O’Connor adopts a “show, don’t tell” approach to debunking some of our society’s most banal and unhelpful narratives about technology and work — among them the idea that AI will “free up” cognitive load and enable people to take on more creative and satisfying tasks and enjoy more leisure. Through nine lively chapters organised into sections on the “mind,” “body” and “soul,” she introduces us to many different kinds of people who work with, around and under highly automated and AI-infused systems, including coders, translators, drivers, warehouse workers, miners and screenwriters.

What emerges is not a ledger of winners and losers but a set of skilfully drawn portraits of power, self-awareness, hard choices and collective contestation. None of O’Connor’s informants is beguiled by grand narratives of human liberation, and none seems to accept at face value the idea that AI is “just a tool.” For O’Connor and many of her interviewees, the question of whether any particular job is robotised always co-exists with the question of whether and how human beings are being made more robot-like when they are forced to work in highly automated systems.

Where things stand within any particular occupation is, O’Connor observes, often detectable from the words people choose they use to talk about their jobs:

“We send him away, then we send him back,” the miner had said about the autonomous truck. Compare that to what the Amazon workers said: “The robot is moving and you have to move with the robot.” Or, indeed, compare it to what Rebecca, the translator, had said: “You still have to be quite fastidious in receiving all this machine translation output, and that’s exhausting, it’s stressful.” All of which is to say, sure, technology might be “just a tool,” but if you’re not the one with the tool in your hand, you’re not the master carpenter, you’re the screwdriver, or, worse, you’re what’s getting screwed.

One of the real strengths of We Are Not Machines is O’Connor’s deftness in showing how AI is, and isn’t, the latest act in a centuries-long drama of worker alienation in response to industrial capitalism. The varieties of anxiety, danger, resentment, acceptance, exit and resistance she chronicles are never detached from the history of capitalism and its critics. In describing the risks of machine users becoming machine-like, for instance, she quotes Ruskin: “It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men — divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life.”

The hypermodern Amazon warehouses that bring the shelf to the worker (rather than the other way around) — and rely on a remote global workforce of “humans in the loop” to oversee mistakes — can be seen, she says, as a new iteration of Henry Ford’s moving assembly line. Appropriately enough, the American engineer F.W. Taylor plays a recurrent role as the architect of the most notorious system for using “time and task” techniques to deskill and speed up workers.

But O’Connor hasn’t written another weary “it’s capitalism, stupid” narrative. This is largely because she has a finely tuned ear for workers’ descriptions of the ways AI-infused systems shape their inner lives at work.

She tells us, for instance, about the silent mantra that Affan, a human “GO-AI Associate” for Amazon in Costa Rica, recites while watching videos of people putting items onto canvas shelves in nine-hour shifts. Faced with a 99.9 per cent accuracy rate requirement and the need to watch approximately 1200 ten-second videos a shift, Affan’s time before the screen is accompanied by the prayer, “Please God, save me from a defect, please God, save me from a defect.”

Poignantly evocative, too, are her presentations of translators’ lives and perceptions before, during and after the imposition of AI-based software. The creativity and sense of meaningfulness of translating from scratch shines through one translator’s explanation of the process:

[Y]ou take a message, a part of the message… then you render it in the other language, mostly through the equivalence of expression, the equivalence of feeling. “If I was thinking this, how would I say it?” That becomes automatic — it feels almost automatic. Sometimes you get stuck [but] if I am hitting the flow, then it feels fantastic.

Having to edit a machine translation, however, is “a bulkier process in your mind,” says Majkic, “it’s less rewarding, it takes more cognitive effort, not less.” In the words of another translator, Petr:

When someone presents you with a solution, and you’re looking at that, and you’re supposed to make it sound natural. It’s difficult to come up with your own solution… I compare this to counting from one to a hundred: one, two, three four — with someone whispering in your ear some random numbers. Imagine that. It’s so frustrating. That, to me, is what machine translation post-editing feels like.

O’Connor doesn’t present the degradation of translation work as something afflicting only the translators, either. End-users of the work — the readers and watchers of the films and TV series being translated — receive more literal translations that might be comprehensible but are also “flat and boring and uninteresting.” The loss here isn’t merely of “quality,” it is also of people’s capacity to recognise what “quality” is or be aware that any alternative might be possible in a market flooded with “good enough” products.

Noting that this, too, isn’t a new dynamic, O’Connor quotes George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier: “Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to the demand or machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.”

O’Connor’s main example of a group of workers for whom the “AI is just a tool” maxim seems plausibly true is software engineers. Most of them view AI tools as a welcome addition to their workflow because they don’t see them as affecting the part of their job they really value, which is problem solving rather than simply writing code. Nor were AI tools forced on this group: because they wield relatively great labour market power, they retain control over whether and how to use them.

But they are very far from representative. For creatives, educators and carers, the application of productivity and efficiency values — even before they were expressed in AI form — seems like a category error in any attempt to grasp the purpose and value of their work. O’Connor depicts the sense of violation felt by artists, for instance, who see the idea of AI as simply a “tool” as profoundly misconceived. For them, it is “far more like an end-results machine than a new kind of paintbrush.” As the historian Lewis Mumford once explained, “the purpose of art has never been labour-saving but labour-loving, a deliberate elaboration of function, form, and symbolic ornament to enhance the interest of life itself.”

In care work, too, technology-reliant approaches provide new iterations of old ways of missing the point. Debates about AI-infused care robots are a distraction unless they recognise what is lost or degraded when we attempt to organise something inherently and profoundly relational (beautifully elaborated by sociologist Allison Pugh as “connective labour”) as if it were an industrial commodity to be produced via principles of scientific management.

The Buurtzorg nurses O’Connor interviewed (who have a high level of worker autonomy, are geographically embedded, and deliver client-centred, defragmented care) were aghast at the idea that performing “simple tasks” was a “waste” of their training. “You are not only there for that simple task, you are there to see the people, to see the life, to see what you are dealing with,” said one. “You can’t take care of someone who doesn’t trust you, because they won’t tell you the whole story, because sometimes they think it’s not important, but even the little signals can be something that’s really wrong.”

O’Connor doesn’t merely observe the multiple clashes between the AI-enabled Taylorism and the values that hold us together as human beings with bodies, minds and souls. She also delves into the structures of power that make contestation over those matters meaningful.

One of her key case studies describes underground miners in Sweden who don’t evince categorical hostility to digital technology and automation, and show openness, creativity and collaboration in how such systems might be integrated into their work. She describes how the agreement they reached about self-driving underground trucks and loaders reflected genuine give-and-take: how worker concerns that digital surveillance systems would drift from safety mechanisms into forms of discipline and speeding-up were worked through to the parties’ mutual satisfaction.

In that case, says O’Connor, the understanding and compromise on display rested on “a very human edifice: a system based on relationships of trust, underpinned by a careful balance of power. It struck me that it required a great deal of skill, effort and emotional intelligence to maintain it.” It was a system underpinned by collective bargaining not only at enterprise-level but also nationally, sectorally and locally. Employers and unions (the latter with 70 per cent membership density) were able to reach sector-specific agreements lasting one to three years within a system that, by its nature, is more responsive than one-size-fits-all laws imposed sporadically in the face of powerful political resistance.

Integral to the Swedish miners’ approach is a reliable and comprehensive welfare safety net that provides 80 per cent of pre-employment earnings to displaced workers. Through this lens, whether you see AI as a “tool” is not a matter of individual preference or psychological flexibility but intimately related to institutional arrangements that reflect collective workplace power.

The nature of industrial power is also critical in O’Connor’s account of the Writers Guild of America’s agreement with film and TV producers that set the conditions for writers to control when AI is used. The new contract didn’t ban the technology, but it did remove the economic incentive for companies to use it to displace writers by specifying that AI content could not be classified as “source material” merely to be “revised” for lower rates.

The agreement wasn’t merely the product of enlightened and flexible thinking on both sides. It emerged from an industrial relations framework that supported sector-based contracts and permitted industrial action, in this case a 148-day strike in which writers were supported by actors and support from Teamsters and United Auto Workers. As well as generating countervailing power, the process ensured the issue wasn’t metabolised by workers as a private source of shame, lack of training or bad choices. By making the issue public and visible, says O’Connor, workers felt “as if the wider public was also on their side.”

We Are Not Machines concludes with persuasive observations about the importance of attending carefully to how we talk, and therefore think, about work and technology. It is impossible to disagree with O’Connor’s observation that “wave,” “tsunami” and other metaphors “encourage us to see this process as analogous to a powerful force of nature — something that cannot be controlled, but can only be prepared for, and then mopped up after.” As she says, “new technology doesn’t just unfold. It never has. It is created by people and implemented by people.”

