“Women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands. They have rich husbands because they step back from work.”
I am a woman who stepped back from work for/with a rich *wife*, and we talk all the time about our conscious decision to do that—neither of us is under any illusion that she miraculously, alone, by her own white-male-esque virtue, got a 15% raise or is going to make partner or brought in a dozen new clients the year and a half after I quit my job. We both understand the work I do (literally everything else) is grueling and not particularly enriching but essential and allows her the focus she needs to compete with the men at her firm.
AND YET it’s still exhausting swimming against the current of “real” work = good, homemaking = basic, easy, stupid, especially as we increasingly understand that we’re complicit in the seepage of overwork culture to people who don’t have our privilege, for whom it isn’t a choice. I have an MBA and recognize that it’s just good business for our household for one of us to stay home, but I also feel compelled to tell everyone I have an MBA so they don’t think I’m “just” a spoiled housewife.
I don’t really have a point other than to say it all sucks, and also that the book Bullshit Jobs is what convinced me to quit and also made me a UBI convert.
This is a big part of why I went freelance. I make less money and have less stability, but I decide when my workday starts and ends. I say "no" to projects I don't have capacity to take on. I step away when I need to go to the dentist or take my cat to the vet on a weekday morning (or to grocery shop, if that's when it makes sense to do it!). If someone emails me at 6pm on a Friday, I respond the following Monday.
I recognize there's a lot of privilege at play that allows me to work this way, and part of the reason I have enough of a network to do it is that I worked for a decade in office jobs that did not respect balance or boundaries, and was generally successful at it. But I honestly felt like the only way to push back against unreasonable expectations was to not be an employee anymore. And I think it's pretty fucked up that it came to that.
I started freelancing as an urban planning consultant directly out of grad school, kind of accident rather than getting a "job"--and I am so glad that I made that choice! I never have to answer to anyone about why I'm leaving for school pickup or getting a haircut at 11am on a Tuesday, and it does feel a less shitty to be working late at night or the very occasional weekend when I know that I'm getting paid by the hour. I've just recently in the past year or two gotten really explicit about my boundaries to be a good boss to myself: deleting work email from my phone so that I'm not tempted to check on a Saturday, saying no to new projects, not working on a Sunday even when it feels like deadlines will crush me on a Monday.
Twelve years in, I am increasingly questioning this as a systemic choice though for two reasons. One, I can set my own boundaries--up to a point. If I want to engage in contracting for certain jobs, I am still part of the overall work ecosystem. I think urban planning isn't as cutthroat as some other fields so the overwork is dialed back just a bit, but my point of influence on the practices is fairly limited on my own. Second, I am questioning whether it's good for the profession and for the places we live to have individual consultants like me, floating around writing policies and zoning code for nine cities simultaneously, and maybe not really dialing into the local places and nuances? I've been thinking a lot about this article: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/03/21/1162242773/need-a-consultant-this-book-argues-hiring-one-might-actually-damage-your-institu
I'm an urban planner with almost a decade of experience all working directly for governments, and I'm incredibly surprised people hired you right out of grad school. It took me a year and a half after grad school to even get a job, I cannot fathom anyone giving me a consulting gig at that point in my career.
MTCW: I’m not sure if the answer is for everyone to “work for themselves.” Not everyone can work from home, work for themselves, or become digital nomads. Someone actually has to do the childcare, clean the streets, run the grocery stores, etc. I think your point about legislation and changing the playing field is really worth driving home here. We don’t all need to leave the game if we can change it. Maybe I like working as a garbage collector or librarian or publicist and really just need better, different structures in place to allow me to do that and live a whole healthy life. Working for yourself is still working for someone. See what influencer link under this story.
I hear this! I know for me personally, as someone in my late 30s with bills to pay who is not independently wealthy, starting over as a childcare provider or grocery worker or librarian at is not financially plausible. I'd love to shift to a more socially valuable career than the one I'm in, but I can't afford to live on those wages while waiting for sweeping policy changes to grant workers in those fields better pay. I support advocacy for better labor conditions and I vote accordingly, in hopes that others will have better options! But personally, I'm coming up on middle age, I don't own a home, and I don't have robust retirement savings. Putting my own wellbeing/future at risk to "stay in the game" sounds like a choice, but practically speaking it really isn't.
I hear you.... The piece seems to say that "being on the line" is a very relative perspective as those making more money, owning homes, etc, are also drowning in the same ocean of dysfunction. The only people not drowning or threading water in some way are those families in the one percent and under. I'm not suggesting you or anyone else stay in the game but rather change it, which of course takes a lot of risk for "all" involved. I think the piece also seems to say that most people aren't voting as if they are ready to make our elected officials do anything different. So, I think we're "in the game" we have for a while, whether you work for yourself or not.
This makes me think about how “burnout” has been appropriated by capitalism... sure, take a break when you’re burned out, but then DO make sure you come back to doing just as much work until you burn out again and again and again....
What if we all just worked less in general? What if we lowered the bar, and then lowered it again just to be sure?
Wow, this got me thinking in so many different directions.I feel like you draw nicely on the idea that many of these systems are participatory, and that they either force or incentivize participation in a way that precludes—or at least minimizes—group resistance.
A friend of mine recently finished med school later in life, and one of the things he was struck by was how unhealthy the whole process was. He said the general attitude from other doctors was "I went through this so you have to go through this." This seems to be a common theme in certain professions. (I had the feeling you'd written about this practice but I couldn't remember where.)Anyway, that all got me thinking about the French writer Édouard Louis's work. I started reading it early in the pandemic. He thinks a lot about ways that violence perpetuates violence—the ways that people who are treated violently so often enact that violence on others. He is very influenced by Bourdieu and his idea of symbolic violence ("Bourdieu's term for the imposition on subordinated groups by the dominant class of an ideology which legitimates and naturalizes the status quo"-borrowed from https://www.oxfordreference.com, because I'm not a philosopher). Reading your piece, I kept thinking about how these sliding work practices feel like forms of symbolic violence.
Lastly, I was listening to Ezra Klein's interview with Danielle Allen over the weekend and was really struck by something Allen said: "Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again." I do a lot of work/thinking about ideas of maintenance and Allen's sentence spoke to me about how the systems we design demand constant attention/maintenance—the same way a car engine requires maintenance. I think you so nicely highlight here how poorly maintained many of our systems around work have been, and how hard that maintenance work is without proper legislation. So many of the things you highlight reek of systems that have been allowed to decay. And that decay, in turn, is self-perpetuating: It eats up community investment, free time, socializing, mental health.
