Work, Homework, and the Disappearing Work-Life
By: Daniel Kassl
Tags: Capitalism, Labor, Education

Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life — so goes the hackneyed aphorism that rejects the importance of a discernible work-life. It’s true, though — our ability to distinguish between labor and leisure has deteriorated. But it’s not because we have all suddenly found jobs worthy of our love; most of us, the late sociologist David Graeber finds, hate our jobs and feel that they contribute little social value. The result of this arrangement is that people work longer, more volatile hours and feel more unhappy, less useful to the world, and fundamentally unfree. What’s more is that K-12 and college education now serve as customary rites of passage into this very platitude of adulthood by emulating that stage of life that is supposed to be the most rewarding, productive, and fulfilling.

Charlie Chaplin in ‘Modern Times’ (1936)

To make the claim that a work-life balance is important should be uncontroversial. In the imaginary of the American dream, after all, we have understood adulthood as somewhat rigidly structured: a nine-to-five job at a factory or an office financially furnishes the remainder of the week that we ought to devote to self-care (like sleep), care for the family, and leisure. The idea is that this sort of life is earned through learning and investments in human capital.

So, too, has there long seemed to be a fundamental understanding that education and labor are two completely different things, and that for one to be enmeshed in either school or work precludes the possibility for one to be engaged in the other (at least full-time or seriously). Work is the moment one delves into her career and the point at which life actually begins, whereas formal education is something…well, different than labor. As it goes, there lies a critical juncture in one’s life — between childhood/adolescence and adulthood. If you put in the hours as a student, you can — or, according to bootstrappers, you will — make it as an adult.

This essay aims to highlight the ways in which the traditional nine-to-five gig has given way to a labor regime that largely ignores traditional hours and our historical proclivity for some designated free time aside from work, and to elucidate the ways that modern education has bolstered this new order.

The work-life is dying (or, is already dead)

Myriad reasons exist to explain how and why traditionally defined work hours have become the exception to the rule. The advent of the gig economy, wherein workers (or, more commonly, contractors) create their own hours ostensibly to accommodate their lifestyles, is one such reason. The kicker here, though, is the pressure to be “on-call”. Rideshare drivers, instead of truly defining their own hours, must work when there is ample demand so that they earn enough to survive. The irregular increase in consumer demand associated with the coronavirus pandemic, especially for household goods and groceries, illustrates another example with personal shoppers.

Thus the sort of independence and freedom that the gig economy promises to its workers is in fact illusory, a result of the widening power imbalance between capital and labor that first took shape in the 1970s and which was exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008. It’s what allows Uber to reap such large portions of their drivers’ earnings, highway robbery for the pun-inclined. Because there is no defined hourly wage for this sort of worker, they must work as many hours as are required by their expenses. If earnings are down one month for a DoorDash driver, she will undoubtedly have to forgo some of her own leisure time to make up for the lost earnings by “choosing” to fulfill a greater number of delivery orders — really, no choice at all. This sort of situation is made especially common as inflation continues to outpace wage growth, forcing earners to try to uphold their standards of living with fewer real dollars in hand.

This is the exact sort of volatility that has been chipping away at the work-life in the twenty-first century, but it’s not the only sort. Low-wage hourly workers face sporadic hours and typically lack any sort of union representation to protest their schedules, which will change from week to week and make it very difficult to etch the boundaries of the work-life. Salaried workers, even those pocketing lavish sums of money (associate attorneys, for instance), are expected to ignore the nine-to-five workday and instead do whatever it takes, whatever that might mean. In either case, raising children or taking care of loved ones is difficult if not impossible, and that’s not to mention any sort of social life outside the family.

The literature on unfreedom and labor is fascinating, and many brilliant scholars have tackled the concept of the hourly worker in this light. E.P. Thompson was one of the first to distinguish between time orientation — that is, where the clock determines the bounds of one’s daily labor — and task orientation, where the completion of a given task or tasks define the workday. Thompson observes task orientation as a norm in peasant societies, and for this reason he explains that “there is a sense in which it is more humanly comprehensible than timed labour” because “[t]he peasant or labourer appears to attend upon what is an observed necessity.” However, the peasant household was usually somewhat self-sufficient, and much or at least part of its labor was to sustain life for the family. Put differently, the task that a peasant worker performs has an inherent benefit for the peasant himself. The modern worker receives little to no material value from the labor she produces, incentivizing capital to extract additional surplus value from her — an endeavor for which task orientation is more cost-effective and profitable.

The greatest and most valid challenge to this argument is that laws mandating a 40-hour work week, as well as the corresponding, observed decline since the nineteenth century in the yearly number of hours worked, demonstrate that we are working less, not more (except this trend has reversed since the beginning of the pandemic). But it is vital to conceptualize modern labor in its most comprehensive sense, which involves a reconceptualization of labor itself that transcends merely the number of hours we work.

One way to do this is to consider what Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “emotional labor”, which is the raison d’être of her quintessential monograph The Managed Heart. Emotional labor dovetails with the explosion of the service economy, which forces its workers to appear happy, eager, and responsive at all hours of the day. Not only must workers complete a set of tasks within a certain subset of time, but they must also be constantly prepared to face customers and clients. No matter what’s going on in a worker’s life — a death in the family, relationship problems, anxiety or depression — he must nonetheless present himself as jovial and professional.

