
And it's quickly adding up to nothing for most of us in myriad ways.
The must-fix-everything part of me might suggest getting them to contract the work out to you but your price will need to be a lot higher than your salary to cover insurance, benefits you currently get, cover for when you want to holiday, etc etc etc.
But some roles have to have built in slack to cover emergent situations. In your example, to be available in-hours to do clean up a spillage or unblock a drain. Something that would impact other workers. Actually filling your timetable with work would diminish that slack-insurance.
There's no easy answer for working less in that situation, especially if you're already the only janitor on site at a time.
Given an average 8 hour work day, how many of those hours would you say is a fact of nature, and how may are the result of us playing our cards poorly?
I know plenty of people who have chosen not to work forty hour weeks and make do with varying levels of money.
I have family who choose to be stay at home parents, I know working class people that own small businesses, like a caterer, and I know successful engineers who have negotiated part time roles, and contract work
These people all work, and they all get by. Working 40 hours a week is also a choice. I know people who work more than that too, because they enjoy their work (a shocking concept to the antiwork crowd I'm sure), and I've talked to gig workers who like the flexibility
These are just anecdotes but if it's the structure of the forty hour work week that you don't like, you just need some creativity, and maybe a willingness to make do with fewer material things, but you are NOT excused from the moral imperative to work if you are able bodied.
There are people who really can't work and if you can and choose not to do so, you are hurting society's ability to help those people.
My back of the envelope calculation puts the strain of our national bums at 1 dollar a month for every taxpayer. Netflix is $10. EU membership is $10. Every single bum in my country is 1 dollar combined.
And we're giving these people a home, heating, water, electricity _and_ Internet access, plus food, all for free.
I don't know what the rest of the world is doing, but choosing not to work is not the social burden you make it out to be, at least over here.
>My back of the envelope calculation puts the strain of our national bums at 1 dollar a month for every taxpayer.
How did you get those numbers? I took $1/month, multiplied that by 144.3M tax payers, dividing that by the federal poverty line of $12.88k/year (presumably the minimum amount needed for living), and only got enough funds to pay for 134k people. Wikipedia says there were approximately "1.5 million sheltered homeless" in 2014, so that's an order of magnitude more. Add to that, the effects of this program disincentivizing work, and I expect that the final cost to be two orders of magnitude more expensive than you proposed.
Notice how I mentioned EU membership? It's a non-USA calculation. As I said, I don't know what the rest of the world is doing. I get your $12.88k/year at a fraction of $1/mo for the taxpayers over here and I'm living like a king. No idea why providing basic necessities is supposedly so _expensive_ in the US.
While such leisure disincentivizes _bullshit_ work (which is a _good_ thing), it allows me to do _actual,_ meaningful work. I.e. pursue my lifelong dreams pertaining to computers and art.
> the moral imperative to work
So how many hours goes to the moral imperative side, and how many to the "I like to have nice things" side?
Because I'd be willing to accept that I have a moral imperative to work 8 hours a week. And as technology improves, that number should decrease.
working 40 hours isnât a choice if you need healthcare
We all make decisions based on what we think we need and the reality of our situations.
I feel badly for people who don't think about the second-order effects of their decisions, though. If one chooses to only do enough to get by starting at a young age, they'll still be waiting tables (or some equivalent) in their 60's, one paycheck away from disaster.
On the other hand, working more than you need has compounding effects. Ben Franklin got about his business with a hand-cart early in the morning in his 20s and 30s and was in shape to retire in his 40s - and could indulge in public service, invention, scientific experimentation, and exploration to his hearts desire after that.
We can't all be Ben Franklins, though I think more of us could do so with better decision making.
There is no moral imperative to deliver food to ungrateful assholes all day. They can fucking walk to the restaurant themselves.
That said, the antiworkers won't move to some poor country, buy a large plot of land and live off it.
They like modern shit, plus that would be way more worky work than any shit job in a city.
Fighting for better labour conditions and wages is good, being completely anti work is just stupid.
> It's really sad that the people who post to r/antiwork do not seem to understand that the fact of work is a fact of nature and not a product of society.
But we could say the same for disease, tribalism, rape, and murder.