Nor, she argues, should we accept the thin, desiccated view of humanity that makes up Silicon Valley’s view of progress: the idea that we are merely slower, stupider, weaker and more biased versions of the machines. Anyone who doubts her point — and in fact everyone that doesn’t — should urgently read the Papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.

O’Connor writes brilliantly, too, about the importance of not feeling boxed in when we ask difficult and complicated questions about where AI belongs and how it should operate:

To say you don’t want AI to clone musicians does not also mean you don’t want protein-folding, antibiotics, low child mortality rates or indoor plumbing. That is a ludicrous mental box to put oneself into. And people don’t do it with any other kind of produce. If you think heroin is bad, you don’t worry that people will think you are also against paracetamol.

O’Connor guides us, instead, to some better starting questions. She cites Neil Postman who suggested in his 1992 book Technopoly that we ask: “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution? And whose problem is it?” To Postman’s questions, O’Connor adds another, “Are there any other ways to solve the problem?” To these, I would perhaps suggest one more that emerges from her account: what structures are we building to enable answers to these questions to be meaningfully debated rather than simply imposed?

O’Connor is to be applauded for insisting we centre human agency when we talk about how AI is designed and introduced into workplaces, that we always ask who decides. The next step in the analysis — and one beyond the scope of her book — is to ask why we so often accept the formations of industrial power and corporate power inherited from the last century as “givens,” as if they are features of the natural landscape (“Norway has mountains,” “Australia is flat”) rather than as structures we have built and can choose to maintain or change.

If we know Taylorism is deeply corrosive to the forms of trust and relationality that are critical to care, for example, why do we increasingly choose to provide care via private equity companies, the institutional vehicles perhaps least capable of reversing disastrous low-trust, high-fragmentation “time and task”-based approaches? Why do we persist with collective bargaining structures that (with narrow and highly conditional exceptions) confine collective worker voices to the enterprise level and narrow range of “permitted matters”? These institutional structures were built in the time before AI, and whether and how we continue to use them is up to us. •

The post What are we building? appeared first on Inside Story.

Lots of people have been debating that question — so many, that anyone who poses quite different questions about work and technology runs the risk of sounding out of touch. Try to defend “the human” as a general category of importance and you risk being labelled ignorant, fearful, romantic or nostalgic about life in inefficient, hierarchical, analogue societies. Express concern about the accumulations of unaccountable power in a digitised-everything world — the surveillance, the exclusion, the environmental destruction, the damaged bodies and minds of workers who must make and maintain the machines — and you can sound like a modern Jeremiah, perpetually wracked by lamentation over a fallen world. My own rule is that if I find myself mentioning Black Mirror it’s time to stop talking and go and do something else.

Allison Pugh’s masterful new book, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World, will be read with gratitude and relief by anyone who has participated in conversations of this kind. Pugh does not, like James Bridle, try to narrate what is lost, or might be lost, from a world of work without us. Nor does she proclaim a new age of social organisation, like Yanis Varoufakis. The Last Human Job is not a manifesto for collectively transforming society through automation, or a text on how we might make things a bit better. Pugh’s contribution is to give a name to something that we all already know, connective labour, and to carefully explain what happens to society when it is eroded or attacked.

Connective labour is Pugh’s term for the work of “seeing” the other and reflecting that understanding back to them. It is an inherently human activity that can’t be automated and is highly resistant to systematisation. It has five dimensions: using the body as an instrument of connection; reading and deploying emotions; collaborating; managing spontaneity; and making (and reacting to) mistakes. All of these things rely on human expertise, spontaneous judgement and vulnerability.

Connective labour is not (just) about “greasing the wheels of productivity.” It is, rather, something integral to workers’ self-concept and sense of belonging. It transforms both the person performing the labour and the person on the receiving end. It shapes how both parties experience themselves as human.

Various phrases have been used by feminist and other scholars over the decades to describe patterns of human attentiveness similar to the idea of connective labour. Terms like soft skills, caring work, empathy, emotional intelligence and invisible skills are all commonplace, and are frequently used in the same breath as the word “undervalued.”

The case for introducing connective labour as a new term that touches on, but transcends, all of these is a compelling one. Connective labour isn’t just an individual practice or attribute; it is a kind of social architecture. According to Pugh, connective labour practices accumulate and create the “connective tissue” of society. The connective labour idea makes clear that, whether we acknowledge it or not, all the decisions we make about whether and how to standardise working practices are also decisions about how deep, dense and flexible we want the connective tissue of society to be.

The evidentiary foundations for her argument are rich, expansive (including five years’ fieldwork) and deftly conveyed. Although the main empirical attention of The Last Human Job is on therapy, teaching, medicine, nursing, the clergy, community organising, hairdressing and various caregiving occupations, Pugh makes clear that connective labour is also central to many jobs not directly concerned with well-being.

Consultants, lobbyists and salespersons engage in connective labour for the purpose of persuasion; prison guards, spies and detectives use it as part of an apparatus of control. Connective labour involves knowing and reflecting human thoughts and desires. “But it does not,” she notes, “always involve holding that knowledge tenderly.”

The concept of connective labour is sinewy. It binds acts of judgement, speech and action across domains of work that are often discussed in isolation. As one of her interviewees observed,

“How do you know when it’s the right time to intervene when your kids are having a fight with another kid? You know, how do you know when the right moment is? How do you know when to say goodbye for the last time when someone’s dying? I mean, it’s in here. (She gestured to her heart) It’s in here.”

Elegy and bathos infuse many of her tales. We see workers caught agonisingly between the imperative to be present for clients in their moments of most profound need and the pressure to participate in Cartesian systems that aim to regularise and abstract those very moments into repeatable processes. We learn of a hospital chaplain who carries around a “cheat sheet” for coding the spiritual concerns of the dying (options include “unready for death”; “has tasks they must complete before they are ready to die”; fears “abandonment” or “punishment”). We see him present in the last hours of people’s lives, holding their hands, praying, hugging them and singing with them. We follow him as he fulfills his job requirement to “log” the “units of service” he provided in triplicate through the hospital system, a system that is not only dispiriting but Sisyphus-like in its pointlessness since the hospital doesn’t bill anyone for those units.

Even more concerning, perhaps, are the instances Pugh describes where connective labour has not simply been neglected but is actively undermined by design. We learn of an experimental school in the San Francisco’s Bay Area, for instance, organised around the idea that teachers should deliberately and comprehensively be decentred from the learning process in favour of machines. Children are provided with customised lessons from apps in tandem with non-professional “advisers” whose task is to generally mentor and coach students without teaching them any substantive content.

On this model, “care” and “attention” are consciously decoupled from the craft of teaching, enabling “enhanced” “personalisation” of lessons via apps and a palpably lower wage bill that need only cover less-credentialled and more replaceable “mentors.” Pugh observes how the system plays out for children:

An irrepressible little redheaded boy, looking about six years old, seemed to want to interact with others about whatever he was learning. He kept looking up from his screen to try to catch the eyes of kids around him, while they bent their heads to their own tasks. One time he called out, “What’s five minus two? Three right?” Nobody replied. Later, apparently finishing a problem, he exclaimed “yes!” and pumped his arm in triumph, looking quickly around to see who had heard him. Again it looked as if no one had, except me.

Pugh’s book is not a reflexive kick at standardisation in all contexts, or of automation per se. She and her subjects recognise that systems created to standardise work can and have contributed to reducing discrimination and incompetence and increasing efficiency and coordination. Nor does she romanticise public institutions as sanctuaries for connective labour: the need to fit work into austerity budgets can desiccate connective labour just as effectively as the profit motive can corrode it in private workplaces.

The Last Human Job is not a simple morality tale against digital technology, either, since it is clear that the older technologies of manuals, checklists and standardised forms, dating back more than a century to the introduction of Taylorism itself, are primary destroyers of connective labour. Indeed, a strength of Pugh’s book is that she shows how connective labour is frequently ground down by a one–two punch, the “old” methods of scientific management and work intensification coming first and then replaced by digital apps and AI justified as necessary improvements to human systems that are so evidently failing to cope.

The enemy of connective labour, then, is the mindless application of industrial logic, with its relentless drive to grind down the inherently personal dimensions of human relationships into tasks that are amenable to being measured, standardised, predicted and efficiently reproduced. At its core, Pugh’s thesis stands in a long line of critiques of Taylorism beginning with Simone Weil and her observation of the highly destructive impact of systems of standardisation on workers’ capacity to think, connect with other people and make meaning from their toil.