The tenure track in higher ed is a lot like med school in that once people have run the gauntlet, they think everyone else should too. At least that seems to be the case at my R1 university.
A small part of the larger problem, but the 43% of workers who feel guilty about the additional workload put on their peers when they use PTO is another example of how corporations take advantage of us. I'm on a small team, and nothing feels worse than coming back from vacation to learn that my peers' week was busier and more stressful as a result of me using days I was entitled to. Another burden we all bear in service of the almighty corporation :-/
Thanks for this piece. One thing popped to mind that feels related but is outside the scope of this piece (or might be reflected in some of the links you included) - "job creep" in hourly/retail settings as a type of overwork. So, not JUST the relentless invasive metrics/tracking technology gig workers are subjected to now. It's also the kind of weird psychological pressure to perform as if you were getting paid on commission .... when you're not. The pressure is INTENSE, as anyone knows who has ever had to push customers to apply for a branded credit card at checkout.
I used to have a part-time nonprofit job that I took in order to get out of a toxic workplace. I knew it wasn't going to pay the bills, so I layered on a part-time retail job (not chosen for any particular reason, I just didn't have a car at the time, and the jobs were in walking distance of one another; I could use the same bus stop for each). It was an upscaleish home furnishings national chain and it was so grim. Every sale at the register was "tracked" with the ID number of whoever had helped the customer. At the end of the day, the manager called into regional HQ and literally reported total sales for everyone that day, by name. WHY? Again, you will be paid exactly the same amount of money whether you make sales or not. We'd received marginal training on the products but the store advertised expert services, so it was to our advantage to just straight make shit up to sound knowledgeable and make customers feel good about their purchases. Moreover all of us were under such intense pressure to be chipper and have a good attitude. While closing, I would listen to the managers switch on their "happy voice" to leave an upbeat EOD report for regional. All possible because of the absolute precarity (threat of being fired or punished with not enough hours) and, I think, also because they could dangle the promise of a manager job over all of us. At the time (about a decade ago) a store manager job paid $40k and had benefits, so it was a serious material improvement, even if you had no interest in the company or "advancing" for any other reason.
All these companies are the same, so there's probably no reason for me to have gone into that level of detail about this specific one, but I think about it constantly when I'm out in the world buying stuff, when I'm thinking about the infuriating behavior of managers in Starbucks union-busting; they all rely on this culty environment to make profit margins work and I would love to read more about this psychological underpinning.
Nowadays I also think about it in my desk job, where sometimes it feels like SETTING ANNUAL GOALS!!! and CAREER DEVELOPMENT!!! is really just a giant scam to get us to work outside the scope of our jobs; unless your path to promotion has been spelled out, there's really no connection between increased effort and increased pay. Sometimes it doesn't feel so different from selling silk drapes and throw pillows with manufactured enthusiasm.
I really enjoyed reading about your experience. You connected some dots in my head. I work at a library and I sh*t you not that we're getting pressured intensely into coercing patrons to borrow more books. If they come in for one book, we're supposed to try to get them to borrow two or three. And management is trying to get us to set measurable goals that they'll put in our annual performance review under the guise of "professional development." But you're right - there's no connection between increased effort and increased pay.
I really hate to see the "let's run x like a business" mentality take over libraries. They're one of the few places where people can go and NOT feel pressured into "buying" anything. Never mind that output measures like number of circs don't fully illustrate the impact that a library has on the community. But counting beans is a lot easier than counting outcomes.
Except that libraries report their circulation, number of visitors, and number of programs/events at the state level (and sometimes at the national level), and that helps determine their funding. People who want to support libraries need to visit them regularly and make an effort to check out more books.
I was a grant writer for most of my career (though mostly private foundation funding, not big gnarly government agency funding processes). And one eye-opening thing that sort of slowly sunk in over time: no one really knows how to measure anything, but they have to do it anyway. Money is moved around based on what CAN be measured, what is easiest to name (number of participants, events, sure!) And that is measuring activity, not impact. Don't get me wrong, I don't have the answer. I don't think there are many accessible ways that most orgs on the ground can "measure" personal impact (in one person's life) or long-term impact (so-called "moving the needle") in a way that passes muster with the federal government. And that's just sort of the reality we're in. There is an idea called trust-based philanthropy that (in my mind) is somewhat connected to this reality and the fact that some things may not ever be easily defined.
Thank you for saying that - I was feeling a little guilty about derailing from the very-worthy topic of white collar overwork, and even though it's somewhat connected in my head/experience, it's not really the same phenomenon. BUT also I would have never made the connection to libraries, so now I have something new to think about, too - thank you.
I really believe that - in their best purest form - goals and professional development can be wonderful ways of allowing workers some autonomy, that rare thing - having a say in what you work on and how. And I DO read it as "support" ... if companies actually make good on providing you with actual opportunities, not just responsibilities. You know, actual money and time and prioritization for training, for new projects. BUT ... I just filled out my THIRD annual self-review in a row with pretty much the SAME THREE GOALS as I've had since I started my job ... because the entirety of my time and energy has been consumed just keeping up with the baseline job description, the day to day work. And let me tell you, going through this exercise is kind of soul-crushing at this point. Both the suggestion that I should or could be doing more when I'm already barely getting by, and the bleakness of knowing that I HAVE ideas - lots of them! - that I won't ever be able to actually work on. This is punishing! This is not a good system! Why am I spelling out new ways I could contribute to the company if the company is not actually supporting that work in any way except to say "be better, do more!" and putting it on me as an individual to manage my time magically? This is the mindf*&k weirdness I'm talking about at all levels of American business, not just that you should work constantly, but that you should maintain a kind of personal enthusiasm and show of investment in your own overwork. I guess that's the thread I was thinking about from the white-collar culture essay, it's sort of everywhere in different ways.
"The data isn’t surprising. But it underlines something that we’ve been talking about for some time now. The more educated you are, the more money you make — the more time you spend working, and the slipperier your work becomes, oozing into all corners of your life. The more you’re paid, the more ostensibly prestigious your job, the more time you spend working outside of standard working hours."
I don't think overwork is particular to the educated, but I do think measuring this by email makes it look that way. When I worked retail everyone had multiple jobs, many of them taking place "after work hours." Is it really a luxury to "not get emails after hours" if you're standing on your feet at 11pm working your second shift of the day?
