This is a great book review looking deeper into the obsession with work and work resisters.
In its place was a somewhat nightmarish and dystopian warning call. The movie depicted the troubling apotheosis of capitalism. Jiro was dedicated to his craft but at what cost? He worked closely with his two sons, but there was virtually no representation of family or home life in the film. He only became close to them when they started to work for him, and after denying them a university education. Jiro’s wife is never mentioned; we get a fleeting glimpse of her in an old photograph. Jiro’s older son clearly wishes to take over the family restaurant, but his father refuses to retire. A trip to the fish market revels in the extractive horrors of capitalism. The sellers lament the low quantity and quality of fish on sale, a crisis being precipitated by the overfishing that supplies the rising demand for sushi. An old man at the market complains of being tired and worn out. He longs to retire. Why can’t he? We are never told. The colonizing and soul-crushing powers of work were suddenly brought into sharp relief.
What is noticeable about the experiences of the workers that Terkel interviewed is the extent to which they say that their work is dehumanizing. The worker is not treated as person; they are treated as a cog in a machine.
… in the modern economy we are never released from the demands of work. The leisure time we have is not truly leisure time. It is recovery time: a brief interlude between periods of intense and high-commitment work when we have little energy for anything that could truly express our personalities. What’s more, modern technologies and 24-hour markets mean that we are always ‘on call’, answering emails late into the evenings, awaiting the summons back to the office to deal with some pressing crisis. This is compounded by the constant pressure of employability. Every worker has to take responsibility for their own employment prospects at a time when work is becoming more precarious and uncertain. Gone are the solid, dependable middle-class ‘jobs for life’; in their stead are the ‘gig economy’ and its associated nation of freelancers. People have to constantly improve their job ‘prospects by training, acquiring educational credentials, networking, learning how to project the right kind of personality, and gaining life experiences that match up with the values sought by employers’
Why is there such an unrelenting emphasis on employability? One reason is the widespread conviction that work is virtuous, a key component of the work dogma that elites have used to police and shame the poor.
They are viewed by the rest of society as parasites or as somehow incomplete (‘half a person’ according to one of the interviewees). They live in constant dread of the perennial dinner party question: what do you do? This causes them to seek out like-minded souls through the internet — a community of kindred spirits who make them feel more welcome.
They are viewed by the rest of society as parasites or as somehow incomplete (‘half a person’ according to one of the interviewees). They live in constant dread of the perennial dinner party question: what do you do? This causes them to seek out like-minded souls through the internet — a community of kindred spirits who make them feel more welcome.