The Post-Workists

The Post-Workists look to a future without jobs, where full automation has eradicated much of human labour. Andy Beckett described the thinking and met some of the key thinkers in a long read essay in the Guardian newspaper called Post Work: the radical idea of a world without work.

A world with much less work could be a fairer, less anxious, more human and communal and enjoyable. The end of work would open up the possibility of a whole new stage of human development. Sexist divisions of labour would be history when neither couple can claim to be the main wage earner, and so be exempt from housework or child-rearing. Anyway, much of that could shared by the whole community, with Soviet-style communal laundries and cafeterias.

The idea of a world without work is not totally utopian or futuristic. It has been tried before, with surprising results. When Edward Heath’s Conservative government imposed a national 3-day working week in 1974, productivity in the UK actually went up. Leisure activities also went up. People were more productive when they worked but they also played more golf, fished more and more people listened to John Peel.

People earned less, but were more productive and more engaged in a cultural life. This led to the idea of the shorter working week being given serious consideration in government, at least until Margaret Thatcher got to power and set a very different agenda.

Those who defend work culture argue that people achieve a level of satisfaction from work that they don’t get from leisure. Psychologists Judith LeFevre and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted an experiment that seemed to show that people often reported achieving a sense of “flow” at work, when they were totally absorbed in a task, learning a new skill, using their abilities to the full and growing self-esteem. The satisfaction they derived from achieving glow at work was rarely experienced from leisure activities.

Post-workists like David Graeber argue that our capacity for things other than work needs to be built up again:

“The post-war years, when people worked less and it was easier to be on the dole, produced beat poetry, avant-garde theatre, 50-minute drum solos, and all of Britain’s great pop music — art forms that take time to produce and consume.”

As an aside, anyone who has read John Lahr’s Prick Up Your Ears will know how crucial a period on the dole was to Joe Orton. Unemployment benefit gave him the space to develop a body of work that would add much more to the economy was ever invested in the shape of dole payments. How many bands learned their chords and built a following while signing on? Stow College in Glasgow reportedly once offered a Youth Training Scheme course on music production which included access to a recording studio, a godsend to the sound of young Scotland.

In the post work future, towns and city centres could be redeveloped to cater for more needs than simply working and shopping. A new type of public building is imagined, one that combines the library, the leisure centre and artists’ studios.

Many of Britain’s towns, with their desolate high streets that have never recovered from the Crash, or the states with their dead malls on the edge of towns, are crying out for new ideas. Catering to a post work population could revitalise and regenerate them.

Such regeneration would bring opportunities for artists and cultural entrepreneurs. New types of galleries, kitted out for Virtual and Augmented Reality exhibitions are surely more exciting than yet another bland Vape shop?