Pugh’s account is, however, highly dynamic and attuned to the contours of twenty-first-century America. In the words of a healthcare worker whose hospital was managed by people who (literally) viewed The Toyota Way as a corporate bible, “They use the analogy of trains, where we come at a certain time and we leave at a certain time. The goal isn’t about care. The goal is about discharged date and how do we meet that discharged date, so the goal is discharge, and to discharge them before noon.”

Silicon Valley is clearly not playing a benign role in all this. IT engineers are depicted as incessantly attempting to automate connective labour based on a well-meaning or wilfully blind misunderstanding of what it is and what is at stake when it is lost. Pugh carefully dissects the most common Big Tech arguments for automating connective labour, from “it’s better than nothing” to “it’s better than humans” to “we are better together.”

The endless promise that automation will “free up” people from “mundane tasks” and give them more time for “meaningful work” is rightly met by questions about who is going to be “freed up” and what kinds of work count as “meaningful” (and who decides?).

Pugh also lays bare the profound conservatism of “better than nothing” arguments for automated connection. True, many low-income patients told one survey they liked being helped with hospital discharge by a “virtual nurse” (an animated figure on a screen with a mechanised voice, programmed to ask them about their favourite baseball team before outlining the clinical steps they must follow). It is easy to understand why. A virtual nurse can explain procedures as many times as necessary, and that can be preferable to interacting with someone in a constant rush.

To accept this state of affairs as desirable, however, is to accept that relational services are a kind of luxury good. It implies that we will never have a society in which a discharge nurse has the time to help a low-income patient leave hospital in a way that is not rushed. It accepts a terrible status quo that entitles the rich to be seen by human beings and forces the poor to endure services that are scripted, sped up, surveilled or unavailable.

Arguments that automated service is “better than humans” are premised on a split between services on the one hand and relationships and emotions on the other, with the value of the latter being to grease the wheels of the former. Whether as replacement or augmentation for human beings (the “better together” argument), such conceptions fundamentally misunderstand connective labour. They fail to grasp that a machine, regardless of the level of “personalisation” it can display, can’t offer the experience of being seen by another human being. The very things that make human encounters challenging — the possibility of shame, vulnerability, judgement — are precisely the things that make them valuable.

Connective labour is highly unevenly distributed in American society, a point Pugh vividly illustrates with the career arc of physician Ruthie Carlson. Ruthie, who decided to become a doctor to serve society, began her career working in the public system in Alaska, where she was able to forge deep connections with communities and knew all of her clients face to face. But inadequate resourcing ran her ragged. She was “always on,” her clients were needy, doctors were too few, and she felt utterly depleted.

A corporate setting offered more practitioners, more resources, less privation and less of an expectation (and opportunity) to develop personal relationships with her patients. Efficiency was a major focus in this setting. Ruthie’s clients were consumer-oriented and she had little sense of solidarity or community with other physicians. Despite being better resourced, she was an unappreciated “cog in a wheel,” still under time pressure without the chance to connect with either patients or colleagues.

In her current work setting, providing individual services to the highly privileged clients within a “concierge medicine” framework, Ruthie is finally able to prioritise relationships. She has the time to do her job properly, isn’t overwhelmed by clients, and is well compensated. But although this set-up helps her use her professional skills as a physician with individual patients, it doesn’t support her wider vocation to “serve the unserved.” Alongside other “lifestyle professionals” — personal investment advisers, chefs, fitness instructors — she is devoting her skills to a tiny elite of hyper-privileged people on an exclusive basis.

Connective labour hasn’t been crushed across the board. But it is exploited, expanded or squeezed in different ways in different employment settings, each of them unfair and enraging in different ways.

The Last Human Job is fascinating, urgent and beautifully written. Its finest passages merit a place alongside Arlie Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self, Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character and other classic works of sociology. In its rich weaving of tales that could only have been gleaned by an exceptionally good listener capable of making her interviewees realise why their experiences and reflections matter, it is a monument to the author’s own practices of connective labour.

The book’s thesis will be instantly recognisable to anyone working in an education, care, health, social or spiritual-support setting, as well as anyone who has used any of these services as a citizen or customer. But it is not those on the frontline who should most urgently read it, but rather the people responsible for designing and shaping the systems through which such work is performed: the legislators, executives, managers, university vice-chancellors and administrative decision-makers of all kinds.

The Last Human Job doesn’t try to explain why connective labour came to be so poorly valued. Nor does it offer a detailed prescription for turning around current trends. Unions, the entities that have historically been the primary mechanism for enabling employees to work according to the norms of their occupational communities, are barely mentioned. Nor does Pugh attempt to engage much with the law or the legal strategies of workers, such as the initiatives underway in Australia to increase the wages of employees in aged care and other caring occupations by virtue of the centrality of historically undervalued “invisible” skills to their performance.

Pugh’s contribution, however, is immense, and it isn’t hard, after reading her, to see how different our current “future of work” discourse would be if we took the idea of connective labour seriously. In place of wordless films documenting the technological sublime, our stories of future work would be lively. In place of silence would be noisy tales of human drama, as workers spoke of the craft and skill required to teach, heal or care for people, while hearing them, in conditions of uncertainty and risk. We would stop asking children if they were “ready” for a dystopian world in which their only guaranteed adult role is that of a consumer and invite them instead to imagine how they will contribute to the irrevocably human business of listening, reflecting and being heard.

We might conjure, then, a “future of work” far less violently severed from the past. There will be some robots, certainly, but there will also be familiar rhythms of struggle over work’s meaning, conditions and purpose. •

The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World
By Allison Pugh | Princeton University Press | $49.99 | 384 pages

The post A kind of social architecture appeared first on Inside Story.

An unnamed emergency doctor, fuelled by the desire to staunch suffering, worked long days in Afghanistan for six months treating patients with horrific injuries. It was not this experience, however, that led her to quit, but rather her time working in an emergency room of a community hospital on her return to America, where her days felt like a meaningless cycle of “rinse and repeat.”

How are we to make sense of the strange alchemy by which modern workplaces convert some workers’ enthusiasm, commitment and confidence into cynicism, withdrawal and depletion? In their new book The Burnout Challenge, organisational psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter offer two contentions about understanding and tackling these quiet workplace tragedies.

The first is a riff on the historical practice of putting canaries into coalmines to detect toxic air that could kill miners. “Let’s say our hope was to keep more birds singing in the mines. What would be our best approach? Should we try fixing the canary to make it stronger and more resilient — a tough old bird that could take whatever conditions it faced? Or should we fix the mine, clearing the toxic fumes and doing whatever else necessary to make it safe for canaries (and miners) to do their work?”

The second is the claim that an “increasing mismatch between workers and workplaces” is the cause of burnout, and that the mismatch takes six forms: work overload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, breakdown of community, absence of fairness, and values conflicts. The self-described “burnout shops” of Silicon Valley are archetypal mismatched workplaces, the authors say: employers brazenly boast of having an “always on” work culture, and workloads are so obviously unsustainable that a job in a startup is only feasible for a few years.

How or why this particular chamber of the “mine” got so toxic for its canaries, though, or its relationship to the other kinds of workplaces that make up the mine, is not something the authors attempt to explain. Befitting experts who have made major professional contributions in the form of taxonomies and systems for data collection (Maslach was the creator of the “Maslach Burnout Inventory,” Leiter the “Areas of Work Life Survey”), The Burnout Challenge takes a highly schematised approach in guiding managers to incrementally improve levels of worker efficiency, health and happiness in their workplace.

It turns out that decades of peer-reviewed research shows “receiving good vibes or compliments” to be “an uplifting experience” and that involving staff in rostering decisions can increase their sense of control. Evidence also backs the idea that “there should be sensible limits on work hours and a focus on how employees will complete tasks within that time rather than be forced to donate personal or sleep hours to finish their work.” It is particularly dispiriting for employees to have an overfilled plate of tasks when those tasks are lower than their capability level. The blunt assumption that “people deliver under pressure” is wrong.

Many employers could genuinely benefit from reading this advice, and not all of them are quiet admirers of the rise-and-grind, move-fast-and-break-things management philosophy of Silicon Valley. Maslach and Leiter provide lots of neatly enumerated lists illustrated by breezy narrative vignettes and even simpler graphics (the section on “insufficient rewards” gets a thumbs-down emoji; the chapter on “values conflicts” shows a broken heart lying in a pool of blood). If you find ticking off a to-do list an appealing mechanism for keeping the complexity of the world at bay, you may find all of this soothing.

