By Graham Hillard
Thursday, February 03, 2022
Among the top posts on r/antiwork, Reddit’s
flourishing hub for job-quitters both prospective and actual, is a contemporary
masterpiece of managerial condescension. Summoned to work on his day off,
user Tylerro2 texts his employer that he is using his respite to mourn the
very recent death of his father. His boss replies with a callous invitation to
“stop being a victim.” What follows — a curt resignation accompanied by an
obscene (and anatomically unlikely) suggestion — is no aberration but the very
coin of the realm among Reddit’s shirkers, deserters, decliners, and dropouts.
Having toiled in private misery for long enough, the nation’s least valued
workers have begun to pool their emotional resources and celebrate those
wage-earners who are bold enough to issue a throaty go to hell when pushed too
far. Their ultimate goal, evident after mere minutes in their presence, is
dramatic political and economic change. Call them the Averse-to-Labor Party.
As is by now known to everyone within shouting distance
of the Internet, America is in the midst of a “Great Resignation,” a roiling
tidal wave of professional disenchantment brought about by Covid and the
attendant governmental relief efforts. Perusing the monthly turnover summary
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one is struck primarily by the sheer scale
of the phenomenon. In September of last year, a then-record 4.4 million
Americans resigned their jobs, a figure that represented 3 percent of the
national workforce. In October, the relevant number dipped to 4.2 million but
was nevertheless 20 percent higher than the same month’s total in the last
autumn before the pandemic. In November, the final period for which data are
presently available, a whopping 4.5 million Americans told their bosses where
to get off, with notable increases in transportation, warehousing, and
utilities (+33,000 over the previous month); health care and social assistance
(+52,000); and accommodation and food services (+159,000). For many readers of
this magazine, upheaval in the employment market has been experienced chiefly
as an inconvenience, either because the price of labor is increasing or
because it is now, in many places, next to impossible to get good service. For
bottom-line workers, however, these are boom times. Don’t like your current
supervisor’s attitude? Nearly all of his competitors would be thrilled to hire
you away.
In chronicling this pendulum swing in labor–management
relations, the 1.7 million members of r/antiwork have assembled some of the
most entertaining and infuriating social-media content since Donald Trump was
marched off the Twitter reservation. So compelling has been the group’s output,
in fact, that numerous media outlets have taken note, a fact that has led not
only to a drove of self-congratulatory posts (“A reporter wants to talk to me”)
but to the creation, more than a little ridiculous, of an option to filter
content for “press coverage.” Writing about the forum last November, Vice’s
Roisin Lanigan declared r/antiwork to be “a temple of anti-capitalism and a reminder
that a new way of life can exist.” For the New York Times’ Farhad
Manjoo, meanwhile, the community offers “the visceral thrill of seeing people
wrest the reins of their lives from the soul-sucking, health-destroying maw of
capitalism.”
The Left’s wild enthusiasms notwithstanding, a great deal
of the content served up by r/antiwork is delicious irrespective of one’s
political priors. Who but a Scrooge, after all, could resent a moment of
well-deserved comeuppance? Or deplore a bad boss’s taking one on the chin? To
fill this market need, Reddit’s anti-workers have created the genre for which
their forum is perhaps best known: the “take this job and shove it” message
thread. In order to play the game, hourly-wagers resign in a screen-capturable
huff upon being buffeted with demeaning or ridiculous demands. Next, they post
the exchange online for all the world to see.
Consider, for example, the forum’s top post, contributed
by u/hestolemysmile and rewarded with 284,000 upvotes at the time of this
writing. Having reviewed the previous shift’s security footage, the user’s
warehouse supervisor attempts to ding him for the “completely unacceptable
behavior” of sitting down while on the clock. Hestolemysmile’s response invokes
both his measurably excellent performance and the two broken bones in his left
foot. When his boss replies with aggression (“I’m really not appreciating your
attitude”), the user drops his resignation bomb and provokes a bout of
desperate managerial backpedaling. For anyone who has ever worked for a fool
(and who hasn’t?), the schadenfreude is likely to prove irresistible.
