I always knew there was something wrong with going to work—with having to get out of bed, immediately eat breakfast and get dressed, get into a car and drive to some place, and be there from 9-5, Monday through Friday, unless you got special permission to stay away by saying you were sick or had to go to the doctor or sometimes got vacation (“time off”).

I knew there was something wrong with work in the way my mother once spoke of her own job: we all have to do something for forty hours every week, she said when I was growing up, her voice heavy. That’s the way things are, she seemed to be saying. But her voice betrayed no hint that she thought, This Should Change or, We Have To Change This. (My father, too, in what I felt was a rare moment of candor, would admit, decades later, that the grind of 30 years of full-time work had really taken a toll on him physically.) My mother raised my sister and me as a single parent in the 1980s and ’90s. While we got ready for school, she got ready for work. The smell of burnt toaster crumbs (or was it Pop-Tarts?) reminds me of those mornings when she did her makeup at the dining room table with Bryant Gumbel’s “Today” show on the TV and the window air-conditioning unit blowing its miserable cold air onto us. (To this day, I hate window air-conditioning units in part because they remind me of those sleepy, too-cold mornings.) School was the thing I knew we were attending in order to prepare ourselves to one day do what our mother and every other adult did every day. School wasn’t for fun, for exploration, or anything like that. It was job preparation, and I damn well knew it.

I now understand the years of my upbringing as the “neoliberal” era, when the welfare state was scaled back with “welfare reform” and austerity, privatization was in vogue, and the hyper-individualism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took hold. Individual grit and resilience? My mother certainly got the message that those were the qualities required to raise two kids alone, and she passed them down to us. We understood, although we never spoke of it, that there was no society out there for us to fall back on as a family of modest means: just our extended family and our neighbors and maybe our teachers at public school. But even teachers we didn’t really think of as community members (or laborers). They weren’t our neighbors, and we didn’t even know where they lived or what they did once they left the school building each day. I confess, I never thought of my teachers or the lives they led outside the classroom. Maybe that was because I was a bookish kid, my mind focused on my schoolwork and not much else.

Actually, I never thought about people as laborers, either, even though I understood that every adult had to do “work.” My parents were both college-educated, and their jobs mostly involved sitting behind desks or working in quiet rooms while dressed in a suit or business casual. My father was an attorney for the city, and my mother, after their divorce, went from homemaker to substitute teacher to welfare caseworker to college math tutor and, eventually, math instructor. Other adults in my family had office-based jobs or were in college.

As a child, then, I was blissfully unaware of manual labor and the laborers behind it. I never had to think about the work of lawn-mowing or restaurant dishwashing or grocery bagging (back when we had grocery baggers who would take things out to your car!) or produce picking or clothes-folding in the mall or the workers who did those jobs, even though I saw many of these people all the time. (I don’t remember anyone in my family having a negative attitude toward working-class people; it’s more that we lacked a conscious recognition of them.) Perhaps oddly, my realization that I was oblivious to the more physical kinds of working-class labor occurred in college, when I started reading the New York Times regularly for a journalism class (it was a requirement). I remember reading about labor disputes and about corporate wrongdoing and thinking, it sounds like workers have shit stacked against them. And that was just from reading the liberal-sanitized stories coming from the Times, before I got into progressive media a few years later. But I never thought about labor problems as applying to me. I, unlike the workers in news stories, had plans to go to medical school. I was going to get a job where I didn’t have to sit behind a desk or listen to some boss tell me what to do. I didn’t think of doctoring as a kind of labor all its own—certainly not as a profession whose workers are exploited, just as they are in practically every other line of work. What an ignorant fantasy world I lived in!

I also knew there was something wrong with work when I got my first job out of college, which required a bachelor’s degree yet paid only $21,000 a year (about $35,000 in today’s dollars). At that time, I began to realize that there was also something very wrong with the system of higher education that I had graduated from. I had obtained my college degree—from an “elite” institution, no less—with $40,000 of debt (and that was with scholarships and grants). College was supposed to be one’s ticket to financial success, one’s way of paying off all that (very reasonably sought out) debt. Yet how was I supposed to pay off this debt when the best job I could get in my hometown in South Texas paid $21,000 a year? I rationalized these contradictions by assuming that I just needed more education to increase my earning potential.

