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Antiwork

During COVID, I Realized There is No Limit to Much Employers Will Ask

This is the story of when I became anti-work, and it happened before I knew about this sub-reddit. I live in Canada and started a new job the summer of 2020. I had worked in not-for-profits for over a decade but my new position with the provincial government paid about 40% more, with a much better pension. The job was hybrid work-from-home, with us going in to the office certain days of the week. Although there was literally no reason to ever be there, this was still better than a fully in-office policy. My area went through a brutal COVID wave in late 2020. We actually switched to working from home fully, a transition which required no effort at all, but six weeks later, in early 2021, they asked us to come back. The timing was actually incredible, cases were higher than ever and the provincial government had just made…


This is the story of when I became anti-work, and it happened before I knew about this sub-reddit. I live in Canada and started a new job the summer of 2020. I had worked in not-for-profits for over a decade but my new position with the provincial government paid about 40% more, with a much better pension. The job was hybrid work-from-home, with us going in to the office certain days of the week. Although there was literally no reason to ever be there, this was still better than a fully in-office policy.

My area went through a brutal COVID wave in late 2020. We actually switched to working from home fully, a transition which required no effort at all, but six weeks later, in early 2021, they asked us to come back.

The timing was actually incredible, cases were higher than ever and the provincial government had just made the pronouncement that they were encouraging all employers whose staff could work from home to let them do so. Yet our boss told us we were coming back in on Monday, no explanation, no rationale, no prior warning, he just dropped it in a Zoom meeting and then moved on.

Now remember that at this point vaccines were still not yet available, all we had were masks, sanitizer, and a prayer. And I want to provide another point of context, a month earlier my premier made headlines with this: “I'm the guy who's stealing Christmas”: Canadian premier makes a critical holiday plea.

So I just gave up getting together with my family to do my part to save lives (including my own and their own, of course) and had a quiet Christmas with just my wife and kids. For the first time ever, no turkey, no seeing my parents or siblings. But once my employer decided he wanted us in the office he was happy to erase those sacrifices by putting us in a cramped office with no airflow for absolutely no reason related to doing our actual jobs.

This was the moment for me in going full anti-work. I remember thinking to myself, I do curbside pick-up for groceries, I completely stopped getting together with friends–this job allows me to easily reduce my chance of infection by working from home, and could potentially allow me to take some calculated risks and choose to get together with one other household in my family occasionally, and not worry I will get the virus at work and spread it to them. It costs my employers nothing to allow this. But instead, they would have me give up my family to avoid bringing the virus to work.

This is how much an employer will ask of us–even the good employers, even the good bosses–without skipping a beat. They are so used to workers giving up everything for their jobs, they think they can take this kind of screwed-up prioritization for granted. The bar is so low, any employer that isn't stealing wages or emotionally abusing its employees gets a thumbs up by comparison.

I hate this power dynamic where it's so hard to call them out and I'm so glad to see people pushing back against it. I hate the race to the bottom where an anti-worker policy becomes an industry standard so nobody gets criticized for doing the same thing as everybody else. The audacity of an employer acting like I'm a slave and they own every part of my life, and then giving themselves awards for leadership and workplace culture just because they bring in f*&@ing muffins every other week.

I love that we're talking about this more and pushing back, little by little. Wresting power away from employers and into the hands of workers is the only way this gets better.

Tl;dr: They wanted me to choose my work over my family, and I did, because I needed the income, and I still hate them for it.

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