The Beginning of the End of Meaningless Work
The New Republic
The New Republic is the voice of creative thinkers, united by a collective desire to challenge the status quo.
“When was the last time we really had terms with which or the occasion for questioning the quality of people’s work?” Kathi Weeks, professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, asked when we spoke in December, which, at that point, had been the?deadliest month?so far of the Covid-19 pandemic, with 12 million workers’?unemployment benefits?at risk, and the virus still spiking. “And not just the quality of what the labor process is like—is it a good job? Is it a bad job?—or the remuneration, but does the work have any purpose?” The pandemic gives us an opportunity to ask questions usually submerged under the presumption that work is fundamentally valuable. Jobs are often tautologically self-justifying; work is good, because it’s good to work. “Nobody asks what jobs or what would be the output of these jobs. Do we need the output? No, we just need the jobs so we don’t care about the output,” Weeks said.
The Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated this questioning—a return to an understanding of work as a site of struggle, not liberation. It has also introduced a new kind of laborer: the “essential worker,” tying together workers who typically are not seen as having a shared fate, from grocery store cashiers to nurses, food app delivery drivers to teachers. Workers in meatpacking plants, in Amazon warehouses, in critical infrastructure have been recognized as fundamental in maintaining society as we know it, even as their labor is demeaned and their lives endangered. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI)?estimates?that there are more than 55 million workers across 12 industries who now share this label: 70 percent didn’t have a college degree; one in eight were covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In frontline essential work, the Center for Economic and Policy Research?found, women and people of color are overrepresented (disaggregated data on women of color was not presented). They also found that one-third of essential workers live in low-income families.
Essential work, as a category, crosses divides, as Weeks pointed out. At the same time, it may also update the outmoded image of the mythic working class as personified by a white, male, blue-collar, industrial worker to a more accurate representation. Yet saying work is?essential?is not the same thing as saying it is good. It’s to recognize that there is a social value to the work beyond its ability to generate profit. It can be easy to fall into a kind of saccharine heroism over essential workers: the yard signs, the applause at 7 o’clock (which also faded long before the pandemic had given any indication of slowing). With women whose essential work is care work, the deification can lead paradoxically to making their work invisible, as if nurses and teachers are just doing what comes naturally, “doing what they love.”
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