Guess we better cease resisting, roll over, and surrender to the facts of nature?
False equivalence. Lowering the number of people raped and murdered as much as possible has a positive effect. Lowering the number of people working as much as possible does not.
> Lowering the number of people working as much as possible does not.
You must surely know how much of our work is centered around consumerism and the role this plays in the impending climate catastrophe?
Besides, the vast majority of jobs have an abysmal effect on the health of the worker. And don't get me started on bullshit jobs.
Even if I agreed entirely with your point about necessary jobs etc, there is still a threshold (and I believe it is a very early-on threshold) where turning down the number of people working starts to have a detrimental effect on society. That doesn't happen with a rape and murder.
> there is still a threshold (and I believe it is a very early-on threshold) where turning down the number of people working starts to have a detrimental effect on society
This appears to be why we don't see eye to eye, as I am convinced it'd be of great benefit. If people wouldn't be stuck in a constant rat race, they could lean back, enjoy life, and ponder about more important matters. If so inclined, we could all live scholarly in the true sense of the word: having the luxury of enough free time to acquire knowledge.
> "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." â R. Buckminster Fuller
I think that the notion of "unnecessary jobs" comes largely from the misguided desire to pressure people to want different things. For example, should I think that the beauty industry should be as large as it is? I am not talking about the big beauty corporations, I'm talking about the self-employed estheticians, hair stylists, beauticians, etc, who have their own rooms and buy their own products and tools. I think intelligent people like Buckminster Fuller would see them as mostly unnecessary to society, and that they shouldn't have to work, and should go to school instead. But guess what? People want their services. And many of the workers like their jobs (even if they don't like how much they work). So they work those jobs (that they like) and provide services to people who want them. An outside intellectual might look at the exchange and think "This worker hates their job...they should be an artist! And this customer shouldn't want nail extensions...they should go back to school!" That kind of thinking has a distinct authoritarian bend to it.
>It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
That only works if everyone knows who that "one in ten thousand" person is, and does everything that they can to support that person, so that they don't have to spend all of their time doing the things that we would have to do individually if most jobs went away. For those "one in ten thousand" people, the jobs that many people provide are conveniences to them so that they can focus on other things. Eg: delivery, food prep, handiwork, advice (sales, legal, health, etc).
In your first paragraph, I think your example is actually along the lines of what Anti-Work would support.
The independent people who are self-employed are already doing what they enjoy and their enjoyment results in other people getting their hair done. Doing hair for play, as opposed to doing it for a profit. The will of the person doing the hair is within their own agency and an expression of what they want to be doing and is self-fulfilling.
So you can style hair, and be self-fulfilled in doing it. You can take a scholarly approach and make better techniques for doing hair, create solutions to problems with hair, and you can share these things with others, and improve the society-level understanding of styling hair.
Take someone else who really needs to have an apartment to live in, and food on the table, and this is what they are trying to solve. They have a hair salon close by and they go get a job there, they trade their time and collect a wage to pay for the apartment. They are styling hair now to meet their basic needs, not as the fulfillment of their own self. This, I think, is the problem Anti-Work is pointing out.
That what you spend the majority of your life on, ought to be something which is an expression of yourself and a manifestation of your will, rather than an expression of someone else's business interest and a manifestation of your boss's will through you.
> That only works if everyone knows who that "one in ten thousand" person is, and does everything that they can to support that person, so that they don't have to spend all of their time doing the things that we would have to do individually
I suppose the counter idea here is that if everyone is fulfilling their own personal will and is within their own agency, the will of society itself will align to take care of everyone. It isn't that 1 in 10,000 people is special and should be given all of this extra support to do something that becomes massively beneficial, it's that if all needs are met, tens of thousands of people are now working on what they are interested in, rather than fulfilling other people's will, and you have far more of those 1-10,000 people actually doing massively beneficial things to improve society even further.
> And many of the workers like their jobs (even if they don't like how much they work).
But do they like their job enough to pursue it if they have their basic needs already covered? Unconditionally?
How many of them would quit and set sights on something far greater? We could find that out quite easily.
Why not? There's a ton of people unable to live their life fulfilling due to their exploitative jobs. If we could remove some of the necessity of their job, then wouldn't their lives be improved? And isn't that a good thing?