This is where the data on underwork is clarifying (included slightly lower in the piece) - a big chunk of lower income workers report not having *enough* hours. This has also been a trend for sometime, and it’s in part the work of non-unionized retail jobs keeping hours just low enough to not be forced to provide benefits. Some people just don’t have enough hours (or enough money); others take on another job (but that’s harder when, as many retail jobs now do, your scheduling is erratic and decided just a week before). Hence: not enough work.
I have genuine questions about that data. Is this not enough work at one job? Because absolutely, almost no one gets 40 hours at their one retail job, which is why people often have other things they do to make money, whether that's multiple retail jobs, babysitting, pet sitting, any kind of gig work. Are people reporting that they don't get enough hours at their main job while still working quite a bit outside standard working hours? (ie, perhaps just as much as the knowledge worker answering an email).
Also want to underline that I’m not disagreeing with you that working two lower paying jobs is definitely harder than checking emails at home with Netflix in the back - but that normalization of overwork helps normalize overwork in *all* industries.
In evaluating the statement: "the more educated you are, the more money you make — the more time you spend working, and the slipperier your work becomes, oozing into all corners of your life" I think I would need to know what number of part time workers are working more than 40 hours total across all the things they do for employment.
I agree that everyone needs the ability to work less in all sectors, but I just don't see support for the idea that it is educated people who are most burdened by working at crappy times or more than 40 hours/week. It sucks for both kinds of workers sure, but the ability to "not think about work outside of work" is an often romanticized aspect of crap jobs and it's like, okay sure, but when is "outside of work" if the day is 11-12 hours of working, even if across two jobs?
This is a really good point, and I definitely don’t think white collar workers are more over-burdened - but I do think that it’s easier for this type of work to subsume one’s identity (to become your identity!!) making it difficult to even see it *as work*….which then makes it harder to understand why it can and should be regulated, why resisting regulations has ramifications on all people who work.
Excellent piece! I was the overwork queen ... until the pandemic broke something in me and everything became so much clearer. Now I work for a company that doesn’t operate on Friday afternoons and doesn’t email at night or on weekends. It’s fantastic and I’m never going back to my old ways. But I need to get better at taking vacation. Thanks for giving us things to consider in this realm!
I turned down a promotion two weeks ago because the position required checking emails after hours, weekends, and holidays. State government position tied to an industry that runs 24 hrs a day. My supervisor wasn't willing to negotiate on salary and wanted to pay me significantly less than others already in the position, for an undetermined amount of time. This low salary was due to experience I am lacking, but it wasn't that lack of experience that would require me to answer my phone at midnight if needed. I was filling in after the previous person in the position passed away. I filled in for a month before we got around to the salary negotiation and that month showed me clearly the salary didn't even come close to meeting the overwork levels required. So I said no-with the full support of my spouse.
The sense of relief I felt after saying no has made it clear I made the right decision for me. I fully recognize my privilege in being able to turn the promotion down. But if they weren't going to highly compensate me to give part of my life to them, more than they already get in a standard working day, it wasn't worth it for me. Reading this article today reinforces my decision and once again reaffirms my choice. Thank you!
see the thing that is wild for me is that my experience has been the complete opposite…when I worked a “stable” office job with benefits & hourly wages totaling around $43k at the end of the year which was not wonderful but i made it work, for the last 2 years that I was there i was kind of underemployed? i didn’t have enough tasks on my plate, so I would consistently ask other departments to give me work; and I spent a TON of time “looking busy”. i had a lot of residual trauma from that job where I was on the complete opposite side of the spectrum & a textbook case of the overwork that your article speaks of, so I left.
now I’m a “teaching artist” at a youth theater, no benefits, no paid time off, and if I’m very lucky my hourly wages at the end of this year will total to around $28k. i NEED full time hours, but on a good week they typically clock in at around 30-34 hours billed, on a bad week around 18-24. I am very good at my job and for the first time, I love what I do and DONT have imposter syndrome about work, but the job has more assignments & tasks due than any other position I’ve worked in my life. as a result in order to hit my deadlines and “save the show” and keep my job, I work at least 10hr a week off the clock. I’m really trying not to do this, but I’m a one person department and i HAVE to keep the plates spinning, because theater jobs are hard to come by, and nobody else knows how to do what I do. I was NEVER this kind of a person. I’m pro labor and try to think of myself as a leftist, but I feel like I’m failing at both of these things - to the detriment of my health & overall life.
needless to say I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering if working in my dream industry for super low pay is worth it, or if I’ll have to reinvent myself & switch industries a fourth time. It blows.
Hi!! Funnily enough, I was coming here to comment while thinking about a past job at a youth theatre (in fundraising, not as a teaching artist - but same deal, hourly, part time, no benefits, too much work in a very "save the show" kind of sense - not literally saving the show as you are doing, but, there's no second chance or "later" for submitting grants or making payroll). Anyway, that specific place is not really super relevant to what I was going to say but it means your comment caught my eye!
I am just here to very kindly be a person who says it directly - no, this is NOT sustainable (ask me how i know!), and no, it is not YOU who are "failing" at being a leftist/pro-labor, and none of this situation is your fault. You're keeping the plates spinning because you're a one-person department with a lot depending on you, and you care, and it's also powerful to finally love the work and feel good about it. And it is super unfair. What a loss to everyone if you have to switch industries again. But it IS to the detriment of your health and life and nothing YOU can do better or harder is going to change that. What MAY work is being a squeaky wheel to your management. I mean, I'm 100% sure they know already and have normalized it. But make them face it! Say it out loud! You're working off the clock (because there is too much work, not because you're doing it wrong) and they need to increase your hours to full time. They will say they cannot do this, and they might even be right about that for now, but they need to know they MUST build this into the next budget cycle. "This job needs to be full time to do right by our youth and best serve the mission." "This job needs to be full time in order for me to be here for the long term." "I am writing curriculum/buying materials/hanging lighting/putting out literal fires/etc for 10 hours outside of my actual hours. What would happen if I didn't do that? *intense stare, pregnant silence*" This is super scary but you cannot continue in this situation forever either way, so why not try the last-ditch effort of getting them to make it a real position? I'm saying this because it worked for me: after 2 years I was able to get an offer for a full-time position at that place. But by that time I was already leaving.