Readers drawn to thinking about the deeper causes of burnout may be struck by how eye-wateringly obvious and familiar these statements are. Since F.W. Taylor popularised “hard” scientific management in the early twentieth century, observers have noted the self-defeating and demoralising consequences of attempting to wrest maximum value from employees.

Elton Mayo’s book The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, for instance, published in 1933, included chapters on fatigue, monotony and morale, all themes taken up by Maslach and Leiter. Like them, Mayo urged managers to view employment in relational terms. What workers required was recognition, community and respect.

Rather than asking ourselves what is wrong with this kind of advice, we may be better off considering why, ninety years on, books on these themes are still in demand. A simple response might be that, like the wisdom of a kindergarten teacher, basic lessons in how to behave well at work are always relevant and it never hurts to have them repeated: listen carefully, don’t demand impossible things, practise give and take, don’t steal, apologise when you make a mistake, and it is not okay to threaten people to get what you want.

Another, less rosy answer is that books of this kind not only are easy-to-read digests of academic research but also reinforce the longstanding idea that burnout is a consequence of inadequate managerial technique rather than inadequate worker power.

For their work to resonate with their time’s commonsense ideas of wellbeing, every generation of scholars in the human relations school has to tackle their task in a slightly different way. In Mayo’s day, employers were invited to understand themselves as grappling with “problems of human equilibrium,” “social disorganisation” and anomie. Today, Maslach and Leiter suggest, employers play a six-dimensional game of workplace matching with employees, a framing of the problem that resonates well with what theorists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello dubbed the new spirit of capitalism — the emphasis on individual autonomy, initiative, intimacy, pleasure and creative expression that has prevailed for the last four decades.

The mismatch metaphor diverts attention away from the structural determinants of power and towards the agency of individual workers and their managers. Other actors — trade unions and the governments that set the terms of workplace relations — are relegated to the background.

The idea that tackling the burnout “challenge” involves aligning two puzzle pieces also invites us to assume that the parties negotiate with roughly equal bargaining power, and that if a match is not found either party may walk away in search of another, better match. If we view this drama as a mutual desire for a satisfying “click,” we are less likely to notice that the employer’s puzzle piece is usually made of unyielding metal while the employee’s is more often soft and pliable or, worse, brittle and prone to shatter.

Maslach and Leiter don’t wholly ignore unions. They credit the Australian stonemasons for establishing the norm of an eight-hour working day in 1856. But they don’t acknowledge unions as manifestations of the “beneficial social communities” they praise in other contexts. The Burnout Challenge does mention union-like formations on several occasions, but using terms like “cuddle huddle” and “social pod” that implicitly distinguish these “good,” “customised” forms of collectivity from “bad” ones that come “off the shelf.”

Digital technologies also make an appearance in The Burnout Challenge, but primarily as carriers of additional workload. Maslach and Leiter declare that “technology must be managed — and managing it means balancing on and off time.” This perspective ignores the vast potential of digital technology for workplace surveillance. Numerous observers have noted, for instance, that Amazon’s use of technology to monitor employees’ work rates is related to the dangerous intensification of work at the company. In the gig economy, of course, work may be coordinated and managed at scale in the absence of an employment relationship.

Nor do the authors touch on the digital dynamics quietly eroding anti-discrimination law, labour law, anti-trust law and privacy law through what legal scholars Richard Bales and Katherine Stone call “the invisible web at work.”

Maslach and Leiter coyly allude to the relationship between insecure employment and burnout in a discussion of “tentative relationships,” noting that workers may experience “anxious feelings about disposability” and that “it is difficult to exercise control in a relationship without confidence that the relationship will continue.” The logical extension of such observations — that it might be wise for managers to offer secure employment as a burnout-prevention measure — goes unstated.

In airbrushing power from the narrative, The Burnout Challenge also diminishes employer powerlessness, even though recognising the limits of what managers can do is surely crucial to understanding the phenomenon and its solutions.

Many of the “values mismatches” the writers refer to are the product of institutional frameworks over which employers exercise little control. Consider, for instance, the clash between market-based mechanisms and professional–client obligations in care work and other highly “emotionally connective” jobs. As sociologist Allison J. Pugh has brilliantly observed, a panoply of workers — therapists, teachers, doctors, carers and more — need to be present and receptive, and bear witness, to the emotional truths of others.

Such acts of recognition are inherently particular, and often experienced as among the more meaningful aspects of work. They are also, thanks to New Public Management approaches, subject to massive pressures from rationalisation, standardisation and accountability, via manuals, checklists, scripts, templates and digital platforms, and are organised within “regimes of scarcity.”

A generation of research has observed that psychosocial injury is linked with high quantitative demands, insecure work conditions, compromised skill development, low control of work tasks, and market-based systems. These conditions are not unfortunate accidents; they are the inevitable concomitants of treating care work as a commodity to be delivered “just in time.”

Such dynamics are very difficult to grasp when burnout is framed as a workplace-level issue, as Maslach and Leiter do when they recount what happened after the takeover of a rural hospital by a private health organisation. Following a “values clarification process” of town hall meetings, focus groups and unit-level discussions, a new hybrid values system emerged, with neither hospital nor new owner “winning.”

The authors suggest that managers struggling with similar values clashes should consider the parable of the janitor at NASA who, in 1961, encountered president John F. Kennedy. When the president asked why he was working so late mopping floors, he responded, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon!” Maslach and Leiter distil a set of “sense-giving” steps for managers from this tale: “narrow the focus on one goal; shift from an abstract description of the goal to a concrete one; set up clear milestones to the goal; give life to the idea by using persuasive language and rhetorical techniques.”

A radical indifference to context is apparent here. Not only does cold war–style talk of national purpose no longer apply, but a cleaner would now, more likely than not, be an outsourced worker with an entirely different manager from the “core” workforce to whom the “purpose talk” applied.

The assumption that healthcare is, in essence, similar to putting a man on the moon is also highly questionable. It would only be exaggerating slightly to suggest that true burnout-minimising leadership in a care context involves flipping each of the proposed “sense-giving” steps on its head: encourage employees to widen the focus from the goal to the person; embrace the abstract and expansive goal of hearing someone; reassure employees that work of this kind is not linear and that hearing someone’s needs in a meaningful way takes time; recognise the overwhelming significance of employees having the security, time, skills and trust to form relationships.

It is unsurprising, perhaps, that The Burnout Challenge also has little to say about how the stories that live in our heads and in our culture contribute to burnout. Maslach and Leiter offer scant recognition of how the idea of “passionate work” saturates our culture to the extent that it forms an “interpretative schema” for the world, long before any individual crosses the threshold of a particular workplace.

Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, communications researcher Renyi Hong has argued that passion is now a “standard post-Fordist affect.” The idea of “passionate work” fosters a sense of an ideal capitalist self: well managed, resilient and capable of coping with economic fluctuations and precarity. It is an argument that resonates closely with Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism: relationships made available at work under capitalism offer themselves as objects of desire while also representing profound obstacles to flourishing. The relevance of both ideas to employee burnout is obvious.

As a concept, “burnout” need not be bereft of political potency. It can invite critical thinking about limits, energy and reproduction, and help reframe the “non-productive” as crucial and valued. It can question the logic that intensity is inherently good. In the climate change era, these questions are excellent ones to be asking, both of ourselves as individuals and of societies as a whole.

A politics built on the refusal to be “burned out” recalls the insistence that labour is not a commodity and invites its extension to other things — such as rivers, skies, forests and all the ecosystems of which they are part — that we should not readily accept as simply raw materials for production. It asks that we consider how we will revalue and protect all of the human spaces founded on non-capitalist values — families, schools, welfare states, unions and Indigenous communities, to name a few. It would be a politics, in other words, built on deliberate and defiant mismatches.

The Burnout Challenge, needless to say, is not concerned with such a politics. While its authors may have rejected the project of turning the canary in the coalmine into a “tough old bird” capable of enduring toxicity, their book doesn’t do much to analyse or adjust the underlying sources of the mine chamber’s fumes. Much less do they consider inviting the bird to participate in the endeavour.

Maslach and Leiter offer modest and practical suggestions that may help some bad workplaces become less bad. But the bird they construct as their object of concern is a lonely and flighty one, primed to glide into the next chamber in search of better air, sustained by the hope that their “match” is just around the corner. •

The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs
By Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter | Harvard University Press | $51.95 | 272 pages

The post On not burning out appeared first on Inside Story.