> Why not?
Food, clothing and shelter are all the products of people working. Maybe someday that can all be automated, but it isn't and anyone not working ends up exploiting others to obtain the fruits of the other person's labor, which is supposedly the exact opposite of what they advocate.
> anyone not working ends up exploiting others
I think we should keep in mind that what they might be doing at work is exploiting others.
Most of the jobs I've had, I left because once I got to know the inner workings of the company I realized that it wasn't about solving real problems, but instead about justifying the ability to profit from a privileged position.
I don't have a lot of data here, but I'd estimate the percentage of people employed in the full time exploitation of others at about 50%.
Well, don't do that, then? I spend my days helping people.
I held a lot of views in my youth that I dismissed later in life, including something akin to this anti-work sentiment, among many other anti-consumer, anti-technology, anti-society nonsense. I abandoned them in my maturity but they had real value in my life and continue to mark and influence my perspective later in life.
So in some sense I don't mind seeing the paradoxes or irrationalities of this type of thinking. It's a healthy part of development for young people. Yeah it is sometimes over the top, and some people never outgrow it. But I mean the basic sentiment isn't hard to agree on -- the purpose of life isn't to work for someone else in a soul-crushing environment.
And while one may concede that work is a fact of nature, one might also respond that it's alienated labour, blah blah blah, and they have a good point.
Work is natural in that as hunter/gatherers we would hunt and gather food for ourselves and community. But you would be mistaken if you thought that hunter/gathers didnât have a lot of âleisureâ time.
I do agree that some of the anti work sentiment is silly and doesnât seem to note that, at the very least, you need to work for yourself. And I find the communist angle to be abhorrent. But clearly, whatever we have going on now is not working. But I wouldnât call our current system capitalism either. Itâs more like some bastardized, corrupted form of capitalism at this point that rewards the people that have already succeeded and makes it hard for people at the bottom to succeed. Maybe more simply, I see capitalism without much meritocracy.
I would be interested in hearing of a "capitalist" system in which this "bastardized, corrupted form" is not an inevitable end case. Why would "capitalists" want meritocracy? _They already have the means of production._ We've seen this before with other power structures: people want their kids to succeed them, even if by any objective measure somebody else "deserves" it more. Why would that change with suits rather than crowns?
The way to keep "capitalists" from doing intrinsically capitalist things is to have a strong regulatory force with an engaged body politic that refuses to allow that regulatory force to be suborned by capturing interests, such that you can harness the positives of a competitive economy without grinding humans to dust within its gears. But that is in itself difficult when the fundamental mode of teaching in a society centers around creating technicians for the industries _owned_ by those capitalists, no?
A steadily and strongly mixed economy that commits to ensuring that everyone has their basic needs met (so as not to create wage-slave conditions; nobody would work as a janitor for peanuts were there other options, so make other options to push the floor upward until it finds a better equilibrium!) plus a willingness to shatter giant companies is the way you make something that superficially at least smells like "capitalism" into a thing, but that adds to the mix all the things that make people start screaming about socialism.
The answer you're looking for is Austrian economics. Stop printing trillions of dollars and giving them to Wall Street. Have positive interest rates (5-10%) that encourage loans to be paid off, rather than servicing never ending life debt. End the asset bubble, and let natural technological price deflation take its course across all sectors.
I'm not going to assert that if this were to happen, that it would certainly solve our problems (with its corollary of closing my eyes to the problems if they don't go away). But our current economy emphasizes centralized planning over distributed capital, without even getting the benefits of central planning - government spending for people is Evil, while prolifigate government spending for corporations is routine. And the current policies (busted inflation metrics, "full employment" mandate) guarantees this will only get worse.
Politically this criticism has been taken off the table - the red team pretends to be fiscally conservative while giving away trillions in corporate welfare, while the blue team advocates for even more government spending to mitigate the damage caused. This managed zeitgeist may be a result of the inevitability in your comment, but there is indeed a framework that doesn't just conclude "welp, that's capitalism".
> Work is natural in that as hunter/gatherers we would hunt and gather food for ourselves and community. But you would be mistaken if you thought that hunter/gathers didnât have a lot of âleisureâ time.
