Say, an average human being only has about 7,00,000 hours in their lifetime. Why then do we work so long and so hard?
Rewind to a hundred years ago. Madras witnessed one of the fiercest strikes in its history of the region, by the workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills, which has had a lasting impact along caste and class lines. In the meantime, workers in Tamil Nadu and around the world are predominantly facing severe setbacks, with regard to their ability to effectively strike and negotiate wages, and most importantly, to imagine a life outside wage labour. The historical anxiety surrounding work’s dominion over life and living seems to be falling apart in the face of a greater, all-encompassing morality: The work ethic.
The compulsive belief that work is a moral good — the work ethic — has emerged as a key force in legitimising and enforcing a social existence, entirely based on wage labour. As scholar and anti-work theorist Kathi Weeks writes in her book The Problem with Work, “The behaviours that the ethic prescribes remain consistent — the identification with and systematic devotion to waged work". However, she also notes that how one justifies their compliance to the system can vary.
Most workers CE spoke to — daily wage, low-income — found it difficult to even comprehend a life outside wage labour, even hypothetically.
Babu (48), security guard at an apartment complex, said, “I work 12 hours a day, and get about half an hour for having my lunch. If I don’t work, it will cause fights at home. Would anyone like it if you simply slept all day?” When pressed to imagine a life of idleness, he went silent for a minute. “I do not know what idleness even means. No such concept exists in my life,” he added.
“If I don’t work a day, my family and I will go hungry. That is what drives me,” said Jayachandran (54), a roadside fruit seller. Running on mere four hours of sleep, he looked puzzled as to what response we were expecting from him. “I cannot sit idle, if I stop working, I die,” he said, adding, “If you really want me to imagine what I would do with such a life, I would like to travel and see the world.”
A delivery worker, Jaisusai (36), told us if he didn’t have to slog over 10 hours a day, he would indulge his interest in videographing temples and examining their architecture. Tamizharasu (32), recalled that he had once been on track to be a professional footballer, one who “could have made it to the state-level at least”, but was eventually bogged down; firstly by his dire financial situation and secondly, the obligation to work.
On the white collars
Outside India, where white-collar professionals across sectors have a minimum of a five-day work week, first-world countries such as France, Japan, and New Zealand have moved to reducing work hours. This slow but sure paradigm shift makes us wonder, is this possible to implement here, and what do Indian workers think about it.
CE reached out to a handful of professionals — ranging from software engineer to Merchant Navy officer — asking them questions regarding unemployment, idleness, and a ‘workless’ future, under condition of anonymity. Nearly all of them agreed there should be time for simple idleness in people’s lives, and almost half of the lot told us they get only about an hour of idle time during an average working day. Some engendered unemployment purely as the knife of starvation hanging over their heads at all times, and some others chalked the phenomenon down to a simple lack of skill to ‘compete’ in the job market.
But why do we work at all? “I believe one must work not for money or other reasons. I genuinely believe the human mind cannot be left to idle and be engaged in nothing,” one said. Such responses demonstrate the ethic’s double bind and how work is often the absolute centre of all activity for modern workers.
Apart from decoupling the economic incentive from work, once again laying bare the irrationality of the ethic, the respondent brings up a rabidly popular but false dichotomy between work and idleness. The opposite of waged labour is simply unwaged labour, and not necessarily idleness or unproductivity. For most of history — till about 250 years ago or so, when capitalism took root — everyone everywhere had relied entirely on unwaged labour for sustenance, as the concept simply did not exist in feudal societies. As Weeks notes, when workers attack work society, it is precisely the wage relation and its reification that are being challenged or threatened, never labour itself.
A much-repeated response was, ‘We work so we can have some meaning.’ One of them went so far as to say, “We work so there is purpose in life”. This unnerving confusion of work and identity has long been criticised by experts and non-experts alike, often pointing to the workers’ diminished imagination and capacity for living. Sociologist Max Weber, borrowing from Goethe, characterises this new subjectivity in his seminal The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, and this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.”
But, can we imagine a world without work? Nearly half of all the people CE interacted with said they could not.
Perhaps the most clarifying answer of them all, said, “Then there won’t be a point to living anymore,” capturing the dire predicament of the modern worker who now simply lives to work, instead of working as means to enjoy, examine life.
However, one respondent remained on the fence, “I wish it were possible. I would like to hear more about such a world.” Another displayed a familiar brand of techno-optimism. “The way work is perceived and carried out will change in the future. Work will become meaningful and a complete joy to take part in. Everything else will be automated,” they said.
Finally, the answer to why we work so long and hard is of little practical use “when we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centred on work”, as per Weeks. Hence, criticising wage labour as a mode of living must necessarily entail cultivating alternate imaginaries of community and ownership, rejuvenating collective imagination, and embracing a life for and of this world, not simply live in it.
What is one word that comes to mind when thinking of work? These were some of the responses we got:
Focus
Exploitation
Endless
Money
Vacuum
Necessity
Passion
Stress
A lesson for the ages
The trials that had beset the striking workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills, also known as Binny Mills, have been extensively documented in the late labour historian D Veeraraghavan’s The Making of the Madras Working Class. What started out as a dispute over wages and leaves escalated into a full-blown strike on June 20, 1921, led by the country’s first union, the Madras Labour Union. However, a large portion of workers from the Adi Dravidar community refused to join the strike, leading to a mob of striking caste Hindu workers allegedly entering their settlement and burning their huts. The strike, which went on for six more months, lost considerable traction due to the division of workers along caste lines. “Binny and Co succeeded in crushing the union with the assistance of the state, by promoting communal divisions among the workers. The Madras Labour Union and the labour movement in the city in general took considerable time to recover from this catastrophic defeat,” writes Veeraraghavan.