Work: An Introduction

Work: An Introduction:

 Do
you think it's possible to talk about living in a free society when
most of us practically spend so much of our lives working at jobs that
are essentially authoritarian?

 

 

 

For the majority of us, most of our lives are dominated by work.
Even when we are not actually at work, we are traveling to or from work,
worrying about work, trying to recover from work in order to get back
to work tomorrow, or trying to forget about work.

Or even worse, we don't have work and then our main worry is trying to
find it. Or we are one of the people - mostly women - whose household
and caring work does not count as paid work at all.

For many of us, we don't care about the work we do, we just need money
to get by and at the end of the month, our bank balances are barely any
different from the month before. We spend our days checking our watches,
counting down the minutes till we can go home, the days till the
weekend, the months till our next holiday…

Even those of us who have jobs in areas we enjoy, we do not control our
work. It controls us, we experience it as an alien force. Most of us do
not control what time we get to work or what time we leave. We do not
control the pace or volume of our work, what products we make or what
services we provide, or how we do it.