Did they? IIRC there was a recent HN post about this, and in the comments someone mentioned that the comparison was flawed because they compared the modern 8 hour workday, to how much time hunter-gatherers spent gathering food. They didn't account for the time for making/maintaining apparel, preserving food, or making repairs to shelter.
Indeed.
While it may be true that hunter-gatherers had a lot of leisure time, it's also true that hunter-gatherers typically didn't have much beyond a spear, a knife, a loin cloth, a cooking pot, a subsistence amount of food and maybe some sort of hut with a fire pit.
Making enough money for that level of existence wouldn't take much time even today. It would be easy enough to do the experiment (and some have). Just pay a bush pilot to drop you off somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness and hunt and gather to your heart's content. Alaska has regulations that allow subsistence hunting, so you could even do it legally (you might have to fill out a few forms...).
However, we seem to like having things like electricity, running water, central heat, desktop supercomputers, global computer networks, airlines, interstate highways, modern medicine, more than one change of clothing...
itâs the amount and the type of work, do you think weâd all be starving and naked if people werenât flipping shitty burgers for $8 an hour, 40 hours a week? thatâs not dictated by nature
>They really think work itself is the product of capitalism, as though it isn't part of the human condition and a necessary part of every society that has ever existed.
The idea of 'work' in our society is quite different to the idea of 'work' in past societies. Time is allocated in a particular way (to particular people), usually by particular people, and the direction of the labour performed during that time, as well as the restrictions within that time and the end purpose of labour during that time, is determined by a complex social arrangement. There are several reasons why someone involved in that arrangement would be critical of it to various degrees.
For example, some people on HN are critical of the five day work week. Others are critical of the "back to the office" rhetoric pushed out by big corporations. Still others are critical of what Graeber called "bullshit jobs". These are all criticisms of 'work', usually from the point of view of wanting to do less of it, and under different conditions of society.
Nobody - not even the orthodox Marxist or the anarchist - believes that society functions without labour. However, they do recognize an important point: 'work' is a particular implementation of a much more abstract 'labour' in a particular (global) society. It's necessary, but not immutable.
Analyze your monthly/yearly budget. Add up how much is spent on physical necessities, even those providing modern conveniences (food, heat, electricity, Internet, housing maintenance, etc), versus how much goes towards virtual trickle-up debt flows (mortgage interest, health "insurance", student loans, etc). The difference is staggering for denser urban living. Suburban/rural uses more real resources and has been less financialized, but the trends are still telling.
The non-productive meta economy has gotten ever larger, dwarfing the real productive economy. And it's not like the industries administrating those debt flows are on easy street either - their workers are still working 40+ hours per week creating and consuming paperwork, because their individual alternative is to become destitute. "Antiwork" is not about doing _no_ work, but rather about seeing any of the gains from increased productivity apart from shiny gadgets.
Looking at this another way, full time employment was 40 hours per week _before_ women entered the workforce. After the workforce nearly doubled, the definition of full time employment should have nearly halved. Combined with productivity increases and offshoring, modern "full time" employment should be below 15 hours per week! Instead we have a glut of unskilled labor competing at "minimum wage". Even worse, this has led businesses to destroy their own value by deprecating trusted skilled workers, and instead hiring cheap interchangeable cogs and running business logic Chinese-room style through policies and procedures.
Labour != work
The former is a necessary precondition of the functioning of biological life (until gods, aliens, or AI show up to feed us lemonade.) The latter (as with the modern concepts of national borders, for example) is a system rooted in the logic of capitalistic ideology. Stating such is not to disagree with the logic of capitalism but only to point out the genealogy of its ideas or the ideas it has appropriated or influenced.
Very deep thoughts from a brand new user named âfartattackâ.
It appears this is a troll account. Their first couple of posts are flagged / dead posts calling people who support COVID vaccines cowards and denying the existence of the Delta variant. Unfortunately I took their bait but I suggest others donât.
Is this the new appeal to flatu-pacifism logical fallacy Iâve been hearing about?
I enjoy the mainstream memes that are top ranked in r/antiwork - righteously quitting from unethical organizations where bosses routinely break their promises, labor negotiations that worked out (isn't that pro-work?), and PHB incompetence - like automation unrecognized and lost.