Admittedly, it felt pretty deflating to go from being a high school valedictorian to a student at a famous New England college—supposedly, as your teachers and counselors tell you, headed for some kind of greatness—to… living at home in my childhood bedroom and driving a used, dumpy $7,500 car to a job I didn’t like. I showed up every day to the workplace to sit behind a desk and help researchers recruit teenagers and young adults for their studies on binge drinking and cocaine use. In exchange for a small payment, the teenagers were subjected to questionnaires, psychiatric assessments, and spinal taps to study their nervous systems. It was extremely boring work, and I was frustrated by having to be there all day, every day, in the same drab office building, in an office with no window. Two of my three similar-age coworkers were also pre-meds, and I wonder if that’s why it was so unpleasant there: people who think they’re climbing the socioeconomic ladder tend to be competitive or just don’t care about anyone else around them. I’m certain I was self-absorbed at that age. I also didn’t care much for the other pre-meds’ behavior: one of them was fired a few months after I got there for allegedly stealing petty cash from the institution.

Anyway, we pre-meds were headed for better things. That job was just a stop along the way. But our fourth coworker, who was married with a young child, hadn’t taken the job as a placeholder. For her, the job was no stepping stone. It was just her job. How could she support her family on such a salary? I wondered. This alarmed me at the time. But not too much. Again, I was on the way up. Thank God that isn’t me, I thought.

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”  —Charles Bukowski, “Factotum”

Now I understand that all of us who work for a wage (whether a single job or multiple jobs) in order to earn a living are essentially in the same position. There is no escaping economic precarity in a society like ours—unless one is born into wealth, that is, or exploits others for profit. And no amount of education or culturedness or any professional-class job will shield you from the rampant exploitation that is core to a society that subordinates everything to profit. Worker exploitation runs the gamut from the unfair (wage theft, union busting, gender wage gaps, the precarity of the “gig economy”) to the horrific (child labor, dangerous working conditions). 

I can speak to the exploitation of the medical profession. First, clinical training is simply a form of hazing, with higher-ups and other staff members inflicting everything from emotional abuse to sexual harassment to discrimination onto trainees while they work unnecessarily grueling schedules. Some trainees have started to fight back by unionizing, and the training system itself has allowed reforms that have scaled back brutal 30-plus-hour shifts (every three to four days) to a slightly more humane 24-hour shift. But under the current system, trainees are still allowed to work up to 80 hours per week on average. 

The entire system, from training to clinical practice, is built upon not only the myth of the physician as some benevolent, all-knowing dictator and dispenser of medical care—someone who, accordingly, should be brutalized into competence just the way the old guard was—but is also subordinated to the bottom line. Training itself amounts to a huge transfer of wealth from the public to the for-profit private sector. Medicare funds at least part of physician training—physicians are, I believe, supposed to be stewards of the public’s health—and then physicians go on to provide the labor that allows health insurance and pharmacy benefit management companies to profit off of people’s sickness and deny them care. And everything about clinical practice—how many appointments your doctor has been allotted for the day, how much time they spend with you, how much they get paid—is dictated by the bottom line, which is heavily influenced by insurance companies and their administrative burdens and reimbursement rules. Doctors only really get paid for time spent with patients, not for any of the administrative work generated by those patient visits. (The boss, after all, is telling you what to do, you just don’t see them because they are an insurance company located somewhere else.)

Recently, I went to see an ophthalmologist for my yearly eye exam. I was shocked when the medical assistant told me that the doctor sees 80 patients a day. Eighty! Divided over eight hours (not including lunch!), that’s a patient every six minutes. How could it be possible to give good care in six minutes? It’s not! (In physician parlance, this kind of high-volume clinic is called a “patient mill.”)

A major reason I left clinical practice (pre-pandemic) after six years as a general pediatrician was that the economics of the workday were unsustainable in terms of patient workload—and this was even in my particular case as a part-time (32 hours per week) clinician.¹ In clinical practice, the conditions of work lead to 360 degrees of unhappiness among staff. Patients start to resent the doctors (doctors spend so little time with you!); doctors start to resent the patients (patients are demanding too much of our time!); doctors start to resent the medical assistants and scheduling staff (staff members aren’t being time-efficient, they’re overbooking patients, they’re piling too much work onto us!); and staff start to resent the doctors because they pick up on this resentment; and so on and so on. It’s a miserable situation² and creates the perfect conditions for what pediatrician Mark Vonnegut has called “zombie care”—care that is bad, indifferent, or uncaring. Unsurprisingly, it also delivers bad healthcare outcomes. The only people satisfied with it are the health insurance executives who are making tens of millions of dollars a year. It’s not going to get much better until the profit motive is removed from healthcare entirely and we move to a system of socialized medicine. (Medicare for All is socialized payment of healthcare, but we need the entire system socialized—from the production of pharmaceuticals to education and training of healthcare workers to the delivery of healthcare itself.)