Joaquin Phoenix in Todd Phillips’s in ‘Joker’ (2019)

Hochschild’s emotional labor is one of many ways in which work has intensified even while its hours in the aggregate have decreased. But what does this mean for the work-life? Employees withhold their anxieties that have festered in the workplace throughout the workday, and these anxieties have created an often uninhabitable environment once they arrive at home. On one hand, workers are exhausted from their day-to-day tasks as well as from the implicit emotional labor that they entailed. Work, while perhaps less physically demanding for workers in some sectors of the economy, thus offers repercussions to one’s mental and emotional wellbeing.

On the other hand, the home becomes the sole place to vent or express their negative emotions. The home is not so much a relaxing refuge from the toils of the workplace, but a temporary resting point to recover and recharge. (It should be noted, too, that remote work during the coronavirus pandemic has challenged even the sanctity of the home in this sense, further blurring the line between work and home.) How much time do we spend thinking and stressing about work outside of the workplace? All of this is to say that our concept of work should not be constrained simply to the time during which we are performing labor; we must also consider the psychological and social effects at home, away from the workplace, that work exacts which would not be present without our necessity for labor to survive.

The labor of learning

Any student who suffered through remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic understands best the cumbersome toils of schooling, but it was not Zoom that was so transformative to how children and young adults receive education. As Malcolm Harris observes in his excellent book, Kids These Days, once kids have reached adulthood, they have practically been “working” all their lives, coming home nightly with hours upon hours of homework, much of which is completely redundant.

One of Harris’s important corollary arguments in Kids These Days is that we have misconceived formal education as something fundamentally different from labor because learning, by convention, closely resembles the employment students will later embark upon. For instance, schools do observe standard hours, but the actual labor can and often will spill over beyond those hours in the form of homework and projects. Teachers and professors are encouraged to act like managers. And the end goal of learning is less to enrich the soul and mind than it is to increase the value of one’s own human capital in order to be more attractive to potential future employers.

The mechanics of education, then, certainly resemble those of modern labor, but there’s something else going on. Because human-capital theory is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche, by this point students’ attitudes towards their learning and its ultimate purpose have changed. Gone are the days of John Hughes’s high school; in its place is the figurative factory of learning (for a visual, see, for instance, the music video to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”). Students seem to understand this. It has materialized in a culture that enshrines padding resumes and LinkedIn profiles with as many useless and/or fabricated skills and experiences as possible (see mine), and encourages bragging about how busy one is with schoolwork or work itself because, after all, to be a busy contributor all the time is the pinnacle of responsible citizenship under capitalism.

From Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”

That latter point is important because it mirrors the competitive spirit that capitalism champions. One can either follow suit with their colleagues and take on an increasingly oppressive workload in the form of credit-hours, internships, research, etc., or fall by the wayside. To moderate one’s own workload in the name of mental health and respect for a reasonable work-life balance is to put oneself at a disadvantage relative to her peers, and this is just as valid in the classroom as it is in the workplace and the labor market.

Reclaiming freedom

What to do, then? This is where philosophers and political theorists tend to fall short, and I expect to do no better. But the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal thoughtfully connects this disappearing work-life to an exigency of freedom in the modern economy. While he argues that while more free time could indeed yield economic benefits like increased productivity, his central point in a Boston Review essay and his book Freedom from the Market is that for workers to demand more free time is to demand “more of the good things in life. Workers [historically] built movements around this idea, which would find a home in the New Deal. In our own era, where we feel that we have no control over our working hours, this is a vision of freedom worth recapturing.” People with more time on their hands are not lazy; they own more of their freedom.

To disrupt the alarming trend of our labor eroding every minute of our time (including our sleep, argues Jonathan Crary in his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep), we must understand freedom in this way. Contesting visions of freedom always entail high stakes, and they couldn’t be any higher here. This fight involves reclaiming our own limited time here on earth and implicitly asserting that there is more to life than just work. Of course, without free time, the very concept of freedom is tenuous at best, especially given the more elaborate mechanisms of control and scientific management exercised by capital in the workplace which Harry Braverman dissects in his Labor and Monopoly Capital.

Demanding this sort of freedom in practice is as vital as it is difficult, however. Organized labor has never been weaker than it currently is, and the shift to remote work, which looks more and more permanent as the pandemic continues, heightens that difficulty by keeping workers physically separated. Moreover, what this essay aims to establish is that it is not just the workplace that reinforces a culture that rejects the importance of the work-life; from a very young age, our systems of education encourage students to work by insisting that labor is what they’re supposed to be doing. Learning is only a proximate goal on the way to labor; it has no innate purpose.

I wrote in an earlier piece that this human-capital approach to education is precisely what has contributed to the dismantling of democracy that was particularly poignant on January 6 in Washington, D.C. Democracy is no less important in this regard. The broader, theoretical reason that education and labor are so overwhelming is a complete lack of autonomy in the classroom and workplace. Just as labor is more meaningful when workers take an interest in it and benefit from it (materially, mentally, etc.), learning is more meaningful when students feel emboldened and empowered by it.

Valuing and asserting democracy in these spaces — at school and at work — is therefore essential to reclaiming our free time and our freedom more generally. The risk in neglecting this charge is the loss of our very lives themselves, which should entail friendship and love. And, as Sarah Jaffe memorably writes, work won’t love us back.