But there seems to be a more insidious core flogging a fantasy where entry-level-jobs that should be staffed by high-schoolers have over double minimum wage compensation and full benefits.
I'm reminded of the MLM (multi-level marketing) fantasy of, "forget about product orders (the real work that makes the arrangement legal), just get more people to pay you to get in your downline and they'll sell for you and you'll be able to sit back and make money for the rest of your life without doing anything." - which makes the business arrangement into a pyramid scheme.
The problem with pyramid scheme MLMs is the market gets saturated quickly and runs out of greater fools willing to support it.
I see a very similar attitude in the anti-work crew, where the fantasy is, "if the billionaires would just give everyone a thousand dollars a month then we could just sit back and relax the rest of our lives."
The point is that mimimum wage hasn't kept up with productivity increases and that all the added profit of the last xx years is going to the top of the company. Example
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qp769d/think_this...
And that "benefits" shouldn't be something that's held over your head as a reward or as something that can be taken away on the whim of some other people. Healthcare etc should be a right, not a bargaining chip to keep the lower class under their thumb.
Should McDonald's be closed during High School hours as well as late at night (so that they can get sleep before school the next day)?
As in, closed between the hours of 7AM to 3PM as well as 10PM onwards?
> It's really sad that the people who post to r/antiwork do not seem to understand that the fact of work is a fact of nature and not a product of society.
The most ironic thing about them, is their praising of socialist states. In ex-Warsaw-Pact countries (socialist "republics") you literally _had to_ work, otherwise you'd go to jail.
They really expect, once capitalism is over, they'd just chill under a tree all day.
If you're clever enough to abuse thermal printers, you can probably also apply that ingenuity to solving problems for profit. In this regard, perhaps the anti-work ideology is limiting. I understand and appreciate that some will find themselves in a rebellious phase. However, the narrow focus on "what is" ignores "what is possible".
Technology has created multifold opportunities for value creation. There are even fields where the same adversarial urges can be applied. Development and publishing is wide open for creators. Even after all of the big players and platforms, there's still open realestate for solo builders.
If you find work tedious, then become clever. Create something which will earn an income on the terms you define and find acceptable. When you fail, look inward and decide what you can do differently next time. Don't blame others. You can't change them. You'll only make yourself a powerless victim. Retain your individual agency and keep going. Learn and advance past your challenges.
1) Identify the problem correctly. It isn't work. It is tedious, unfulfilling work.
2) Create your solution
3) Profit!
I get it. But I happy to really enjoy work.
The message is really anti-exploitation, not anti-work. Saying employees should discuss pay amongst themselves⊠Itâs not even socialist or anything; it is really just encouraging an actual free market by reducing information asymmetry.
You can go work for a company that permits discussion of salaries? That is the actual free market. And if no such company exists, you can start one. Surely you would attract all the workers from the other companies because they would prefer to work in a company with transparent information?
I don't think this "information asymmetry" thing will work out well for the workers. What if there are some people who are more productive than others, but have the same job title? Do they really want to hear "yeah we pay you less because you are less productive"? Or vice versa "yeah, you work twice as hard as Simon, but you have the same job title, so he still gets the same pay, sorry". Those social actions all sound very good, but I think people can sour on it quickly when they realize they are the ones who effectively pay for their unproductive colleagues that can't be fired.
I don't think that will go down well, and will just make things more difficult to run.
And the impetus is still "socialist", equal pay for everybody, businesses are exploiting people and so on, those are socialist talking points.
> You can go work for a company that permits discussion of salaries?
Its illegal for the company to prevent you, but that doesn't help any employee who doesn't know this fact.
Also, that is kinda the whole point of the anti-work movement, to stop working for companies that abuse you.
>And if no such company exists, you can start one.
I think you have an imperfect view of the situation given you likely work somewhere that pays you enough you have spare money left over to save up a rainy day fund. This movement isn't for you, and you should step out of the way.
Min wage workers don't have a rainy day fund, they don't have any money left over to put into a savings account, they can't even handle missing a single day of work without one of their bills being paid late, all while working a class of jobs that rarely has paid sick time, almost never has vacation, and no union to keep you from being fired for arbitrary or made up reasons.