I am sorry to come here with a big old rant about things you have already thought about, but I feel for you so hard, I have been there, and that was the only solution I could see to make it salvageable. Don't sacrifice your wellbeing! It could take years to recover beyond the time that you actually leave. I honestly wish the best for you!
no honestly i figured no one would pass by this one because my situation is so niche but I feel seen on this day when you commented….so thank you!
I say teaching artist because i do a lot of teacher adjacent work like wrangling, keeping kids quiet, communicating directly with parents, discipline/rewarding good behavior etc but my real title is “production assistant” - but what this actually means is I’m the head of the wardrobe department, which consists of me! I design, pull/purchase, alter, sometimes construct, fit kids, and do all the paperwork involved (and there is a lot) in addition to general project management stuff - and it’s not one show at a time, I’m typically working on like 5-8 shows at a time because we contract out to elementary schools in the area. my record is 11 casts of different shows at once and when all is said and done from september to June of this year I will have worked on 35+ shows with this company in one season (my first). And next year we’re opening a second studio so the workload is about to get fiercer
needless to say I am scheduling a meeting with my boss to negotiate a hefty raise w/ft hours and a title change, because production assistant does not explain what I do at all and $16/hr for 18-34 hours on schedule a week doesn’t even get me off Medicaid. I just have to figure out a way to say all this and own my worth, which I KNOW I have, and not get too emotional about it, because genuinely I’m great at costumes and I do love working with kids, and my coworkers (who are mostly actual teachers!) are nice, helpful, and cooperative for the most part. I could see myself here for a long time if the pay & the billable hours increased.
Yes!!! Sorry it took me so long to reply - I'm so happy to hear this! The fact that you know something needs to change and your'e already working on it means you're ahead of the game already! (vs. being gaslit into thinking "This is fine" or "it's me, I'm the problem") I absolutely assumed when I read your comment that you were doing ALL those types of things, even without knowing exactly where it was focused, haha. I hope it ends up being okay to be a little emotional if your boss can sense that you really care, and I think it's super okay to just be blunt about the fact that it's not sustainable - the numbers say a lot - as well as how it can impact the work itself and the flow of the production for everyone. In fact, maybe some of your coworkers also feel this way, both about how you being overburdened affects their work downstream/upstream ... or about their own workloads. (In the collective spirit of this piece)
I also know from experience the lousy thing about having an unusual position/job title is it's really hard to find any comparable data about market rate pay, etc. But you may be able to find COL data for your general area, or salary data you can somehow "translate" to your job title via level of responsibility, if not specific duties. Anyway just to reiterate I think you're way ahead of the game and on the right track and I wish you good luck!
I've been struggling against overwork (both internally, against my inclinations and fears, and externally, against bosses and with coworkers) for the past five or so years of remote knowledge work.
But what's recently radicalized me about overwork even more is freelancing, which I started doing eight months ago. Now, if I want to work past 5:00 or on the weekend, it actually makes sense (though I try not to). The many cons of freelancing aside, the logic of work actually makes sense in that more work correlates with more pay.
That's made me much angrier about overwork in salaried industries where that correlation doesn't exist. You get paid what you get paid.
It's really made me wonder if there's a case for two extremes: Either you freelance in some capacity and can work more or less and get paid more or less; or you work salary and basically need a union to ensure you don't have to work more than your salary compensates you for. Even though the middle, full time without union, is what's normal, it now makes little to no sense to me.
Phew! Loved this piece. My current and last role were both launching and scaling internal startups. That kind of work comes with periods where there is just too much to be done within work hours, but I’ve always been honest with myself, my managers, and my team that I can only flex up for short periods of time. I “hit” a lot of life “milestones” (marriage, career advancement, kids) pretty young, and I think the thing that actually saved me from overwork (at my salaried job) was that my husband traveled all the time. I simply didn’t have the ability to work at night while solo parenting babies. Of course that meant that I took on much more of the unpaid labor in our household, but things have shifted now in terms of our workloads/schedules.
I think it’s great to see that a lot of Gen Z is setting more boundaries with work and resisting hustle culture (at least that’s the perception; haven’t seen a ton of research). With the ability to work from anywhere, and WFH becoming the norm, it can be all too easy for people new to the workforce (especially those without families) to work at all hours in an effort to show their dedication. I hope we continue to see pushback from Gen Z, and that Millennials and Gen X managers can better model those boundaries.
“Instead of figuring out how to connect all the lifeboats and ditching the ones with holes in the bottom, we keep frantically bailing our own.”
Yes! The irony is not lost on me that companies espouse “team work,” “go team,” “we are in this together,” but not really. It’s every employee against the others, who can maintain the right optics to maybe avoid making the next layoff list? I struggle with the cold reality of transactional relationship between me and my corporate employer. I work for a large tech company and felt the tectonic shift from last year to this year, as soon as “these tough economic times” became the rhetoric, the front line employees are the ones that bear the brunt of justifying worth to the corporate overlords, in the form of toxic, pointless metrics.
I’ve been struggling with office work for 2 decades. At the same time that work generates endless trainings, PowerPoints, and mantras for “how to be a good employee,” there’s no similar depth of guidance for much more important things- how to be a better parent, spouse, friend, or community member. Nor perhaps the time to focus on those things when work is so much of a drag on wellbeing.
Work is a very strong identity and a badge of honor for a lot of people. I can at least take satisfaction in not wearing that badge. But I haven’t figured out the rest of me yet. I have only so much time on the planet and there’s a lot more important things to do. I’m happiest when I have total free agency over my work life, and I probably don’t belong in a corporation but haven’t sorted any suitable alternative to support my family. I’m sure many folks will relate to this conundrum.
The malaise I feel make me question myself and my work ethic. But I DO want to work, who among us doesn’t want to produce value? I just don’t want to do it in service of “quarterly earnings expectations,” short-term thinking, and in service of the bullsh*t power trips and whims of leaders who don’t know my name but will decide how I ought to do my job or if my name goes on the next layoff list.
“Women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands. They have rich husbands because they step back from work.”
I am a woman who stepped back from work for/with a rich *wife*, and we talk all the time about our conscious decision to do that—neither of us is under any illusion that she miraculously, alone, by her own white-male-esque virtue, got a 15% raise or is going to make partner or brought in a dozen new clients the year and a half after I quit my job. We both understand the work I do (literally everything else) is grueling and not particularly enriching but essential and allows her the focus she needs to compete with the men at her firm.
