AliceFraser
patreon
New Tea With Alice with Dan Ilic, and Contemplations on The Nature of Work
🕑 Added 2021-09-24 04:52:27 +0000 UTCHallo lovely Patreonites
I made a joke once that the joy of working for yourself is that you suddenly find out you're a terrible employee AND a terrible boss.
I'm seeing more and more discussion online of the nature of work, particularly when it comes to a critical engagement with capitalism, and the failures of ... let's call it American-style capitalism; libertarian capitalism, 'the market will sort it out' capitalism. I'm calling it now, the market is an idiot, and where your stall is in the market makes a difference, and that invisible hand is creepy.
I see business owners in America and to a lesser extent the U.K. bemoan a lack of workers willing to take that minimum wage, and say they can't afford to run their business if they're required to pay more. At which complaint I sort of think, if you can't afford to pay your workers, you don't have a business, you have a weird cult? Like, a business is a double ended device, isn't it?
I see people in minimum wage jobs (which phrase has a very different meaning depending on which country you happen to be earning that wage) asking, 'why should we work if it doesn't make us safe?', 'What is work really worth, if we can't figure out a system to accurately quantify the economic impact of things like healthcare in a way that figures out to pay those workers decently?', 'Why should we work if it doesn't guarantee our stake in society?', 'What are we paying into if it doesn't pay out?'
Why does the narrative of the good worker demand we be passionate about our work, while at the same time suggesting that people who are happy and relaxed at work are somehow suspect?
All of this is something I'm thinking about as someone who is in the Arts, which constantly has to confront ideas about what is work and what isn't (and to a parallel or orthogonal extent, as someone being pregnant, thinking about what kind of work this is).
We have this cultural emphasis on work as cost; that it must take something out of us to be valid - work that is nourishing or enjoyable or comes easily is seen as somehow a trick or a cheat. Work that involves looking after yourself or others is seen as not the same as real work - whether it's being the full time carer of a family member, or sweeping up the mental health shards of a friend twice a week.
I have friends with chronic illness who spend the equivalent of a full time job sorting out their medical care or basic needs and nonetheless think of themselves as useless or not-working because they're not contributing to the economy, while there are plenty of corporate people in jobs that might for years or decades be loss leaders, or subsidised by the government or actively wasting resources to literally no positive economic outcome like decorative automata on a clockwork display who would never question whether what they do is real work or not.
What about the colleagues who work for years to pitch a show, get it picked up, funded, written, cast, rehearsed, filmed, and then cancelled before it goes to air? Is that work? What if it's never funded? At what point do things cross over into being work, and at what point do they stop being work?
Anyway, as ever, no conclusions, just some thinking.
New Tea With Alice: Dan Ilic
Dan Ilic of A Rational Fear is a very old friend of mine, and a relentless participator in things, creator of work and the genesis of jobs for other people. We chatted in our separate houses in Sydney Lockdown about climate change, helplessness and activism.
Here you go: http://apple.co/2oyL7Vy
Non- itunes listeners can catch it here
Find Dan and A Rational Fear on Patreon Here
--
If you like any of my work, please do share it around - that is a profoundly impactful way to support this little project.
xx
A
Comments
Meagan
There's a great little coffee shop in the town I live that during covid had to shut down a location because they couldn't get anybody to work for them. Minimum wage was all they paid. People around town of course bemoan that those getting unemployment are "too lazy" to take a job, and here was a "perfectly good" job somebody could take. It's really complicated my feelings for this coffee shop, the owners (who are lovely people) and the town I live in.
Without rules, rugby would just be a fight in a field. With too many rules it would no longer be a game. To consider capitalism as somehow separable from regulations and laws is not something that I can make sense of. There will always be some balance and to talk of capitalism being "broken" misses what I believe is the more important point - societies may be losing the ability to collectively agree on where the right amount of regulation is. I work in a highly regulated industry in a Communist country and there is still plenty of room for capitalism. This society just chooses to have a bit less than what is possible. Very troubling for me of late is that much of what calls itself innovation is nothing cleverer than a regulatory arbitrage.
"Anyway, as ever, no conclusions, just some thinking. " Your thinking is great and much appreciated. Please keep doing that!
This is all absolutes vs. nuance / degrees of difference: Our Neolithic brains are almost hard-wired to give a very fast decision in a fight-or-flight situation that something is "good" or "bad". Very binary, and important if you're about to be eaten by a tiger, or need to chase down a woolly mammoth. But kinda useless for modern life. Capitalist dogma "the market will sort it all out efficiently" was written by the sharks, who are largely compassion-less and put no value on the un-measurable human aspects. But even in good ol' US of A their markets are not 100% un-regulated. So the black of white argument is never productive, since we can always point to where society, through government, has to step in and regulate the Capitalist Beast. The conversation therefore should really be about degrees of regulation; how much of a Public Service (for the good of a general population) should be allowed to be borne by private enterprise, and what regulatory framework makes sense. My personal view is that Private Enterprise should be nowhere near Public Health preventative measures because there is no linkable business case for such an insurance policy, where the benefit is a number of random people don't die (look at UK Conservatives foolishly chopping our Pandemic advisory board literally only a few months before Covid-19 hit. That was a *huge* thing that cost many British lives, but was barely mentioned). That said, there's a good case in sub-contracting to Private Enterprise, if they can deliver innovation and more efficient service, since they can adopt new technologies much faster, and the Public body can simply dismiss a lagging provider in favour of something better without suffering Public Sector inertia or staff restrictions. *Then* we're back to governance: such a system needs an properly accountable governing body, and tight rules to stop politicians interfering too much. As we've seen in the recent UK cases of Ministers enriching their Party donors / Pals with useless equipment! I'll get off my soapbox now...
Capitalism has done really well for itself, as confidence tricks go. Maybe people are onto it now