I don’t remember the name of the documentary we watched, or even the teacher who showed it to us, beyond his spectacular moustache and fondness for lessons on “bush survival skills.” But I will never forget the graph I saw on the screen that day: a lime-green line, superimposed across an image of the earth, charting the rise of global surface temperatures since 1960. The line went up and steadily up, fading into ominous red as it approached the 1980s. There was no violent up-tick at the end, like the “hockey-stick graph” that would feature in An Inconvenient Truth seventeen years later. Nor did the line end in the splayed fingers of alternative “shared socioeconomic pathways” like the graph in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report twenty-eight years later. It nevertheless made a deep impression on me.

It was clear, from that line, that we were all going to have to do something, very urgently, to get it to go back down again.

With an imagination fertilised by stories of Vietnam war protests, the Australian kids TV show Secret Valley (in which plucky BMX-riding teenagers in a koala-filled valley stood battle with greedy real estate developers week on week), and the slogan “think global and act local,” I did the thing that was obvious for a child to do in 1989. I started a group within the school with a grandiose name. We were known as “PEACE,” an acronym for People for the Environment and Conservation Everywhere, and we had an immediate, concrete objective: the elimination of the non-recyclable polystyrene cups used in the school canteen to serve out chicken soup at lunchtime.

Tales such as these tend to follow a familiar narrative arc, one that traces a political awakening through the experience of coming together to make demands, and builds to the realisation of the immense power we realised we had to speak truth to power more generally. First the polystyrene cups, and then the world.

But that is not what happened. Instead, the school principal asked gently how else we proposed to keep the drinks hot and safe, we said we didn’t know, and “PEACE” dissolved soon after, our short- and long-term aims unmet. My nascent environmental consciousness was channelled elsewhere, into checking hairspray cans for CFCs and applying sunscreen and wearing broad-brimmed hats with renewed authority and vigour.

But this is not a simple tale of dissipated personal resolve. I did not lose interest in the global temperature line. Rather, I did what I was socialised to do. I “grew up.”

In 1990s Australia, this meant devoting attention to a different sort of line, one that was not written down or public, but rather in my own head: my private line of personal progress. I had been raised in the slipstream of the postwar “golden age” as an indirect beneficiary of a set of educational, industrial relations and social security policies that had enabled my father, who had grown up in a poor family and left school without matriculating in the 1940s, to move into the middle class in the 1960s after many years spent working as a cleaner.

Significant changes were under way in the Australian economy in the 1990s, but what was in my teenage head was a melange of beliefs from an earlier time: an awkward and undigested blend of Fordism, the Protestant work ethic, Keynesianism and second-wave feminism. These collectively distilled into the commonsense idea that hard work, delayed gratification and education were reliable fuel for an upward trajectory in life. It was a belief that, upon obtaining the requisite good marks at school, and then uni or TAFE, you had a ticket to do work that was interesting and useful, entailed more complexity and responsibility as you got older, and earned enough to enable you to buy a house, have a family, and retire comfortably. It was a deal I assumed applied to everyone; not a special offering for those with superabundant talent, energy or privilege.

Unlike the global temperature line, the determinants of this personal-progress line felt wholly within my control. They nestled comfortably in the fabric of everyday life, an unspoken and unacknowledged dimension of day-to-day chats with friends about things like which subjects to choose, which jobs to apply for, and where to live. Yet, as the 1990s flipped into the millennium, it became gradually clear that the pursuit of work that was socially useful, interesting and reasonably paid was not so much a singular endeavour as a competitive and strategic puzzle. You couldn’t have all three, or rather, for women, four, since the question of how to fit in children was an additional matter that we alone had to consider.

Those fortunate enough to be buoyed with parental wealth seemed to have an easier run, not only at achieving two, three or more of the prized quartet, but in taking risks to get them, backed by a sense of entitlement and the knowledge that their family would bail them out if needed. For those with less cultural and material capital, the horizons were shorter. And the rules that seemed so self-evident at high school had the habit of melting and morphing without explanation every time we tried to play within them.

As I was navigating these questions, that other line, the global temperature one, did not disappear from my consciousness. But, if I am honest, it occupied a different universe from that personal-progress line. I had the climate in mind when trying to decide whether to ride my bike rather than drive, when remembering to take my reusable bag rather than use a plastic one, when buying a KeepCup. The climate line related to stuff and its management. Superego, rather than ego. Things I was supposed to say no to rather than the grand, existential puzzle of what to say yes to.

Conversations about the climbing red line and what it meant were awkward to have with friends. They didn’t seem to last for very long.

The different ways we talk about work and its future don’t mesh well with the reality that we have just twelve short years to avert calamitous climate change.

The “just transitions” narrative, for instance, takes a narrow view. It quite rightly observes that there is no zero-sum choice between jobs and the environment. Twenty-four million jobs worldwide will be created by 2030 by virtue of renewable industries, comfortably eclipsing the six million jobs predicted to be lost from the cessation of fossil fuels. It is crucial that workers in the latter group are offered fair support to transition into these new industries or into other work, of course, but so far this story has little to say about workers who are not closely proximate to the work involved in energy extraction and production.

The “digital disruption” story of the future of work, by contrast, is expansive in its scope. It foretells unimaginably vast changes in present configurations of work, heralding the inevitable breaking down of jobs into tasks, many of them vulnerable to replacement by machines. A tone of gleeful inevitability commonly accompanies this narrative, paired with an insistence that technological change has invariably led to a “net jobs gain” in the past, and will do so again. As long as workers adopt a suitably “flexible” mindset, and no one holds back on investment in technology, all will be well.

A more pessimistic narrative of work may be found among the heralds of the “precariat.” For the first time in history, they argue, we have a generation who, despite high levels of educational attainment, are forced to work in “careerless jobs,” with no “shadow of the future” in their working lives, to use Guy Standing’s chilling phrase. Detached from any sense that what they say or do today will make any difference to their fate tomorrow, they are the new dangerous class: frustrated, insecure, indebted and stressed, ripe for seduction by the politics of xenophobia, populism and nostalgia.

And finally, there is an even grimmer story, in which panic gives way to elegy and lamentation. Commonly associated with the writer Paul Kingsnorth and the “Dark Mountain” project, this narrative suggests that human industrial systems are effectively unstoppable, fuelled by a set of toxic myths about the separation of humanity from “nature” and the necessity of human “progress.” All that can be done from here is to challenge these myths with counter-stories and privately pursue lives outside industrial systems.

These four narratives share a few common logics. All (apart from just transitions) tend towards determinism, and the sense that we humans have little agency in the question of how work is organised and valued, and that it is instead some other force, be it technology, neoliberalism or industrial capitalism, that sets the terms of our future. What each shares, too, is the implicit dismissal of work as a viable stage upon which we might collectively struggle for a better system. Indeed, these narratives carry little optimism that any alternative social order will ever be possible at all.

It is a diagnosis that is premature. Signs of an appetite for alternative orders to the “take/make/consume/dispose” model of human progress abound. From the streets full of schoolchildren on strike for the climate to the Green New Deal movement to the language of “circular economies” starting to be heard in business and government, new modes of thinking about what human progress means are emerging and beginning to erupt into mainstream politics all over the world.

And just as it is premature to give up on the possibility of a new social order, so too is it hasty to abandon the idea that work can be a political site from which to fight for the reform. For there is a crucial link between “sustainability” and work that is perhaps very obvious but rarely made explicit: the process of “sustaining” requires human labour. It means more than simply saying “no” to damaging acts of consumption; it also means saying “yes” to the human activities that are positively necessary for the repair, renewal and regeneration of our soils, our oceans, our cities, our critical human systems and our human bodies.

A society that exists within planetary limits is one that looks on such work as more than just an afterthought or “non-core” aspect to the “real” business of production. It rather treats it as utterly elemental.

So how do we currently value and organise this work?

In Perth there is a carer working in a residential care home who thinks that no one should ever die alone. There is no funding for palliative care supplies at her work, so she runs a raffle to enable her to buy what she needs, like moisturiser to use on the lips of people in the last days of life, when they can’t make their mouths wet any more. Most days she works more than an hour without pay. She has never been paid more than the award rate for forty-three years, despite the additional qualifications she has acquired with her own time and money. The time she gets to shower and toilet each person she cares for is approximately six minutes.