AND YET it’s still exhausting swimming against the current of “real” work = good, homemaking = basic, easy, stupid, especially as we increasingly understand that we’re complicit in the seepage of overwork culture to people who don’t have our privilege, for whom it isn’t a choice. I have an MBA and recognize that it’s just good business for our household for one of us to stay home, but I also feel compelled to tell everyone I have an MBA so they don’t think I’m “just” a spoiled housewife.
I don’t really have a point other than to say it all sucks, and also that the book Bullshit Jobs is what convinced me to quit and also made me a UBI convert.
Bullshit Jobs is a deeply illuminating read (although honestly, I feel like the OG Graber essay on the topic gets the message across just as effectively as the whole book, if not moreso: https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/)
Totally agree.
This is a big part of why I went freelance. I make less money and have less stability, but I decide when my workday starts and ends. I say "no" to projects I don't have capacity to take on. I step away when I need to go to the dentist or take my cat to the vet on a weekday morning (or to grocery shop, if that's when it makes sense to do it!). If someone emails me at 6pm on a Friday, I respond the following Monday.
I recognize there's a lot of privilege at play that allows me to work this way, and part of the reason I have enough of a network to do it is that I worked for a decade in office jobs that did not respect balance or boundaries, and was generally successful at it. But I honestly felt like the only way to push back against unreasonable expectations was to not be an employee anymore. And I think it's pretty fucked up that it came to that.
I started freelancing as an urban planning consultant directly out of grad school, kind of accident rather than getting a "job"--and I am so glad that I made that choice! I never have to answer to anyone about why I'm leaving for school pickup or getting a haircut at 11am on a Tuesday, and it does feel a less shitty to be working late at night or the very occasional weekend when I know that I'm getting paid by the hour. I've just recently in the past year or two gotten really explicit about my boundaries to be a good boss to myself: deleting work email from my phone so that I'm not tempted to check on a Saturday, saying no to new projects, not working on a Sunday even when it feels like deadlines will crush me on a Monday.
Twelve years in, I am increasingly questioning this as a systemic choice though for two reasons. One, I can set my own boundaries--up to a point. If I want to engage in contracting for certain jobs, I am still part of the overall work ecosystem. I think urban planning isn't as cutthroat as some other fields so the overwork is dialed back just a bit, but my point of influence on the practices is fairly limited on my own. Second, I am questioning whether it's good for the profession and for the places we live to have individual consultants like me, floating around writing policies and zoning code for nine cities simultaneously, and maybe not really dialing into the local places and nuances? I've been thinking a lot about this article: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/03/21/1162242773/need-a-consultant-this-book-argues-hiring-one-might-actually-damage-your-institu
I'm an urban planner with almost a decade of experience all working directly for governments, and I'm incredibly surprised people hired you right out of grad school. It took me a year and a half after grad school to even get a job, I cannot fathom anyone giving me a consulting gig at that point in my career.
MTCW: I’m not sure if the answer is for everyone to “work for themselves.” Not everyone can work from home, work for themselves, or become digital nomads. Someone actually has to do the childcare, clean the streets, run the grocery stores, etc. I think your point about legislation and changing the playing field is really worth driving home here. We don’t all need to leave the game if we can change it. Maybe I like working as a garbage collector or librarian or publicist and really just need better, different structures in place to allow me to do that and live a whole healthy life. Working for yourself is still working for someone. See what influencer link under this story.
I absolutely agree - even as someone who chose to work for myself!
I hear this! I know for me personally, as someone in my late 30s with bills to pay who is not independently wealthy, starting over as a childcare provider or grocery worker or librarian at is not financially plausible. I'd love to shift to a more socially valuable career than the one I'm in, but I can't afford to live on those wages while waiting for sweeping policy changes to grant workers in those fields better pay. I support advocacy for better labor conditions and I vote accordingly, in hopes that others will have better options! But personally, I'm coming up on middle age, I don't own a home, and I don't have robust retirement savings. Putting my own wellbeing/future at risk to "stay in the game" sounds like a choice, but practically speaking it really isn't.
I hear you.... The piece seems to say that "being on the line" is a very relative perspective as those making more money, owning homes, etc, are also drowning in the same ocean of dysfunction. The only people not drowning or threading water in some way are those families in the one percent and under. I'm not suggesting you or anyone else stay in the game but rather change it, which of course takes a lot of risk for "all" involved. I think the piece also seems to say that most people aren't voting as if they are ready to make our elected officials do anything different. So, I think we're "in the game" we have for a while, whether you work for yourself or not.
This makes me think about how “burnout” has been appropriated by capitalism... sure, take a break when you’re burned out, but then DO make sure you come back to doing just as much work until you burn out again and again and again....
What if we all just worked less in general? What if we lowered the bar, and then lowered it again just to be sure?
Wow, this got me thinking in so many different directions.I feel like you draw nicely on the idea that many of these systems are participatory, and that they either force or incentivize participation in a way that precludes—or at least minimizes—group resistance.
A friend of mine recently finished med school later in life, and one of the things he was struck by was how unhealthy the whole process was. He said the general attitude from other doctors was "I went through this so you have to go through this." This seems to be a common theme in certain professions. (I had the feeling you'd written about this practice but I couldn't remember where.)Anyway, that all got me thinking about the French writer Édouard Louis's work. I started reading it early in the pandemic. He thinks a lot about ways that violence perpetuates violence—the ways that people who are treated violently so often enact that violence on others. He is very influenced by Bourdieu and his idea of symbolic violence ("Bourdieu's term for the imposition on subordinated groups by the dominant class of an ideology which legitimates and naturalizes the status quo"-borrowed from https://www.oxfordreference.com, because I'm not a philosopher). Reading your piece, I kept thinking about how these sliding work practices feel like forms of symbolic violence.
Lastly, I was listening to Ezra Klein's interview with Danielle Allen over the weekend and was really struck by something Allen said: "Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again." I do a lot of work/thinking about ideas of maintenance and Allen's sentence spoke to me about how the systems we design demand constant attention/maintenance—the same way a car engine requires maintenance. I think you so nicely highlight here how poorly maintained many of our systems around work have been, and how hard that maintenance work is without proper legislation. So many of the things you highlight reek of systems that have been allowed to decay. And that decay, in turn, is self-perpetuating: It eats up community investment, free time, socializing, mental health.
So much here to think about. Thank you.