How da fuck do you expect them to start a company? Its hard enough for them to handle the expense of changing jobs just from the one or two extra days between paychecks because they pay out on a different day.
That narrative of "poor people are so helpless, they have no chances at all, their only hope is socialism to rescue them" doesn't really convince me. Surely at least you can send out some applications from your phone on your daily 2 hour commute to work.
It can be really cheap to start a company. You could offer to help your antiwork colleagues to find better jobs, for example. Bam, you have a company.
On another note,
While I get that you don't see how more income leads to more ability to job hunt for a better job, I would like to ask why you think it is that when people got stimulus checks they started leaving their current wage slave job for better ones in droves?
There is still a labor shortage, where did you think it came from? Unemployment benefits don't apply to people who quit, or were fired for cause, and for most people out of work from the pandemic days, they are fully exhausted, and have been since the first week of sept when the federal """handout""" ended. Nobody who didn't lose their job this calendar year still has employment benefits. Yet there is still a labor shortage for bottom rung jobs?
Its almost like a bunch of people now having the means to eat the cost of job hopping did their job hopping and are working better jobs.
Now lets look at about why that might be...
>Surely at least you can send out some applications from your phone on your daily 2 hour commute to work.
Doesn't matter if you can't afford to take the job.
This is what people who haven't been poor recently don't understand...
If you can not afford to have your first paycheck delayed by a week to 3 weeks without either running out of gas or bus money to get to work(!), or ending up past the final date (!!) on a utility bill or rent bill, why would you waste your time applying to jobs?
That's just nonsense. How many people are in that situation? You can borrow money to bridge the three weeks, for example. And what happens to such people if they get fired, which presumably happens all the time?
I think you are talking about imaginary situations that don't actually reflect reality.
If people were able to find better jobs, that is exactly the solution I propose.
Calling setting min wage to be enough that you can have a savings account and have the financial freedom to move jobs "socialism" is premium intellectual dishonesty.
If the min wage is socialism then call me a socialist because thats not an argument you'll win with here
You people simply have it backwards. You truly seem to believe of the alternatives of somebody offering a job for 2$/h and no job, offering no job is the better alternative. When in reality you could simply not take the 2$/h job and be in the same situation as if there was no job.
The living wage theory is a completely moronic idea, because why should anybody who needs a job done have to pay for somebody else's whole life expenses? That makes zero sense and just makes it more difficult to offer jobs.
Like suppose you need somebody to paint your living room. Should you have to pay their whole living expenses to do that? How does that make sense? It is just a job.
Minimum wages only hit the poorest people who can't get jobs anymore. And the first victims will not even show up in the joblessness statistics, because they will be people who earned an extra income to their pension or student allowance.
The only proper solution is to increase demand for jobs. If you are desperate to find somebody to paint your living room, you will raise your rates to get the job done.
Itâs silly to pretend that anyone could just magically start a company, and therefore no company will ever do harm. Consumers would also like to spend their money on ethically responsible products, and yet we have (and need) laws on pollution, workplace safety, etc. Why? Because the consumer isnât going to maintain a complete list of misbehaving companies and their various subsidiaries, suppliers, and trademarks. Aka âinformation asymmetryâ.
The comparison of salaries is used as a _method_ not a goal (I think). And for your 10x-coder-god, the lesson seems to be that they should be given a title better in line with their genius and salary. If itâs somehow difficult because their value isnât easily measured in terms that would work in a policy document, chances are your impression of their skills may just be imaginary: are they really worth the money, or do they just look and act like only a highly productive person could without being fired?
Who say things should start magically? Isn't HN a place were we hear a lot of stories about how hard it is to start a company? Yet if somebody succeeds, somehow they cross the line and become exploiters and own other people things. But workers should just magically be given wonderful comfy jobs? By whom?
As for coder gods, yes, there are people who are more productive than others.
"The comparison of salaries is used as a method not a goal"
A method to achieve what?
I dunno, I've been on the subreddit of the same name and some of the messages really are anti-work as such, not just anti-exploitation.
Sometimes I'm reminded of that Ferengi quote "we don't seek to end exploitation, we seek to become the exploiters."