In Arnhem Land there is a Kuninjku man on an outstation who used to burn his country according to customary practice. His burning eased the destructive pressure on native species exerted by feral cats, cane toads, pigs, cattle and other animals, and formed part of a sustainable hybrid economy that comprised hunting and fishing, arts and crafts, and access to state transfer payments. Since 2015, government policy changes mean that he must now engage in “work-like activity” (which does not include caring for country) for twenty-five hours a week, on an hourly rate of $11.60, without standard industrial protections. He has no time for burning now, and the Kuninjku hybrid economy has all but disappeared.

In Brisbane there is a woman who loves to care for and teach young children. Her wage is so low that she cannot afford to have children of her own.

In Hobart there was a security guard who worked in the state’s court complex whose name was known by every employee and regular user of the building. She had a low, quiet voice capable of soothing the most intimidating of offenders. She offered support to domestic violence victims and solace to the parents of young offenders. One day, after twenty-one years of work, her position was converted into a casual one by the service multinational who had taken over the contract. She could not pay her mortgage on such uncertain wages, and was forced to leave.

In Perth there was an engineering graduate who wanted to work in renewable energy manufacturing. Despite top marks, he was unable to get a secure job in that field. Others in his cohort found jobs in oil, coal and gas industries, earning, on average, $180,000 a year.

In rural New South Wales there is a regenerative farmer who knows how to “read” the landscape, measuring success in terms of the levels of animal health, species diversity and the quality of nutrient and water cycling on his property. Seeing his farm in this way meant that he had to painstakingly “unlearn” everything he was taught about best-practice farming over decades.

In Adelaide there is a junior humanities academic who gave birth to a human being. Devoted to her discipline and the maintenance of an intergenerational conversation about the world through teaching and writing, she worked for years as a casual, always taking more than her allocated forty-five minutes per student per term to be the best teacher she could. Research was done in her own time in the hope of securing a permanent job, but with a child to care for, she could no longer afford to work for free, and has left the sector.

Each of these people does work that is the opposite of what anthropologist David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs.” They bestow, daily, the thing that Simone Weil described as “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” namely, attention.

Their work is environmental. Not in the narrow sense of being low-carbon-emitting (although it is that). Nor in the sense that it boosts biodiversity (although some do that too). Their work is environmental because it is centrally concerned with human and non-human regeneration, and in particular with fostering social cohesion, trust, civility and a sense of order. It is environmental because it fosters education and the passing on of learning about how to live wisely and within limits. No society can simultaneously exist within environmental limits and be a democracy that does not possess an abundance of these things.

There are some common themes in their conditions of work. Their jobs generally lack pathways in and pathways up. Most of these workers are not “held” within a secure career structure that enables them to reliably progress over time in seniority, nor are they paid adequately to comfortably afford those social markers of “life progress”: a house and a family and a secure retirement. They are, rather, expected to “trade off” the meaningfulness of their work for material security, status and self-development.

For many, daily work is often frustrated and interrupted by management processes that are ill-suited to their labour. They must contend with rigid Taylorist grids, competitive frameworks, productivity metrics: repertoires of control and efficiency derived from industrial contexts thrust into vocations that have, for millennia, followed the tempos and cyclical rhythms of human and environmental need rather than the dictates of the clock.

Many, if not most, of these workers live under the shadow of a glaring mismatch between the status of their work (in terms of pay and security) and the social value it creates. For we reward and support the stewards of renewal far less generously than we do the stewards of extraction and consumption, who benefit from myriad material and social supports that mean that their personal-progress lines don’t just start high, but are set up to rise.

No element of this work order is necessary, or inevitable. The point is not that these workers are victims. Far from it, most of those mentioned are actively organising and agitating in their workplaces and unions to make their conditions of work better. The point is rather that there is a deep perversity in our current order of work, which does not furnish the people who are doing the things most crucial to a flourishing planet and society with the means to flourish themselves.

As Australians, our obligations in responding to environmental crisis are particularly acute. We are one of the wealthiest and most technologically capable nations on the planet, and among the most blessed in renewable energy sources. Yet we are also one of the highest per capita emitters in the world. To put our current priorities in clear focus, the International Monetary Fund has calculated that Australia spends 1.96 per cent of its GDP on fossil fuel subsidies. That is almost four times the approximately 0.5 per cent of GDP we spend on early childhood education and care. In other words, for every public dollar we spend building a future for our youngest citizens, we spend nearly four dismantling that future.

There are powerful historical and geographical dynamics that have led to those damning numbers. Our “settler capitalist” trajectory was premised on extractive pastoral and mining practices. At the same time as that trajectory brutally destroyed and displaced Indigenous lifeways, it imported a highly gendered conception of public and private life that consigned work of social reproduction to women and systematically excluded it from the formal economic sphere.

But just as Australia’s history can be blamed for our present inertia, so too does it contain remarkable sources of inspiration for how we might meet the challenges we face now. We can learn from the religious, cultural and kinship structures that enabled Indigenous peoples to live on and tend to the land, sustainably, for millennia, and to pass on knowledge of how to care for country through the generations.

We can recall the philosophy that underpinned the creation of some of our key national institutions at Federation. The conciliation and arbitration system, for instance, was predicated on a set of principled arguments for determining where competitive markets belong and where they do not. It rested on a notion that our economic systems should be in service to a higher purpose — the development of people as full moral and social beings — and established systems for regulating industrial relationships to that end.

We can learn, too, from the fact that we have remade the fundamental determinants of our work order once already. One hundred years ago, the basic determinants of working life — the things that had the greatest bearing on your occupation, salary, permission to work at all — were gender and race. Imperfect and incomplete as the process was, we largely dismantled that system of formal discrimination in the final third of the twentieth century.

Finally, a sense of history can aid us in understanding why so many ostensibly powerful people seem to feel so powerless to do anything about our current crisis. Our embrace of a passive conception of government, one that confines itself, as Mariana Mazzucato has recently observed, to doing little more than merely “levelling the playing field” of the market and getting out of the way, has led us to consign great swathes of the work of renewal to the for-profit market. As a consequence, much of the care of our eldest and youngest citizens is the responsibility of firms necessarily operating within a financialised system that demands short-termism, risk-shifting, debt loading and lean labour costs. Such arrangements are not only unjust. They are the product of an anachronist and misplaced application of ideas that were gestated in the context of the cold war, in response to a centralising, statist, planning-obsessed Soviet enemy that no longer exists. They are institutional arrangements that come from another age and are not the ones we need to deal with these warming, fragmented and increasingly unequal times.

Such times demand a new work order, an updated social contract for our warming world that recognises anew that the purpose of our economy, and thus of work, is to facilitate the flourishing of our living systems. It is not to furnish markets, capital, GDP — or any of the human inventions we have devised as synecdoches for advancement — with raw material.

The essence of such a renewed social contract should lie in the notion that if you are doing useful work — and especially if you are doing the essential work of stewardship and renewal of our life-giving systems — you should be rewarded with the status, salary and self-development opportunities to enable you to fully develop your capabilities over your life course. You will not be left to knit together the elements of a full and flourishing career on your own.

The new work order can’t be technocratic. It needs to be built upon the strengthened efforts of those already engaged in renewal and stewardship work, and the community organisations, unions and environmental groups that support them.

There will be struggle. There are, after all, more than a few powerful stewards of the old take/make/consume/dispose order who will see no reason to simply surrender their status. We must start to see certain habits, practices and fields of expertise associated with short-termist, non-reciprocal corporate “extractivism” as being akin to occupational “stranded assets.” Just as certain bodies of fossil fuel ores must simply be kept in the ground, so too, these ideas for how to run a society must simply stay in people’s heads.

Technology must be seen as a servant rather than a master. It is crucial to contest the idea that technology, rather than people, determines the value and organisation of work. And, in particular, that it is “gigs” and “tasks” that comprise the natural units of work, rather than relationships, careers and domains of knowledge and practice. At the same time, it is crucial to avoid nostalgia. Digital capabilities and networked orders must be at the heart of our repertoire in thinking about how to reorganise and value work that is oriented to environmental repair and stewardship.

We must re-examine, too, our assumptions about what counts as low- and high-skilled work in light of what we now know about the complex needs of human and environmental systems. Our assumptions are currently stuck in a circular logic that ties status to levels of pay and credentialism, and “bakes in” the undervaluation of caring and relational work. There is no reason why domains of work that are currently fragmented and insecure cannot be rebundled into occupations that are more autonomous, skilled, relational and rewarding.