Beyond medicine, many lines of professional work—from the nonprofit sector to lawyering to academia—have their own problems with exploitation. Workers in these jobs may make more money than the average U.S. worker—indeed, I was making more when I had a six-figure salary working in medicine before leaving that job—but at some point, unpleasant working conditions are going to take their toll. People might just quit and take their talents elsewhere. Some successful leftist podcasters and YouTubers, for instance, left their jobs as corporate lawyers and public defenders.

Another problem in the U.S. is that everyone has to worry about healthcare, which is tied to employment. Over the years, even good job-sponsored health plans have gone up in cost. No one can escape the fact that healthcare itself is increasingly unaffordable for everyone but the independently wealthy (and even for people who have insurance). The existential risk inherent in a society in which our lifestyles predispose us to disease, healthcare is tied to our job, healthcare costs are absurdly high, and COVID remains a threat (the CDC has washed its hands, pun intended, of any real public health campaigns to mitigate the spread of the virus) ought to frighten everyone. It certainly frightens me.

“I often wonder, to be absolutely honest, if I'd ever really have time for a job. How do people cram them in?” —Will Freeman in "about a boy"

When we step into the workplace, we give up all kinds of rights we otherwise have in normal life: democracy, decision-making capabilities, privacy, and so on. Working conditions obviously vary significantly from job to job, ranging from the abusive control of an Amazon worker who barely has time for a bathroom break, to the surveillance of an office worker in a cubicle, to the dangerous conditions for lone workers who manage dollar stores or agricultural workers who must endure extreme outdoor temperatures.³ At my previous job, my colleagues and I may have been free to work at our own pace (to a point) or take a bathroom or coffee break whenever we wanted. But even professional workplaces employ (sometimes petty or frustrating) methods of control. At the clinic where I worked, doctors were required to work one 12-hour shift a week, and on that 12-hour day, even if no patients were on the schedule, we had to sit in the clinic until 8 p.m. and could not leave a minute sooner lest staff tattle that we were trying to leave early. Lunch breaks (which we often worked through anyway) were routinely disturbed by pointless meetings about finances. 

No matter what kind of work we do, then, it is worth considering how much of a say each of us has in our workplace. This is, of course, where worker cooperatives and unions come in, and it is certainly right to support worker organizing efforts whenever they happen. But challenging management power in the workplace is just the beginning: we need to rethink entirely the assumption that work should be the primary focus of our energy as living beings.

If the 24-hour day is divided into thirds, work is where we spend a third of our lives, assuming around eight hours of sleep. And this is not counting the people whose shifts are longer than eight hours or whose working conditions vary from stressful to outright hazardous, such that they need significant time after the shift to recover. Nor does that factor in the number of people afflicted by what David Graeber called the “spiritual violence” of “bullshit jobs”—jobs that often pay well but that are pointless or pernicious in the opinion of those who do them (think corporate law, finance, real estate, some administrative work). When we go to work, we spend our lives away from the people we are closest to—loved ones, family, friends. We move around the country for educational programs, training programs, and jobs, and this increases our atomization. Many of us are lonely in part because we live in cities that are designed to keep us apart, as they often lack public transit or public spaces that don’t require a purchase to be there. 

Lately, I find myself thinking a lot about what the U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meant when she said, “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.” On a superficial or aspirational level, it makes no sense—or at least, as a socialist, I find it morally and politically nonsensical, sickening even. Of course there is a “society,” and we are all in it together. (Is there no such thing as a person because our bodies are made up of atoms?) We all depend on each other’s labor to get our basic needs met. But in terms of how I feel about society—about how many of us spend our days (apart from our loved ones) and our nights (in atomized, antisocial housing) and how many injustices we tolerate—I think Thatcher was right. We do not, in fact, have a society in the true, realized sense of a collective, a society that values everyone. How could we with such unconscionable levels of homelessness, hunger, poverty, untreated illness, and police violence? With the brutal system of mass incarceration, in which we lock up more people than any other country on earth? With our country funding and supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people? With our morally bankrupt political system? And with climate change, when an extreme weather event comes—a cold snap or hurricane or torrential flood—every household is on its own. Just like when I was a kid. I felt it then. I feel it now.

I have a job I enjoy and find meaningful and coworkers I am happy to work with. I feel that my work—writing and editing, which involve long periods of time working alone—is conducive to my personality as an introvert. (This wasn’t the case with my previous job, where I had to perform socially in a way that was mentally draining.) But my entire working adult life, I have felt out of balance. After the workday, I have little energy to do much else even though there are plenty of things I’d like to do: visit my family and partner more, spend time with my niece as she grows up, do socialist organizing, become a pastry chef, learn a non-Romance language, or learn to play the cello or to sing. There’s something wrong with work as we know it, with the idea of fitting our lives into the time that’s leftover from the job. The character in About a Boy was right about jobs: how do we cram them in?

