I just came across this Business Insider thread on Twitter about how workers are starting to just (gasp) work less rather than quitting, which it coins as “coasting culture.” Something about it bothered me, and eventually I realized it's that corporate America is framed as the solution to a nascent antiwork sensibility — rather than its cause.
It says:
The challenge for corporate America is to find a way to embrace this new professional mindset — the desire to do good work without striving to be a superstar, to prioritize life ahead of work.
And:
Coasting culture might not end up replacing hustle culture. But perhaps the two can find a way to coexist, even after the red-hot job market begins to cool.
So, the problem that workers have very rationally awoken to the inherent indignity and meaninglessness of waged work over the course of the pandemic is presented only as a movement waiting to be co-opted — by those who necessitated it in the first place.
Inherent in this framing is that our current work system is unalterable and by extension desirable. The question it asks is: How can corporate America make the most inconsequential of modifications so that workers once again find waged work barely tolerable? Or put more simply: How can we keep things pretty much the same?
So here we have a journalist, whose ostensible role is to hold the powerful to account, essentially advocating to preserve the status quo, without acknowledging it.
It also implies that it's possible, within our current system, to prioritize life over work. That employers are benevolent partners who only want the best for us. That if we just make a few simple tweaks, everything will be fine. This is part of the same life hack culture that tells you if you just download a mindfulness app, turn off screens after 8 p.m., or invest in XYZ self-care ritual, you'll be happy. See, it's you, not them!
We should be suspicious of any corporate initiative that purports to support us as full human beings. At most, in companies' quest for ever greater profit and dominance, we will be accorded incidental dignities.
This isn't the only place I've sensed an unarticulated conservativism (lower-case c) in coverage of the antiwork movement. It's implicit in just about every article I've read. Like for example the recent NYT article, Hating Your Job Is Cool. But Is It a Labor Movement? Why does it have to look like a traditional labor movement to be meaningful?
I would like to ask journalists — who after all are mostly overworked, underpaid workers just like the rest of us — to be more curious. Can we aspire to something more, after this seemingly endless pandemic grind, than coasting culture coexisting with hustle culture? Instead of telling the story of lazy workers, can we tell the story of the burgeoning desire for meaningful work?
And for the rest of us, keep an eye out for this regressive framing. It's part of what keeps us hustling.