Pressed to describe r/antiwork’s other posting
categories, one might suggest a tripartite organizational model. In the first
of these divisions, users describe acts of (nonviolent) vengeance against
erstwhile employers, as when u/This_Manner_256 chronicled the deletion of
“thousands of hours of work” from his old job. (Despite having fired him years
earlier, his bosses continued to rely on a cloud service that he paid for and
controlled.) In the second, Redditors post smart-aleck digs about previous
generations, with special emphasis on the alleged cluelessness of Boomers.
(U/volvonut90: “Boomers are disconnected from reality.”) In the third, members
of the r/antiwork community celebrate individual strikes and direct actions and
predict the imminent demise of capitalism. Perhaps the best entry in the last
of these veins is an oft-shared meme in which space aliens kill Earth’s leaders
and destroy the global economy. The reaction among the masses? Undisguised
relief and glee.
That a certain brash puerility prevails at r/antiwork is,
of course, difficult to dispute. Commenting on particular resignation posts,
users regularly accuse one another of fabrication. Confronted with the
suffering of out-groups, Redditors make little effort to mask their delight.
Indeed, the forum’s greatest blind spot may be its confusion about the
circumstances under which low-level supervisors labor. The annual mean wage for
food-service managers may be $61,000, as reported by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, but the shift leader at the local Taco Bell is lucky to sniff half
of that. Need he be a figure of hate on a thriving Internet forum to boot?
Like any community built on a shared sense of grievance,
r/antiwork is more than usually susceptible to propaganda and poorly considered
arguments. For every thread exposing truly noxious managerial behavior, another
advances the historically illiterate argument that “capitalism kills.” Posts
bemoaning such legitimate dilemmas as housing shortages are regularly followed
by progressive fantasias in an apocalyptic key (e.g., “My retirement plan is to
die in the climate wars”). As might be expected, Karl Marx looms large on the
forum, a figure at once revered and misrepresented. It is at least arguable,
as u/forked_wizard09 recently wrote, that “Marx knows what’s up!” Far less
probable is that the economist is responsible for the claim that “the amount of
money that is in your bank account at the time of your death is the extra work
that you did which wasn’t necessary.” Not even dialectical materialists are
that wordy.
How, faced with a movement that is both unruly and
difficult to ignore, ought conservatives and their representatives to respond?
For executive-track Republicans in the old style, the temptation is surely to
seize anti-workers by the ear and clang their heads together. Conservatives in
the policy shops will have other ideas, some of them very good. One wonders,
for instance, how the business of unlinking employment and health insurance
might reduce the sense of wage slavery that is broadly felt in the r/antiwork
community. (Government-provided coverage is not the answer, but what about
replacing benefits with higher pay and creating a truly competitive interstate
insurance market?) Similarly useful would be a continuing attack on the
cronyism, red tape, and occupational-licensing schemes that serve as de facto
barriers to entrepreneurship. As Reihan Salam and others have written, it is
lamentably untrue that the U.S. is a few regulatory tweaks away from the
elimination of poverty. Education and unskilled immigration as well will have
to be addressed. Nevertheless, there are idea parties, and there are parties of
the discredited status quo. It cannot hurt the GOP to be seen as the former.
What Republicans mustn’t do, whatever happens, is allow
their greater identification with the working poor to color their attitude
toward work itself, a temptation that an hour or two on r/antiwork could easily
introduce. Among the forum’s regulars, to labor is no longer a source of human
dignity but an obvious affront to it. Such a position deserves answering but
is, in the end, incompatible with conservatism, public order, and the American
tradition as established through the generations.
Whether, a decade or two from now, we will look back on
today’s tight labor market as a pandemic-fueled aberration remains to be seen.
Demographic changes may well improve workers’ hands in the coming years, but
the rise of automation could just as easily push us in the opposite direction.
What is more certain is that the habits of industry, once broken, are difficult
to repair, a fact that is as true for nations as it is for individuals. Let
those of us on the right set a good example. Take an hour or so to enjoy
r/antiwork’s subversive exuberance. Then back to the grindstone.
No comments:
Post a Comment