Welcome back to work. Now please hold still while we put your collar and leash back on.

A brief look at the dehumanizing labor market that has Americans refusing to return to work and many of China's young people choosing to “lie flat”

(Photo by Alex Kustanovich from The Sun)

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The pandemic has touched — and, in many cases, upended — almost every aspect of our lives, but work is certainly one of the biggest. It hasn’t just changed where we work, but also what kind, and how much work we do. For many, the pandemic has been a break, a time to rest and reflect, and we saw the result of those reflections last spring when it was generally agreed it was time to go back to work, but many didn’t. They’d had enough. They wanted something new.

And for the time being they could decide not to work because they were still getting unemployment benefits. But many of those benefits, at least at the federal level, are set to expire next week on September 6th — Labor Day. And so for many people this question of labor is coming to a head.

This question is an individual one, but it’s also a collective one. As a society we also have to ask, Why are so many people unhappy with their work, and are there better ways to organize labor?

Of course, hating one’s job is nothing new. Nor is it new to want to be rich and not have to work at all — many would argue that’s the very engine of capitalism. But what is new are some of the forms it has taken in recent years.

For instance, in the last decade many young people have subscribed to the idea of FIRE, the movement to achieve Financial Independence and Retire Early. This often means staying in lucrative jobs they hate in order to save enough money to be able to retire and live off investments as soon as possible (ideally in one’s early 30s).

More recently in China a movement has sprung up called tangping, or “lying flat.” Decades of rapid growth and prosperity have come at a high cost: the expectation around work is described as “996” — working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Many young people — usually with parents wealthy enough to support them — have decided to opt out, to lie flat instead. It’s become a resistance movement of sorts (though “movement” is the wrong word) and it has spooked the government enough to start censoring its online activities.

Luo Huazhong, who started tangping with a blog post entitled “Lying Flat is Justice” (photo by Qilai Shen for The New York Times)

But this act of stepping out of the rat race hasn’t just alarmed the Communist Party, American conservatives are also freaking out. For them, the blame lies squarely with the Biden administration who they feel has left unemployment in place too long. They argue that of course people won’t go back to work if they don’t have to, especially if they’re making more money staying at home. Liberals counter this by pointing to the need for higher wages and better working conditions, especially in light of the new stresses and complexities that have accompanied Covid.

One revealing moment in this debate came in a recent Fox news show where the host, Laura Ingraham, interviewed a consultant in the bars and nightclubs industry named Jon Taffer. After a bit of back and forth lamenting the situation, Taffer came out with a succinct explanation of the problem:

“I have a friend in the military who trains military dogs, Laura, and they only feed a military dog at night because a hungry dog is an obedient dog. Well, if we’re not causing people to be hungry to work, then we’re providing them with all the meals they need sitting at home.”

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona

Laura Ingraham: "What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing." Bar Rescue guy: "They only feed a military dog at night, because a hungry dog is an obedient dog. Well, if we are not causing people to be hungry to work..."

Although conservatives like Ingraham and Taffer would say it’s just a metaphor (in the interview Ingraham clearly states “I don’t mean physical hunger” and Taffer later apologized for what he called a “terrible analogy”), of course they do mean physical hunger. Sure, it’s politically unfashionable to say so in the middle of a pandemic, but it’s what capitalism is premised on — people work for incentives, and the most basic incentive is not wanting to starve.

And there is a basic truth here that shouldn’t be ignored — if people want to eat then clearly someone has to work. If you lived alone, away from society, then of course that someone would be you. You’d either work or starve, there aren’t other options. But living with others it’s possible to not work and still not starve because you can get the fruits of another’s labor without giving anything in return. You can be fed without feeding anyone else.

So it’s understandable that working people might feel resentful towards people who don’t work but could. They might feel it towards those on unemployment, or they might feel it towards everyone living off of investments, especially the rich.

Because in the world of investment you always hear “make your money work for you,” but money doesn’t work for anyone and money doesn’t feed anyone — other people do. We think it’s sound fiscal advice when Warren Buffet, the kindly old grandfather of finance, tells us “​​If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die,” but what does it even mean? How can you possibly be productive while you sleep? You can’t. You can only capture a share of what others have worked to produce. Buffet is only saying: exploit or be exploited.

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Returning to the Fox news segment, the “hungry dog is an obedient dog” comment gives us an important window into just how degrading our work culture actually is. It’s as if the pandemic was a moment of freedom, but now the collar is going back on and people are starting to pull as they feel it tighten around their neck.

So why aren’t people happy about going back to work? Is it really because they’re lazy? No. It’s because they’re tired of being treated like animals. Even if we’re largely unconscious of it, we experience the fact that we’re leashed as an insult to our dignity. We want to be treated like human beings.

The root of the problem is the social dynamic. Employees are dependent upon employers; there’s a clear power differential. Here’s how Arturo Giovannitti, a labor organizer on trial for his part in the Lawrence textile strike, described the relationship between employer and employee, between factory owner and factory worker.

