Golden Handcuffs on the Grind: r/CanadianTeachers and r/Antiwork
Nicholas Rickards, Ph.D. Student
Faculty of Education, Brock University
University Lecturer & Public School Teacher
Reddit.com is a megalopolis social media, content rating, news, ideas, and interest sharing aggregate website, heir apparent to the forlorn forum of the halcyon internet age. What is colloquially referred to as a “subreddit” or “sub” is an online community dedicated to exploring the specifics of any given topic of interest. Though some of my favourite subreddits include r/movies, r/StarWarsEU, and r/standardissuecat (I have one. Her name is Scarlett), the subreddits I frequent most are r/CanadianTeachers and r/Antiwork.
Much to the dismay of our beleaguered gerontocracy, the subreddit r/Antiwork is one of Reddit’s largest communities with 2.8 million subscribers and has become the public square where workers of all industries become bellmen who share the intimate, cigar-chomping details of their experiences of exploitation-through-work, laying bare the undignified moments that we consider normal in our own work, yet appear atrocious from afar. More than just a space for “lazy” but tech-savvy Millennials and Gen Z’ers to air their grievances, r/Antiwork is enticing because of its relatability; we’ve all had to deal with some permutation, combination, or iteration of the megalomaniac manager, the unruly customer, the co-worker turned competitor, or some kind of alienation from the thing we make, produce, or facilitate, which is apparently worth more on the market than what we were paid to bring it into existence.
Although posts on r/CanadianTeachers might generate expected discussion on assessment and resources, r/CanadianTeachers is underscored by the same subtext we find in r/Antiwork. What makes r/CanadianTeachers so fascinating is that it’s one of the few places in media culture and our infotainment spheres that represents the experiences of Canadian teachers as workers in an unmediated, autobiographical form. The subreddit provides contrast to the whimsical idolatry too common in Canadian popular culture like the television show Mr. D (2012–2018) or the film The Grizzlies (2018) — Abbott Elementary (2021-present) and Freedom Writers (2007) serving as suitable American equivalents respectively. In Mr. D and Abbott Elementary, teaching is a joke, which is why the shows are so funny. In The Grizzlies and Freedom Writers, work as a teacher is pathologized with gratuitous, pornographic excess as the single, most important, and presumably only motivation for which to live: to work. These representations are problematic because they are the most prominent representations of teachers and classrooms for audiences that consume popular media, most of whom have not been in a classroom since they were students.
In many of these narratives, teachers are always full-time workers, not precarious substitutes or occasional teachers (of which there are many that every school division depends on). The ones that do work full-time rarely have hobbies outside of their jobs; they have dysfunctional romantic relationships (if they have one at all); they are frequently depicted as childless themselves but function within the narrative as pseudo parents to the children they teach; and are, to various degrees, fueled by their love of the labour and their labour of love.
r/CanadianTeachers, however, descries a tapestry that weaves both threads of a critique of work that we find in r/Antiwork and the realities of the emotional work we find in teacher popular culture, revealing a much more complicated tableau of what it means to work with your body and your heart, traits unique to boots-on-the-ground, front-facing workers in the public sector and service industries. For example, many users often post about how a confluence of factors force them into precarious work (u/ThrowRAohhh, 2024) and that they might need a second job to supplement their part-time teaching (These_Republic_7872, 2024).
As of this writing, the two most commented-on posts of the entire subreddit thus far, “Thinking of quitting, can’t get ahead in life” (Status_Equivalent_36, 2024) and “Honestly, what is everyone else doing to survive who can’t quit?” ([deleted], 2024), have collectively generated hundreds of comments that attempt to disentangle the larger, systemic, ontological paradox of what full-time workers in the Canadian public sector refer to as the pair of golden handcuffs: breaking free would be nice if only those pesky handcuffs with their union membership, structured holidays, and guaranteed pay, pension, and benefits weren’t so shiny and secure. There is a larger project and analysis to be conducted here concerning the discourse and rhetoric within r/CanadianTeachers that might provide legitimate weight to arguments that on one hand, decry teachers as lazy, ungrateful, whiny public servants, or on the other, frame teachers as underpaid, overworked, necessary gears of our economy. Such analyses and arguments, however, are well beyond the scope of this work. And quite honestly, I am not interested in participating in the debate at this particular moment.
What I see as more productive, though, is to contextualize these debates within a larger framework of solidarity that sees all of us as comrades in a collective struggle against exploitation and the tyranny of capital. Such an approach might allow us to ask systemic questions about the nature of work and how teachers fit within the complex nexus of affect, labour, community, capital, and democracy.
How do teachers exist as workers within the political economy? How can we frame them as subjects with working conditions that might be unfavourable to productivity, like classroom sizes, for example? What function does ignoring teachers as workers serve? If teachers are workers, what effects do their working conditions have on the products (students) that they are paid to produce? If teachers exist within larger systems of management and hierarchy, how do we measure the difference between performance issues with workers and managerial issues of the organization which they work for? Why do managers and CEOs get paid more if they produce less? Why do we assign a dollar value to some work differently than others? Is the dollar value we assign to work always equal to the role that work plays in an organization? A community? Our daily lives? Etc., etc.
I am embarrassed to admit that although I think these questions are important to ask, I am a hopeless romantic at heart, my life a pop culture cliché. I love education, and my feelings are both public and concrete (Rickards, 2024). But I am also a labourer, one who works in education, and I am repeatedly reminded by the poignant title of Sara Jaffe’s (2021) book that, sadly, Work Won’t Love You Back.
References
[deleted]. (2024, October 20). Honestly, what is everyone else doing to survive who can’t quit? [Online forum post]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/17jbghf/honestly_what_is_everyone_else_doing_to_survive/
Jaffee, S. (2021). Work won’t love you back. Blood Type Books.
Rickards, N. (2024). “Hey, you there!”: Theorizing the open letter as methodology in academic writing. Brock Education Journal, 33(1), 10–26. https://doi.org/10.26522/brocked.v33i1.1119
u/Status_Equivalent_36. (2023, June 20). Thinking of quitting, can’t get ahead in life. [Online forum post]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/14ku9k3/thinking_of_quitting_cant_get_ahead_in_life/
u/These_Republic_7872. (2024, April 13). Would working at a sex shop inhibit me from becoming a teacher? [Online forum post]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/1c1mx1h/would_working_at_a_sex_shop_inhibit_me_from/
u/ThrowRAohhh. (2024, April 14). What am I supposed to do?? (Ontario). [Online forum post]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/1c2da03/what_am_i_supposed_to_do_ontario/
