Friday, February 4, 2022

Reddit’s Viral Forum for Anti-Workers

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.

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