“The man that owns the tool wherewith another man works, the man that owns the house where this man lives, the man that owns the factory where this man wants to go to work — that man owns and controls the bread that that man eats and therefore owns and controls his mind, his body, his heart and his soul.”

What it comes down to is that the employer, the person who runs the business, holds the leash. This is especially clear when we look back on earlier times, when employers still had free rein and could treat workers however they wanted, before the labor movement organized to improve things — to get “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” And the labor movement’s successes have been tremendous. They’ve been able to convince governments to pass labor laws mandating better conditions and higher wages. They’ve given us the 8 hour day, healthcare, overtime, and the weekend. They ended child labor. But still, even with all these improvements, the underlying dynamic hasn’t changed. The leash hasn’t gone away.

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So how do we get rid of the leash? How do we break this dynamic where one is forced to sell oneself on the labor market, where one is forced to work for another because they have the power?

Let’s look more closely at the dynamic. When someone starts an initiative, for instance a company, they need workers, so they invite people to apply for jobs. If they like the applicants well enough then they hire them and usually pay them the lowest possible salary they can. Of course the employer then also wants their employees to be self-motivated, to take “ownership” of the project, in short: they want them to be hungry to accomplish something great and to build something together.

This is very likely the same hunger the initiative-taker felt when they started the project. It’s also probably the kind of hunger that Ingraham and Taffer would say they really meant, it’s just that causing people to physically starve will never actually inspire this kind of hunger. You don’t get people to become self-motivated by putting them on a leash and threatening them with deprivation.

Conservatives should get this — they love free enterprise. They know the joy of autonomy, of being the author of one’s own actions. The idea of the government being in charge of the economy and telling businesses what to produce is abhorrent to them. But they only seem to love such freedom for the people at the top. What about all the workers? Is it not possible to give them autonomy, to respect their dignity and simply treat them like adults?

So we should ask: How else could this go? What might an “economy of adults” look like?

To begin with, imagine that instead of going to work for someone, you always went to work with someone. For instance, imagine if someone wanted to produce something so they called together all the people who could help them produce it, they discussed it, and then agreed to take the initiative together. What’s more, imagine they also discussed what their needs were and how they could divide up the profits from the initiative so that everyone’s needs were met. No one person determining everyone else’s salaries and wages — instead: this is the expected income from the work, how do we need to divide it?

Sounds civil doesn’t it? — Just a group of adults working together to get something accomplished. (It also sounds like what businesses hope to achieve by calling their workforce a “team,” but fall short of because it’s hard to have any real solidarity when employees are forced to be there.)

Of course, if everyone is getting the income they need to live a dignified life, it would mean a much lower salary for the initiative-taker, the entrepreneur who originally started the company. So why would they ever do it? Maybe because they’re an adult and they want to work with other adults. Or maybe because they started a business in order to meet some real need in the world, so of course they’d also want their co-worker’s needs to be met in the process. Or maybe just because they see how miserable it is to keep people on leashes, how miserable it is to spend all your time herding cats until you can finally retire and then sit on a yacht and do nothing.

Because really the point isn’t to do nothing, to lie flat for the rest of your life and escape work. Work is only a leash when you’re forced to do it — when you’re threatened with starvation. Which is really just to say: work is only a leash when you’re forced to work for your own self-interest, for money.

Because people want to work for a cause — they want to do something meaningful, some good in the world. They don’t want to just feed themselves, they want to feed others. (Of course everyone’s been indoctrinated to think greed is good, but it’s funny that after all this time no business will proclaim on their website — “we’re just in it to make as much money as we can!” Instead, each justifies its work in terms of doing some actual good in the world, meeting some need. But come on! If greed is good then let’s put that front and center and be honest about all the good we’re doing!)

Ultimately each one of us can recognize that it’s degrading when we have to work for our own belly alone. We can understand the sentiment that says “If it’s just about me then I’d rather not work at all.” Because the reality is we’ve come here to work for others, to serve one another and be served in turn. Now we just need to respect other people enough to allow them to work out of themselves, to make a gift of their lives and not just a cold and hungry transaction.

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POSTSCRIPT: If you’ve read this far, it might be because this article is short. I’m trying to keep them brief, but of course that means I’m only able to touch on certain topics and crack the door on new perspectives without fully digging in. For instance, on this topic the main question still remaining is how do we fully separate work and income — what are the necessary outer structures in order to banish the leash entirely? One could also talk about motivation for work (how we need to see each other differently if we’re going to be inspired to meet each other’s needs) as well as how we should work with property so that it’s truly productive and not destructive (ideas such as Piketty’s social and temporary ownership, as well as Steiner’s circulating ownership, come into play here). But those are all future articles and my idea is to link to them here once they’re written [a follow-up: here’s that ownership article] . It will be one short chapter after another, and hopefully over time we’ll have a better picture of the whole of society!