First, thanks for the feedback on my frequency of publication here. As I noted, so far, that’s not been a big strain on me to write, but as I feared, for some of you it is a bit much to receive. So I’ll start with a modest adjustment. Rather than eight items every seven days, let’s try seven items every eight. For the moment, I’m going to stop the Good Enough column on Tuesdays: it’s been a test-bed for some long-form writing I’m going to tackle this spring and I think I’ve gotten a better feel for what I have in mind.
I’ll try to make further adjustments as things go along. I’m still not entirely sure about a News column simply because that commentary space is so crowded. I’m not sure what to say much of the time that hasn’t been said already. A Republican governor in Mississippi diverting covid-19 relief funds to build more prisons? What’s left to say about that kind of murderous nonsense other than to call it that and move on?
For today, though, here’s one thing worth thinking about. Danielle Abril at the Washington Post reports that many office workers have found their return to working with other people to be disappointing because many of them are stuck in featureless cinderblock rooms talking with people on Zoom. They’re still by themselves, only now they’re by themselves in sterile, unattractive interior spaces rather than their own homes. Says one HR head: “We want everyone back in the office, but we still want everyone to do work by video”.
As the summer ended, you could see the contradictions of many contemporary working environments spilling out all over the place. Why not allow people to work from home indefinitely if their work doesn’t have to be in person? Some supervisors wanted people back in office because they feel the need to constantly watch their workers in person—others, of course, have insisted on installing terrifyingly intrusive surveillance on computers used for work. As one HR professional I know said with slight exasperation, a supervisor could just decide to judge whether an employee is working via the results of their labor. Did they do everything they’re supposed to do? Is it done well? Then who cares?
The anxious need by some bosses to have everyone monitored seems to verify that a lot of work consists of what the late David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. We need people in many workplaces who know how to do a number of tasks that require training and knowledge whenever those tasks need completion, but some days that might mean they don’t have that much to do otherwise. Who cares if the rest of the time they’re surfing the Internet, reading a book, or talking to their friends? If you’re the employer in a lot of workplaces, you’re paying for those skills and knowledge to be available on call, not to own every second of the employee’s time. Or so it should be, but that thought clearly hits a sensitive place in the long-standing culture of white-collar work. (And further contrasts that kind of work with the sort of service labor where every minute really is tasked to something.)
I think that Abril’s story is more poignant on the other side, that the people eager to be back at work are disappointed to simply have been shackled to Zoom in more uncomfortable surroundings. There’s some dangers to hybrid or remote formats that employees have to remain wary about, and that’s not just the nightmare that parents of small children have been dealing with. It would be a disaster if we found ourselves right back in the situation of early 20th Century miners who had to pay for their own tools in order to work in the owner’s mines. If we let employers get rid of expensive leases for office buildings while telling employees that paying for fast broadband, a good laptop, and an ergonomic chair is their problem, that’s another big step forward in the race to ever-widening income inequality.
I think worse than that still, however, goes to the disappointments that Abril’s subjects are feeling. The workplace is perhaps the only place left that Americans encounter strangers across a socioeconomic range in an everyday way. It’s the only opportunity we have to remix our sense of belonging and connection. Higher education, despite our alleged devotion to diversity, has become more and more socioeconomically segregated. Neighborhoods and communities have famously sorted into more and more homogenous sociological clusters. Churches have largely withered as community-making institutions. Leisure is more private or sorted much of the time—if it mixes people from multiple backgrounds and sensibilities, it’s an evanescent, temporary thing like going to an amusement park.
Going physically to work and being in an office, in contrast, is—or has been until 2020—the main remaining place that we run into people that we didn’t know before and get to know them better. Even very stable workplaces where employees are around for a long time (an increasing rarity) have new people joining with some frequency.
Famously, of course, some of the people you get to know through work are people you’d never socialize with voluntarily. When I was a temp in graduate school, I got assigned to one of three or four offices with long-term assignments, and I had basically friendly working relationships with all the people in the offices I got sent to. They were people I am certain I would never have met otherwise. The one couple I kind of liked well enough to invite over to dinner I liked a lot less when I saw the husband scream at his toddler in a borderline-abusive way.
But even then, that’s what getting to know strangers is all about: you discover the contingencies of life in our world. The differences that parents or family can make (good and bad), the challenges that people overcome or are destroyed by, the range of temperamental variations and the ways in which people control (or fail to control) themselves, the aspirational variety of people. The histories which burst out of some people and the histories that are smothered or are hidden inside of others. You find out what you can like and what you can emulate. You discover what you can love, what you can hate, and what you can forgive.
The workplace isn’t the best site for the remixing of our social worlds: it puts real constraints on what can happen as a result. Communities and friendships and alliances get broken, misdirected, exploited. Workplace hierarchies put tangible precarity into every moment that people are crossing socioeconomic boundaries during a day’s labor. But if it’s all we have left in an era where public goods have been substantially diminished and inequality has infiltrated every other way that we might meet one another and go from being strangers to acquaintances, then we need to hold on to what we have and try to build new kinds of social mixing and connections. We’re not going to be able to do that if most of us end up permanently in our own homes staring into laptop cameras.
Image credit: Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
Having just read vol 1 of Capital again, I kept thinking “generation of surplus value” throughout this one. You pay for connectivity? Surplus value. You buy the ergonomic chair? Surplus value. You use your own computer equipment? …