The tenure track in higher ed is a lot like med school in that once people have run the gauntlet, they think everyone else should too. At least that seems to be the case at my R1 university.
And the anger that some people feel around student debt forgiveness and how it’s not “fair” for those who’ve had to deal with debt.
Thanks for this comment- you’ve weaved in some great commentary
A small part of the larger problem, but the 43% of workers who feel guilty about the additional workload put on their peers when they use PTO is another example of how corporations take advantage of us. I'm on a small team, and nothing feels worse than coming back from vacation to learn that my peers' week was busier and more stressful as a result of me using days I was entitled to. Another burden we all bear in service of the almighty corporation :-/
Expressing solidarity today - 155,000 Canadian public servants are on strike. Pay people what they are worth!
Thanks for this piece. One thing popped to mind that feels related but is outside the scope of this piece (or might be reflected in some of the links you included) - "job creep" in hourly/retail settings as a type of overwork. So, not JUST the relentless invasive metrics/tracking technology gig workers are subjected to now. It's also the kind of weird psychological pressure to perform as if you were getting paid on commission .... when you're not. The pressure is INTENSE, as anyone knows who has ever had to push customers to apply for a branded credit card at checkout.
I used to have a part-time nonprofit job that I took in order to get out of a toxic workplace. I knew it wasn't going to pay the bills, so I layered on a part-time retail job (not chosen for any particular reason, I just didn't have a car at the time, and the jobs were in walking distance of one another; I could use the same bus stop for each). It was an upscaleish home furnishings national chain and it was so grim. Every sale at the register was "tracked" with the ID number of whoever had helped the customer. At the end of the day, the manager called into regional HQ and literally reported total sales for everyone that day, by name. WHY? Again, you will be paid exactly the same amount of money whether you make sales or not. We'd received marginal training on the products but the store advertised expert services, so it was to our advantage to just straight make shit up to sound knowledgeable and make customers feel good about their purchases. Moreover all of us were under such intense pressure to be chipper and have a good attitude. While closing, I would listen to the managers switch on their "happy voice" to leave an upbeat EOD report for regional. All possible because of the absolute precarity (threat of being fired or punished with not enough hours) and, I think, also because they could dangle the promise of a manager job over all of us. At the time (about a decade ago) a store manager job paid $40k and had benefits, so it was a serious material improvement, even if you had no interest in the company or "advancing" for any other reason.
All these companies are the same, so there's probably no reason for me to have gone into that level of detail about this specific one, but I think about it constantly when I'm out in the world buying stuff, when I'm thinking about the infuriating behavior of managers in Starbucks union-busting; they all rely on this culty environment to make profit margins work and I would love to read more about this psychological underpinning.
Nowadays I also think about it in my desk job, where sometimes it feels like SETTING ANNUAL GOALS!!! and CAREER DEVELOPMENT!!! is really just a giant scam to get us to work outside the scope of our jobs; unless your path to promotion has been spelled out, there's really no connection between increased effort and increased pay. Sometimes it doesn't feel so different from selling silk drapes and throw pillows with manufactured enthusiasm.
I really enjoyed reading about your experience. You connected some dots in my head. I work at a library and I sh*t you not that we're getting pressured intensely into coercing patrons to borrow more books. If they come in for one book, we're supposed to try to get them to borrow two or three. And management is trying to get us to set measurable goals that they'll put in our annual performance review under the guise of "professional development." But you're right - there's no connection between increased effort and increased pay.
I really hate to see the "let's run x like a business" mentality take over libraries. They're one of the few places where people can go and NOT feel pressured into "buying" anything. Never mind that output measures like number of circs don't fully illustrate the impact that a library has on the community. But counting beans is a lot easier than counting outcomes.
Except that libraries report their circulation, number of visitors, and number of programs/events at the state level (and sometimes at the national level), and that helps determine their funding. People who want to support libraries need to visit them regularly and make an effort to check out more books.
I was a grant writer for most of my career (though mostly private foundation funding, not big gnarly government agency funding processes). And one eye-opening thing that sort of slowly sunk in over time: no one really knows how to measure anything, but they have to do it anyway. Money is moved around based on what CAN be measured, what is easiest to name (number of participants, events, sure!) And that is measuring activity, not impact. Don't get me wrong, I don't have the answer. I don't think there are many accessible ways that most orgs on the ground can "measure" personal impact (in one person's life) or long-term impact (so-called "moving the needle") in a way that passes muster with the federal government. And that's just sort of the reality we're in. There is an idea called trust-based philanthropy that (in my mind) is somewhat connected to this reality and the fact that some things may not ever be easily defined.
In the meantime, we have metrics.
Thank you for saying that - I was feeling a little guilty about derailing from the very-worthy topic of white collar overwork, and even though it's somewhat connected in my head/experience, it's not really the same phenomenon. BUT also I would have never made the connection to libraries, so now I have something new to think about, too - thank you.
I really believe that - in their best purest form - goals and professional development can be wonderful ways of allowing workers some autonomy, that rare thing - having a say in what you work on and how. And I DO read it as "support" ... if companies actually make good on providing you with actual opportunities, not just responsibilities. You know, actual money and time and prioritization for training, for new projects. BUT ... I just filled out my THIRD annual self-review in a row with pretty much the SAME THREE GOALS as I've had since I started my job ... because the entirety of my time and energy has been consumed just keeping up with the baseline job description, the day to day work. And let me tell you, going through this exercise is kind of soul-crushing at this point. Both the suggestion that I should or could be doing more when I'm already barely getting by, and the bleakness of knowing that I HAVE ideas - lots of them! - that I won't ever be able to actually work on. This is punishing! This is not a good system! Why am I spelling out new ways I could contribute to the company if the company is not actually supporting that work in any way except to say "be better, do more!" and putting it on me as an individual to manage my time magically? This is the mindf*&k weirdness I'm talking about at all levels of American business, not just that you should work constantly, but that you should maintain a kind of personal enthusiasm and show of investment in your own overwork. I guess that's the thread I was thinking about from the white-collar culture essay, it's sort of everywhere in different ways.
"The data isn’t surprising. But it underlines something that we’ve been talking about for some time now. The more educated you are, the more money you make — the more time you spend working, and the slipperier your work becomes, oozing into all corners of your life. The more you’re paid, the more ostensibly prestigious your job, the more time you spend working outside of standard working hours."