Does it make sense that one is supposed to squeeze into the remaining eight hours of the day—after work and sleep—every other aspect of human existence? Taking care of others, exercising and self-care, cooking, socializing, traveling, the arts, religion, leisure, and more? Of course, it’s not really eight hours once you subtract the time needed to get ready for work, commute to and from the office, or wait in company metal detector lines, as some Amazon workers have been made to do after their shifts.

In October of last year, one GenZ TikToker went viral from a post about the problem of working 9 to 5. It was her first job out of college, she explained, and she was commuting to work because she couldn’t afford to live in the city. “I don’t have time to do anything,” she cried. “How do you have friends?” This elicited an alarming backlash from some people online, including the hateful social media influencer Chaya Raichik (better known as Libs of TikTok), who mocked the poster. But many people responded with empathy and understanding as well.

And what about retirement? Older people now work more than they did in the 1980s, and some people say they simply can’t afford to retire. Social Security, while a vital support for many seniors, is simply not enough for most people to live on, and Republicans are constantly threatening to cut benefits. Over the years, pensions have been replaced by 401(k)s, which essentially leaves us to the mercy of the stock market. In some cases, pensions have even been handed off to private equity (PE), an “alternative asset” industry that buys up companies in “aggressive, high-risk buyout deals that leave a trail of layoffs, benefit cuts, and bankruptcies in their wake.” Investors gut companies, sell them off for profit, and move on to the next one. When this process blows up and the profits dry up, pensioners whose funds have been invested in PE lose out (as do the workers in the affected companies). It’s a cruel and unjust thing to do to workers, and as Aaron Wistar wrote in Current Affairs last year, we must stop private equity from doing any more damage than it already has.

I’ve written before in support of Bernie Sanders’s 32-hour workweek proposal, as well as the general idea that we need to be working less. There is plenty of justification for having a shorter workweek with the same pay. As Sanders pointed out in an op-ed in CNN earlier this year, American worker productivity has gone up significantly over the last half-century, yet working hours have not decreased and wages have not kept up. The United States’ workers put in more hours than workers in other rich nations. (We also get fewer public holidays than workers in other nations, and we lack mandatory paid sick and parental leave.) Most importantly, Sanders writes, most of the economic gains from worker productivity have been “going straight to the top.”

No wonder U.S. workers are burned out. Research has also shown that exploitation in the workplace leads to mental health problems. And we can’t hack our way out of the problem by doing more self-care or “grindsetting” harder. In my personal experience, 32 hours of work per week allows much needed time to slow down, personally reflect, take care of oneself and one's family, and also pursue activities for fun. Thirty-two-hour workweeks have been tried in many other countries including Ireland, Spain, and the U.K. and have shown successful results. In one trial in the U.K., results showed “improved productivity, morale, and team culture” as well as improved life satisfaction.

Despite the fact that people seem to like working less and work better when they do, there is a pervasive cultural bias against it. One example of the way that part-time work is disparaged has come from Michelle Obama. In discussing the challenge of work-life balance that she faced as a young mother, she trashes part-time work instead of the economic conditions that often force women to choose between childcare and paid labor. In a 2016 interview with Oprah, she said:

"I had had Malia, Barack was in the U.S. Senate, so I was basically mothering part time on my own, having, I had a full-time job," said Obama, recounting the story of negotiating a job as vice president of community outreach for the University of Chicago Hospital. Like many women, Mrs. Obama thought that negotiating a part-time position would give her more flexibility at home to be a mother.

 

"I tried part time because I thought, I have to figure this out, I have to be able to pick the kids up, I’ve got to be able to do all this. So I tried part time. [...] The only thing I found out from part time was that you just get paid part time. So I had vowed that if I continued to work, that I would never settle for part time," she said. "I knew what my time and energy was worth."

“Settle” for part-time? There’s nothing sacred about 40 hours. There’s no reason “full time” has to be 40 hours—or eight hours of work per day, for that matter.⁴ As Sanders points out, both became the standard because of legislation that unions fought for. The labor movement helped us claw our way out of 100-hour workweeks, which, for example, were documented in the late 19th century among manufacturing workers. 

For reduced-workweek proposals to gain traction, more people (particularly those in what I broadly call the educated class) need to dissociate their identity from their jobs. They need to realize that there is no escape from economic exploitation or precarity in a society in which human flourishing is an afterthought—or at least when flourishing is more likely to happen when people get the right amount of education and the right job with a high enough salary to pay for the conditions that would allow for it. (For an excellent discussion on the need for solidarity between the “professional managerial class” and the broader working class, check out this recent Bad Faith podcast episode.)

