I truly believe that. When I was doing factory work, I worked with a guy who was living with two other adults in a station wagon in the parking lot. He’d clean up in the company washroom before his shift. The other two never came into the building that I’m aware.
My point? The guy honestly wanted to work, and his people sacrificed to help him do it. They could have found soft beds, hot showers and nourishing food at one of the local homeless shelters. But “local” is a relative term: all homeless services are based in the downtown area, but most jobs they could get are in industrial parks located suitably out of sight of “decent” folk. In my town, that’s a distance of over twenty miles (thank you urban sprawl). And when you drive a car like that, you do so in the knowledge that every time you move it, you risk it breaking down and you not being able to get it back. Depending on where it died, there’s a good chance of it getting impounded, with all the fees that come with it. My point is that they had to choose where to plant their home, near free resources or near employment, and they chose employment. People want to work.
Another time, when I was much younger, I worked with a woman (she was around 22 at the time, and looked like a grownup to me, but at this point in my life I don’t believe people get the opportunity to become a grownup until their thirties, and a good many never bothered). We worked in a restaurant, both of us part time. She also worked full time in a nursing home. And she had a positively adorable daughter, who would sit in the corner and read or color throughout her mom’s shift because the only family she had lived three towns over, and our public transit system has more holes in it than Donald Trump’s election claims, so she would have had to pay more per hour for child care than she earned at her job. At least that was comfortable. The girl once told me that “when mommy’s at the other place,” she sometimes got to sit at a grownup desk with a chair that spins. Other times, however, she had to spend the full eight and a half hours sitting in what she called “the quiet room.” It was a supply closet; she didn’t have a car to live in. Oh, and where she got to sit and color was determined by which manager was on duty; she could have been fired for bringing her kid to work (a supervisor told her), but she had one manager who wasn’t a total douche. Her mother was her only living family. They talked on the phone once a week (this was a lot in the days before free long distance—kids, ask your grandparents), and seemed to get along well. Her mother had offered to let her move back in, but there were very few jobs and no access to education in her tiny hometown. She had to choose between having her needs provided for and sacrificing much just to work, and she chose to work. People want to work.
Now imagine if those people, and the millions like them didn’t need to work. Imagine their basic needs are reliably met independent of any job. Imagine being free to accept or reject any offer of employment, and not have to worry about losing your kid’s medical care, or your house. Employers would be forced to pay workers (closer to) what their work was worth, and workers could shift part time work. Imagine how much you could get done if you only had to work fifteen hours per week. Imagine how much more productive and rewarding work would be if you didn’t have the threat of imminent doom hanging over your head. And imagine how many people would open up small businesses if they knew failure wouldn’t be catastrophic.
When people with power hear the word “antiwork,” they immediately think either “Egads! [adjusts monocle] Who shall iron my morning newspaper?” or “If THOSE PEOPLE aren’t constantly held in check by “the right sort,” they’ll run amuck and western civilization will collapse.” One of those is honest. The other is an ad hoc justification for the status quo. Guess which one gets picked up by mainstream media.
So, I don’t know. I’m just brainstorming at this point, but it seems to me that most reasonable people could be persuaded to remove coercion from the workplace. So is branding our obstacle? Because “antiwork” is an academic word, and academic words are threatening to many non-academics, and its common meanings do not follow obviously from the word itself. We could just wait for enough of the brainwashed masses to seek out and read the right blog post, but I don’t think we have that kind of time.