I don't think overwork is particular to the educated, but I do think measuring this by email makes it look that way. When I worked retail everyone had multiple jobs, many of them taking place "after work hours." Is it really a luxury to "not get emails after hours" if you're standing on your feet at 11pm working your second shift of the day?
This is where the data on underwork is clarifying (included slightly lower in the piece) - a big chunk of lower income workers report not having *enough* hours. This has also been a trend for sometime, and it’s in part the work of non-unionized retail jobs keeping hours just low enough to not be forced to provide benefits. Some people just don’t have enough hours (or enough money); others take on another job (but that’s harder when, as many retail jobs now do, your scheduling is erratic and decided just a week before). Hence: not enough work.
I have genuine questions about that data. Is this not enough work at one job? Because absolutely, almost no one gets 40 hours at their one retail job, which is why people often have other things they do to make money, whether that's multiple retail jobs, babysitting, pet sitting, any kind of gig work. Are people reporting that they don't get enough hours at their main job while still working quite a bit outside standard working hours? (ie, perhaps just as much as the knowledge worker answering an email).
This report has a big section on involuntary underemployment that I find useful - including some survey data from retail workers: https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Collateral-Damage.pdf
Also want to underline that I’m not disagreeing with you that working two lower paying jobs is definitely harder than checking emails at home with Netflix in the back - but that normalization of overwork helps normalize overwork in *all* industries.
Thank you for the link!
In evaluating the statement: "the more educated you are, the more money you make — the more time you spend working, and the slipperier your work becomes, oozing into all corners of your life" I think I would need to know what number of part time workers are working more than 40 hours total across all the things they do for employment.
I agree that everyone needs the ability to work less in all sectors, but I just don't see support for the idea that it is educated people who are most burdened by working at crappy times or more than 40 hours/week. It sucks for both kinds of workers sure, but the ability to "not think about work outside of work" is an often romanticized aspect of crap jobs and it's like, okay sure, but when is "outside of work" if the day is 11-12 hours of working, even if across two jobs?
This is a really good point, and I definitely don’t think white collar workers are more over-burdened - but I do think that it’s easier for this type of work to subsume one’s identity (to become your identity!!) making it difficult to even see it *as work*….which then makes it harder to understand why it can and should be regulated, why resisting regulations has ramifications on all people who work.
Excellent piece! I was the overwork queen ... until the pandemic broke something in me and everything became so much clearer. Now I work for a company that doesn’t operate on Friday afternoons and doesn’t email at night or on weekends. It’s fantastic and I’m never going back to my old ways. But I need to get better at taking vacation. Thanks for giving us things to consider in this realm!
I turned down a promotion two weeks ago because the position required checking emails after hours, weekends, and holidays. State government position tied to an industry that runs 24 hrs a day. My supervisor wasn't willing to negotiate on salary and wanted to pay me significantly less than others already in the position, for an undetermined amount of time. This low salary was due to experience I am lacking, but it wasn't that lack of experience that would require me to answer my phone at midnight if needed. I was filling in after the previous person in the position passed away. I filled in for a month before we got around to the salary negotiation and that month showed me clearly the salary didn't even come close to meeting the overwork levels required. So I said no-with the full support of my spouse.
The sense of relief I felt after saying no has made it clear I made the right decision for me. I fully recognize my privilege in being able to turn the promotion down. But if they weren't going to highly compensate me to give part of my life to them, more than they already get in a standard working day, it wasn't worth it for me. Reading this article today reinforces my decision and once again reaffirms my choice. Thank you!
love love loved this one. Thank you AHP!
see the thing that is wild for me is that my experience has been the complete opposite…when I worked a “stable” office job with benefits & hourly wages totaling around $43k at the end of the year which was not wonderful but i made it work, for the last 2 years that I was there i was kind of underemployed? i didn’t have enough tasks on my plate, so I would consistently ask other departments to give me work; and I spent a TON of time “looking busy”. i had a lot of residual trauma from that job where I was on the complete opposite side of the spectrum & a textbook case of the overwork that your article speaks of, so I left.
now I’m a “teaching artist” at a youth theater, no benefits, no paid time off, and if I’m very lucky my hourly wages at the end of this year will total to around $28k. i NEED full time hours, but on a good week they typically clock in at around 30-34 hours billed, on a bad week around 18-24. I am very good at my job and for the first time, I love what I do and DONT have imposter syndrome about work, but the job has more assignments & tasks due than any other position I’ve worked in my life. as a result in order to hit my deadlines and “save the show” and keep my job, I work at least 10hr a week off the clock. I’m really trying not to do this, but I’m a one person department and i HAVE to keep the plates spinning, because theater jobs are hard to come by, and nobody else knows how to do what I do. I was NEVER this kind of a person. I’m pro labor and try to think of myself as a leftist, but I feel like I’m failing at both of these things - to the detriment of my health & overall life.
needless to say I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering if working in my dream industry for super low pay is worth it, or if I’ll have to reinvent myself & switch industries a fourth time. It blows.
Hi!! Funnily enough, I was coming here to comment while thinking about a past job at a youth theatre (in fundraising, not as a teaching artist - but same deal, hourly, part time, no benefits, too much work in a very "save the show" kind of sense - not literally saving the show as you are doing, but, there's no second chance or "later" for submitting grants or making payroll). Anyway, that specific place is not really super relevant to what I was going to say but it means your comment caught my eye!
I am just here to very kindly be a person who says it directly - no, this is NOT sustainable (ask me how i know!), and no, it is not YOU who are "failing" at being a leftist/pro-labor, and none of this situation is your fault. You're keeping the plates spinning because you're a one-person department with a lot depending on you, and you care, and it's also powerful to finally love the work and feel good about it. And it is super unfair. What a loss to everyone if you have to switch industries again. But it IS to the detriment of your health and life and nothing YOU can do better or harder is going to change that. What MAY work is being a squeaky wheel to your management. I mean, I'm 100% sure they know already and have normalized it. But make them face it! Say it out loud! You're working off the clock (because there is too much work, not because you're doing it wrong) and they need to increase your hours to full time. They will say they cannot do this, and they might even be right about that for now, but they need to know they MUST build this into the next budget cycle. "This job needs to be full time to do right by our youth and best serve the mission." "This job needs to be full time in order for me to be here for the long term." "I am writing curriculum/buying materials/hanging lighting/putting out literal fires/etc for 10 hours outside of my actual hours. What would happen if I didn't do that? *intense stare, pregnant silence*" This is super scary but you cannot continue in this situation forever either way, so why not try the last-ditch effort of getting them to make it a real position? I'm saying this because it worked for me: after 2 years I was able to get an offer for a full-time position at that place. But by that time I was already leaving.