Consider the 2008 recession, when 9 million people lost their jobs and nearly 4 million lost their homes to foreclosure. In a 2018 piece for Current Affairs, Maximillian Alvarez, the editor-in-chief of the Real News Network who also holds a PhD in comparative literature and history, wrote about those years, when he was a graduate student and moved back home to help his family financially. (Unfortunately, his family ended up losing their home.) He writes about finding himself at a temp agency in this haunting scene:

Four months and hundreds of job applications later, I’m sitting in the deathly waiting room of the temp agency. [...] The jobs just aren’t out there. And my fancy college degree doesn’t mean shit. It doesn’t make me better than anyone else. We’re all here for the same reason. We’ve all got to eat. Truth be told, the only special thing about me is that I’m probably the only sad sack here who’s also sitting on tens of thousands of dollars of student debt.

 

[...]

 

When we’re all present and accounted for, the floor manager leads me and the other temps through the metallic, steaming bowels of the factory. I pass under some giant, whirring boiler, hard left, up a rickety aluminum staircase. Flashes of other goggled faces quickly appear and dissolve in the haze. I have no idea what the smell is, but at every turn I expect to see piles of dead somethings.

 

The smell is not just blood, turns out. It’s all manner of human effluence. Mountains of it. In every kind of state: fresh, crusted, bubbling, black. Standing in front of a screeching conveyor belt, in full hazmat gear, our job is to sift through and sort endless piles of soiled laundry from hospitals in the county. About half the guys I start my shift with run off the line to throw up at one point or another. None of them come back. The bosses don’t care. They just call in more temps and keep us sifting and sorting at a breakneck pace. They know they can treat us like dogs. They know how many of us are waiting back at the agency. They know we wouldn’t be here if we had better options.

The “fancy college degree doesn’t mean shit.” 

No matter what our level of education, we all need to have solidarity with each other. Our goal as workers shouldn’t be to climb the socioeconomic ladder and leave everyone else behind—like I thought I would do all those years ago by becoming an educated, professional-class person—but to end the system where anyone is dependent upon the whims of the job market for their survival. The truth is, we can provide a good standard of living for everyone by simply deciding to do so. As the socialist economist Grace Blakeley puts it, describing conditions in the U.K. that also apply to the U.S.: “There is plenty of money to solve our social problems. It's just stuck in the pockets of the wealthy.”

There’s a truly dystopian idea of work that tends to come from the conservative Right. Whether it’s children, immigrants, or seniors, conservatives want us working more hours for more years and under more dangerous conditions. Work is the thing, supposedly, that gives children “worth and value,” said former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year. Not only is this sentiment extremely ableist—it implies that people who physically can’t work, lack “worth”—but McCarthy has it backwards. Work doesn’t impart value to us as people. We bring our intrinsic value as people to any work we do. This is why, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, all work has dignity—and, in turn, all workers deserve a dignified wage. 

People aren’t their jobs. But all people deserve dignified work and a dignified wage and working conditions free from exploitation.

People are more than their jobs, too. We are creatures that think, dream, explore, and create, and we wish to connect with others and the world around us and even get bored sometimes. We might wish to enjoy more of our lives rather than just endure them. We might wish, as Alvarez says on his “Working People” podcast, “to squeeze as much meaning and joy and pride and love” from life as we possibly can. We can’t do too much of all that—or truly build a society from the rubble left by neoliberalism—if we’re at work all the time.

notes

1.

The open secret at my clinical job was that most doctors either saw patients part time (myself, the boss) or wanted to go part time but couldn’t, citing factors like maintaining one’s lifestyle or paying for children’s college tuition as barriers to taking a pay cut and going part time. Nationally, in one survey by the American Medical Association from 2021, some 40 percent of physicians expressed interest in leaving their job in the next two years.
2.

And that was before the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, I was in between jobs and was horrified to see hospitals and clinics failing to provide adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) to healthcare workers. There were social media posts from nurses who were using trash bags instead of gowns. Some people were even fired for demanding PPE at work or for speaking out about the lack of supplies. More than 3,600 healthcare workers died during the first year of the pandemic, and we can only wonder how many of those deaths could have been prevented with PPE and appropriate institutional policies.
3.

And that’s just workers in the “free” world: consider the slavelike conditions of prison labor, where prison firefighters make as little as $1 on the hour and cotton and other crop pickers pennies (2 cents) on the hour.

4.

And no reason why we shouldn't have universal childcare, either!