A new work order will not displace existing environmental imperatives. We must rightly continue to insist on a rapid and deep transition to renewable energy, reduced pollution and consumption, and the eradication of fossil fuel interests from politics. But a new work order will augment them in crucial ways, enabling people to weave the great work of social transformation into their everyday lives.

My generation will be the last to have a climate epiphany. My daughters are growing up always knowing that their world is careering towards a destructive path. They know it in the same sort of way I grew up knowing about the first world war — and thinking (with indecent arrogance) that if, somehow, I had been there, I would never have been involved in something so silly and pointless.

My hope is that by the time they are adults they will see as grotesque the fact that we — knowing about climate change — once paid our brightest young people handsomely for coming up with ingenious ways of flinging people and objects around the planet as frictionlessly and profitably as possible. That we did that at the same time as practically impeding the work of those engaged in the renewal and repair of the world. I hope they will look on such arrangements with a sense of incredulity, of the kind I felt when reading about the militarist logic that saw 57,000 British casualties on the first day of the Somme but insisted that young men wake up and go over the top to be slaughtered again the next day.

Of course, like any parent, I hope their little lines of personal progress rise, and that they find occupations that are useful and interesting and that nourish and nurture the people and places around them. But as every parent knows, I can’t do that for them. What I can do, and what all of us can do, is fight for a system that doesn’t press impossible dilemmas on their slim shoulders.

It is within our power to reshape our present order of work in a way that does not insist that the next generation must choose between work that renews the world and work that is materially secure. We can, instead, fashion a system that offers them a stake in a deep and expansive environmental politics. One that isn’t just about what they do or don’t buy, but that yokes together their private lines of progress with that other great line that determines and marks our collective fate. Such a system would not only be easier and fairer to live in. It would also enable their ambitions, their loves and their impulses to care for the places and people around them to be woven into a common social project they will fight for when we are all gone: the nurturance of life, and the flourishing of our common home. •

This is an edited version of the inaugural Iain McCalman Lecture, delivered at the University of Sydney on 6 February. The lecture was established to celebrate the career of the distinguished historian Iain McCalman.

The post Climate change and the new work order appeared first on Inside Story.

The pages before that date were dense with appointments typical for a late-stage PhD student, nicely positioned in their designated times: “super­visor”; “submit book review”; “conference”; “seminar”; “teach.” All in ink, obviously. The pages crackled a bit from where the biro had pressed in hard. The pages after the “Baby!” entry were smooth and blank. I was living with my husband in a London council flat, seduced from my Australian home by the promise of a life in the knowledge-worker class. All my experience to date had taught me that ink in my diary meant work. Blank space meant not-work. The ink meant constraint. The blank space meant freedom.

As it turned out, the date of the “Baby!” entry was the least of my delusions. The eight-hour labour I learnt about in National Childbirth Trust antenatal classes went for thirty-five. The birth plan I’d thought­fully printed out in triplicate to distribute to the midwives at the birth centre (“warm water, no pain relief, Bach cellos, dim light please”) was instead labour in a fluorescent-lit four-bed ward, oxytocin in my arm, metal in my spine. The thesis plan (“revise introduction, rewrite conclusion, fix footnotes, submit in three weeks”) became nine months of tremulous writing in naptime stretches that varied between twenty seconds and two hours. I developed a dread of small domestic sounds: a door click, a plastic shampoo bottle falling over in the bathroom or a glass clinking on the sink all had the devastating power to wake the baby and unceremoniously terminate my working day.

With an awake baby came life lived in the diary’s blank space. It certainly didn’t feel like freedom. It was more like living in a coral reef: beautiful, yes, but slow-moving and lonely, with little opportunity to venture into the wider ocean.

Years later, I would make sense of this time in terms of Hannah Arendt’s division of human activity into categories of “labour,” “work” and “action” in her 1958 book The Human Condition. Life in the blank space was what Arendt termed “labour” – biologically necessary activity that was, in her words, “futile but necessary.” Always consumed at the point of production, labour is unproductive in a literal sense, leaving nothing tangible behind. It differs profoundly from “work,” Arendt’s concept for activity performed in relation to human-made things. The construction of a table, the building of a road, the painting of a house are all work. Work’s logic is instrumental and utilitarian; it can be contained and planned within the time lines of a diary. Arendt proposed “action” as a category for activities by which people disclose themselves to others. It was the sphere of the ancient polis, the domain in which people apprehend and distinguish each other as incommutable and unique creatures. The writing of a play, the composition of a blog and the delivery of a lecture are all action. As a middle-class, able-bodied nascent academic,

I had the good fortune to spend a considerable portion of time before having a baby engaging in action, and a fair bit in work too. My experience of labour had not been much more than a toe dip. It was no wonder that I did not grasp its logic, its splendour, or its strange rhythms in comparison to the worlds of work and action. It is unsurprising, if not excusable, that I had taken it utterly for granted.

Pregnancy and birth might be one of the most inexorably linear experiences on offer in the twenty-first century. Ask any woman who has given birth about the experience and you are likely to hear a story with events that are powerfully placed in narrative sequence, and an ending that doesn’t just punctuate the story but becomes a sort of temporal frame for her entire life.

The major processes shaping the future of work aren’t much like that. The transgression of planetary boundaries and the displacement of human activity by machines are stealthy and incremental processes, hard to fathom on a day-to-day basis and utterly unamenable to diarisation. They have uneven beginnings, moments of great acceleration (the Industrial Revolution; the period from 1950 to the present) and inconceivable end-points, on a scale far larger than a human life. We are perpetually “in them,” yet their full collective impacts defy the senses. Increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere cannot be heard or smelled; a bleached Great Barrier Reef or a fifty-mile crack in West Antarctica can be cheerfully disregarded with a quick scroll through a newsfeed.

Algorithms that set the price of labour for digital-platform work are designed to invisibly calculate value from moment to moment, unencumbered by human judgement and without scope for negotiation or appeal. Casualisation and digital scheduling are, in combination, reducing the visibility of structural unemployment and the wounds of shame and despair it can inflict. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, unemployed and precariously employed people took up space on the road, forming lines and gatherings that had names like “The Hungry Mile” and “The Bull Pit.” We don’t have a name yet for the experience of sitting alone in a bedroom, in a car or on the toilet in a state of distraction and latent expectation, awaiting a text message that will signal the prospect of work or its absence. Hundreds of thousands of people do this daily. Yet they now do it privately, without ritual or witnesses.

That these non-linear, largely undetectable processes are collectively whittling away at the foundations of “work” as we presently understand it is inarguable. If the Committee for Economic Development of Australia is even partly correct in its prediction that 40 per cent of Australian jobs will be automated by 2025, the changes that the millennial generation will witness to existing patterns of work and education will be epic, and magnified by the imperative to decarbonise the entire system.

Understandably, the first tranche of thinkers who have attempted to grapple with climate change, automation and late capitalism as a joined-up set of challenges have tended to focus on what will be lost, rather than what will stay the same. Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism (2016), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future (2015) and Tim Dunlop’s Why the Future Is Workless (2016), for instance, all overwhelmingly focus on the appropriate psychological and policy responses to the jobs that are set to disappear, leaving the cyclical work of social reproduction – “labour,” in Arendt’s sense of it – as an afterthought. Just as I had done with my pre-baby diary, they contemplate the moment when the dense ink gives way to white space, but can only imagine the latter as lack.

How might our perception of the future of work change if we looked on the “white space” differently? Whether we recognise it or not, the job of maintaining the biological processes of the earth will be a major dimension of human activity in a low-carbon, highly automated world. This applies to the work of looking after human bodies as much as it does to the stewardship of ocean, sky and land. As we rethink and refashion our forms of agriculture, transport, mining, forestry, energy and chemical industries into low-carbon equivalents adequate to sustain life within planetary boundaries, labour will remain a constant. Aged and disability carers, early childhood educators and nurses – low-carbon occupations all – will endure through the thousands of micro-revolutions wrought by automation. No doubt many self-styled innovators will attempt to replace them with robots, tone deaf to how inextricable human relationships are in such jobs. All of us want to be seen and heard by another human being in the moments of vulnerability that constitute the basis for these forms of work. No one wants to die in the company of a robot.

An Arendtian framework can assist us to think through our predicament. Arendt was not a sentimental admirer of labour, although she understood that a life that was structured around a simple dichotomy of “work” and “leisure” risked triviality without it. Unlike many modern theorists, she was not moved by psychoanalytic conceptions of personhood that accorded a pre-eminent role to parents and intimate others in shaping the self of a small child. The low value Arendt attached to labour was, as she readily acknowledged, nothing new. Societies from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christians to patriarchal Victorians all placed it as the degraded partner in a binary with a more exalted form of existence, whether it be the polis, the spirit or the “public sphere.”