I am sorry to come here with a big old rant about things you have already thought about, but I feel for you so hard, I have been there, and that was the only solution I could see to make it salvageable. Don't sacrifice your wellbeing! It could take years to recover beyond the time that you actually leave. I honestly wish the best for you!
no honestly i figured no one would pass by this one because my situation is so niche but I feel seen on this day when you commented….so thank you!
I say teaching artist because i do a lot of teacher adjacent work like wrangling, keeping kids quiet, communicating directly with parents, discipline/rewarding good behavior etc but my real title is “production assistant” - but what this actually means is I’m the head of the wardrobe department, which consists of me! I design, pull/purchase, alter, sometimes construct, fit kids, and do all the paperwork involved (and there is a lot) in addition to general project management stuff - and it’s not one show at a time, I’m typically working on like 5-8 shows at a time because we contract out to elementary schools in the area. my record is 11 casts of different shows at once and when all is said and done from september to June of this year I will have worked on 35+ shows with this company in one season (my first). And next year we’re opening a second studio so the workload is about to get fiercer
needless to say I am scheduling a meeting with my boss to negotiate a hefty raise w/ft hours and a title change, because production assistant does not explain what I do at all and $16/hr for 18-34 hours on schedule a week doesn’t even get me off Medicaid. I just have to figure out a way to say all this and own my worth, which I KNOW I have, and not get too emotional about it, because genuinely I’m great at costumes and I do love working with kids, and my coworkers (who are mostly actual teachers!) are nice, helpful, and cooperative for the most part. I could see myself here for a long time if the pay & the billable hours increased.
Yes!!! Sorry it took me so long to reply - I'm so happy to hear this! The fact that you know something needs to change and your'e already working on it means you're ahead of the game already! (vs. being gaslit into thinking "This is fine" or "it's me, I'm the problem") I absolutely assumed when I read your comment that you were doing ALL those types of things, even without knowing exactly where it was focused, haha. I hope it ends up being okay to be a little emotional if your boss can sense that you really care, and I think it's super okay to just be blunt about the fact that it's not sustainable - the numbers say a lot - as well as how it can impact the work itself and the flow of the production for everyone. In fact, maybe some of your coworkers also feel this way, both about how you being overburdened affects their work downstream/upstream ... or about their own workloads. (In the collective spirit of this piece)
I also know from experience the lousy thing about having an unusual position/job title is it's really hard to find any comparable data about market rate pay, etc. But you may be able to find COL data for your general area, or salary data you can somehow "translate" to your job title via level of responsibility, if not specific duties. Anyway just to reiterate I think you're way ahead of the game and on the right track and I wish you good luck!
I've been struggling against overwork (both internally, against my inclinations and fears, and externally, against bosses and with coworkers) for the past five or so years of remote knowledge work.
But what's recently radicalized me about overwork even more is freelancing, which I started doing eight months ago. Now, if I want to work past 5:00 or on the weekend, it actually makes sense (though I try not to). The many cons of freelancing aside, the logic of work actually makes sense in that more work correlates with more pay.
That's made me much angrier about overwork in salaried industries where that correlation doesn't exist. You get paid what you get paid.
It's really made me wonder if there's a case for two extremes: Either you freelance in some capacity and can work more or less and get paid more or less; or you work salary and basically need a union to ensure you don't have to work more than your salary compensates you for. Even though the middle, full time without union, is what's normal, it now makes little to no sense to me.
Phew! Loved this piece. My current and last role were both launching and scaling internal startups. That kind of work comes with periods where there is just too much to be done within work hours, but I’ve always been honest with myself, my managers, and my team that I can only flex up for short periods of time. I “hit” a lot of life “milestones” (marriage, career advancement, kids) pretty young, and I think the thing that actually saved me from overwork (at my salaried job) was that my husband traveled all the time. I simply didn’t have the ability to work at night while solo parenting babies. Of course that meant that I took on much more of the unpaid labor in our household, but things have shifted now in terms of our workloads/schedules.
I think it’s great to see that a lot of Gen Z is setting more boundaries with work and resisting hustle culture (at least that’s the perception; haven’t seen a ton of research). With the ability to work from anywhere, and WFH becoming the norm, it can be all too easy for people new to the workforce (especially those without families) to work at all hours in an effort to show their dedication. I hope we continue to see pushback from Gen Z, and that Millennials and Gen X managers can better model those boundaries.
“Instead of figuring out how to connect all the lifeboats and ditching the ones with holes in the bottom, we keep frantically bailing our own.”
Yes! The irony is not lost on me that companies espouse “team work,” “go team,” “we are in this together,” but not really. It’s every employee against the others, who can maintain the right optics to maybe avoid making the next layoff list? I struggle with the cold reality of transactional relationship between me and my corporate employer. I work for a large tech company and felt the tectonic shift from last year to this year, as soon as “these tough economic times” became the rhetoric, the front line employees are the ones that bear the brunt of justifying worth to the corporate overlords, in the form of toxic, pointless metrics.
I’ve been struggling with office work for 2 decades. At the same time that work generates endless trainings, PowerPoints, and mantras for “how to be a good employee,” there’s no similar depth of guidance for much more important things- how to be a better parent, spouse, friend, or community member. Nor perhaps the time to focus on those things when work is so much of a drag on wellbeing.
Work is a very strong identity and a badge of honor for a lot of people. I can at least take satisfaction in not wearing that badge. But I haven’t figured out the rest of me yet. I have only so much time on the planet and there’s a lot more important things to do. I’m happiest when I have total free agency over my work life, and I probably don’t belong in a corporation but haven’t sorted any suitable alternative to support my family. I’m sure many folks will relate to this conundrum.
The malaise I feel make me question myself and my work ethic. But I DO want to work, who among us doesn’t want to produce value? I just don’t want to do it in service of “quarterly earnings expectations,” short-term thinking, and in service of the bullsh*t power trips and whims of leaders who don’t know my name but will decide how I ought to do my job or if my name goes on the next layoff list.
Can’t help but think of the contingent vs tenure track faculty dynamic
Part of the fissured workplace for sure! I’m heartened though by contingent organizing.