While our current age is not alone in taking the maintenance of our physical and social spaces for granted, we have certainly given it a twenty-first-century, neoliberal spin. Many early childhood educators earn so little that they cannot afford to buy a house or have children of their own, despite significant post-secondary qualifications. Aged carers are paid so poorly they risk poverty. People with jobs in the world of work and action who take time away to care for elderly parents or young children are punished for their “choice,” not just once through foregone income but twice as a result of a grotesque superannuation system that magnifies wage gaps in retire­ment. Through neoliberal goggles, labour is not recognised as the essential foundation for civilisation but rather is seen as a cost burden on the public purse that should rightly be turned into a profit-making opportunity. Treasurer Scott Morrison, speaking at the ACOSS National Conference in 2016, said, “What I am basically saying is that welfare must become a good deal for investors – for private investors. We have to make it a good deal, for the returns to be there.”

Arendt would not, I suspect, exactly have leapt to advance the status of our modern practitioners of labour, but she probably would have considered Morrison’s comments pretty strange. The extraction of “returns” is work logic rather than labour logic. It is what we do to coal when we take it out of the earth, and wool when we shear it off the sheep. The framing of relationships of care and attention as profit-making opportunities is, in Arendt’s schema, a category error.

Bringing labour to the foreground highlights the extent to which devel­opments in technology amplify, rather than diminish, the urgency of asking old and familiar questions about power, collective action and institutional design in the way our society organises care work. Who should own and design the technology? How should the work be shared out across classes and genders? What role should profit-making play? Who should set the mechanisms for measuring, monitoring and communicating “quality”? Do we fundamentally see the recipients of care as customers or citizens? If these questions are not asked democratically, and with the explicit involvement of the present and future workers who will do this labour, then they will continue to be implicitly answered for us by the owners of capital.

The last instance of a societal shift on anything like the scale that is currently required occurred at the end of the second world war. The intellects that shaped that change, from William Beveridge to H.C. Coombs, faced the immense challenge of working in wartime conditions, with an infrastructure almost wholly devoted to militarisation and a population wracked by privation and grief. The war also presented them with some key advantages, though, not least an acceptance of centralised government planning and authority, a society-wide willingness to make individual sacri­fices for collective aims, and an acknowledged legitimacy in protecting and promoting forms of work on the basis of their usefulness rather than their profit-making capacity. Such thinkers and policy-makers arguably had an imaginative advantage over our age too: a vivid sense of the society they were moving away from – a planned wartime economy – and of the one they were moving towards – a peacetime society not afflicted with the hardships of the Depression.

The current generation of the left, by contrast, shares no such consensus. The backdrop of nationalism that provided a common teleological frame­work to its citizens has been dismantled – a matter for celebration, without question, given its bloody legacy. But we must also recognise that erosion of nationalist (and, before them, religious) structures of meaning has also resulted in diminished conceptual tools for conducting a public democratic conversation about where we are, and where we must go in a climate-altered and highly automated planet. Young people must work in a landscape of political communication that fosters presentism, virtue signalling, impatience with and suspicion of institutional authority, and an overdeveloped sense that individual “feelings” are an adequate proxy for political action.

Like the baby boomers, millennials are also shaped by a deep, post-imperial anxiety about the morality of imposing visions of a collective good onto others. This did not afflict the planners of the 1940s, for better and for worse. Beveridge, for instance, inherited a worldview that stretched back to Comte and the positivist tradition. He passed through Oxford, Toynbee Hall, the British civil service and the LSE – all institutions that emphasised, albeit in very different ways, the subordination of private interests to the common good. Today, by contrast, the political left must repeatedly make the case for collec­tive action and argue for the principles that underpin a flourishing society, in a public realm that is chronically afflicted by amnesia and distraction.

In the absence of societal consensus, it can be easy to resort to despair in the face of an ailing system. But we’re far from empty-handed. We can start with the givens, the timeless things that will inevitably be present in the future, rather than an overwhelming focus on what we are going to lack. We know that there will be children, and they will crave belonging, love and learning. Citizens of all ages will all seek togetherness, connection to each other and to the generations before and after. We will express ourselves through culture, endeavouring to make sense of our uniqueness as human beings and our shared cultural inheritance. Some of our bodies will work imperfectly from birth, some will become diseased. All of them will get old. We will need sources of energy that are generated in ways that don’t violate any of the planetary boundaries for existence.

We will need a grasp on all three of Arendt’s categories of “labour,” “work” and “action” in this impending world. But more than this, we need to acknowl­edge that their relative proportions will change, and work won’t simply disappear. If a larger share of human activity is to be taken up by labour – by the maintenance of our physical, social and intimate worlds – then perhaps it should be shared around a bit more fairly. And perhaps it should be handled with a set of conceptual tools that are more apt. Words such as “efficiency” and “competition” and “choice” have been deployed far too widely – well beyond the bounds of the domain of work, where they rightly belong (and even then, in far more limited circumstances than is standard). They are alien to labour and corrode the foundations of trust, continuity and judgement that enable its proper performance. We need to develop a public vocabulary that gives value and space to labour and action on their own terms, as foundations for our common human flourishing.

I followed the birth plan for the early stages of labour. The contractions of the first morning did involve white pillows, a red balloon visualisation I’d read about in a hypnobirthing book and a sort of figure-eight swaying of the hips I’d learnt in prenatal yoga. They also included the use of a contraction-timing app that seemed ingenious the week before but that, in practice, required the irritating re-entry of my pin number every few minutes. I ditched it a few hours in, submitting to the more reliable “are you in so much pain you cannot talk to the midwife on the phone” test as a measure for when the moment was right to go to the hospital.

I let my hair fall entirely in front of my face as I shuffled with my husband from our ground-floor council flat through the common area to the black cab on the street. It was mid-morning, and the space was like a theatre in the round, observable from five levels of balconies. Given the deep guttural sounds I was making, I suppose more than a few people would have come out to watch me, but from behind the veil of hair, I could not see them. Remarkably, the only witnesses I could perceive were three ginger cats, all residents in our block, lined up near the door in a sort of guard of honour to mark the passage of a fellow animal.

I brayed on the floor of the black cab, through slow traffic and sharp turns, desperate to reach experienced hands at St Mary’s Paddington. A thick paper file was exchanged on arrival (credit card details were not) and a miraculous system of science, planning and institutional design invisibly pulsed into life. Dozens of professionals seamlessly co-ordinated their time and attention, wordlessly sharing scientific knowledge derived from 200 years of research and experience, enmeshed with the particular and specific observations that had been made about me and my baby over the past nine months. I met some of the midwives twice over twenty-eight hours, once at the end of their shift and again at the start of the next. They spoke a common language in accents from Ireland, Australia, Wales, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Jamaica. After more than an hour of pushing, I was politely asked if I would consent to being in an Imperial College univer­sity study about a novel episiotomy technique, and play my tiny part in nudging the scientific frontier forward for others. Yes, God, please, please do it. I signed the paper with a biro and turned my eyes away from the scissors. Then hands on thighs, feet braced, and a deep Jamaican voice of the latest midwife roaring, “Puuuuuuuuush.”

If my daughter is to give birth to a child at the same age, it will be 2040. Her ride to the place she delivers her baby will be, I suppose, a driverless and smoother affair than mine was; the monitoring of heartbeats, effacement and contractions “smarter,” more accurate and less invasive. I’m confident she won’t be required to enter a pin number at any stage. Perhaps the whole thing will happen at her home, with medication and medical-examination cameras alighting to the scene by solar-powered drone. If such technology is useful for keeping her safe, I hope she gets it all, and that her entitlement to do so has nothing to do with her status or income (or mine).

Please let there be people with her, though, no matter what. Let them be experienced, and kind. Let them have chosen this work because they want to do it, and because it is recognised as crucial in a low-carbon world, and not because they cannot find anything else to do. Let them give her their attention, free from concern for ratings or efficiency measures, from worry about where their next job is going to be or how they are going to care for their own children. If something goes wrong, please let there be someone to hold her and help her and calm her, and not just a beeping machine. And when my daughter first hears her baby’s cry, please let there be someone there to meet her gaze, to lift her new child up, and to pass her on with eyes shining. •

This essay first appeared in Griffith Review 52: Millennials Strike Back, edited by Julianne Schultz and Jareth Head.

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