Work Is not Working Anymore? The Rise of Anti-work Demands across Online Spaces in the Coronavirus Pandemic

From Firenze University Press Journal: Cambio

Costanza Guazzo, Università di Milano

Alessandro Gandini, Università di Milano

Following the pandemic outbreak, discussions about the meaning of work have grown larger in the Western public debate. As waves of conta-gion, and related variants, came and went, many workers experienced sig-nificant changes to their usual work routines and practices, leading some to question their choices, reassess their work/life balance, and sometimes rethink their work lives altogether. For workers in the knowledge economy in particular, the unplanned and unprecedented, large-scale experimen-tation of remote work practices has led to a normalisation of hybrid work routines, with some days working from home and some from the habitu-al workplace. Initial research indicates that a growing number of workers actually started to question their existing work/lives in the aftermath of the health crisis, reconsidering the balance between the need to work and one’s personal and life goals (Gandini, Garavaglia 2023).

Contextually, an emergent anti-work sentiment has gained traction. Anti-work, in broad terms, may be seen as a general critique to work and productivity in their exploitative aspects for human life (Russell 1935). This can be witnessed in a number of related phenomena, particularly the so-called “great resignation”, by which a grow-ing number of workers in Western economies, particularly (albeit not exclusively) in the US, voluntarily leave their jobs with the explicit goal of improving their lives (Thompson 2021; Coin 2023). Within this context, online spaces have emerged as a privileged environment for discussions around work. Take for instance the “quiet quit-ting” trend, which promoted active disengagement at work on T i kTo k, inviting workers to strictly stick to what is expected of their role, without going above and beyond their duties (Scheyett 2023). Landmark setting for such anti-work discussions, however, has been the lively r/antiwork forum on the social media platform Reddit, which at the time of writing hosts more than 2.8 million users, largely US-based, who gather daily to discuss work-related matters. This claims to be an online space of discussionfor those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work- free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and seek personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles. This article critically questions this emergent anti-work trend, locating its affirmation in the context of the long-term evolution of work cultures propelled by digital transformations. We suggest that the pandemic has newly put under question the idea of enjoying and deriving meaning from one’s work, which has been for long at the heart of the neoliberal conception of work (Ross 2009; Weeks 2011; McRobbie 2018). Despite the promise of happiness, social recognition and status acquisition through self-realisation at work that was particularly core to the so-called “new economy” of the 1990s and early 2000s, for many — especially young — workers work now amounts to an insufficient source of income for basic needs. Precariousness often represents a stable career condi-tion, alongside diffuse job insecurity and stalling minimum wages (Blossfeld et al.2008). Based on ethnographic content analysis of a set of posts extracted from the r/antiwork subreddit, we show how this online forum has been able to aggregate a set of conversations aiming at «resisting work». These conversations suggest that, following the pandemic outbreak, the neoliberal ideal of self-realisation through work is undergoing a crisis; digital discussion groups, such as Reddit, may open a new space for workers’ organisation and negotiation of new visions and mean-ings of work.The article is structured as follows. In the next section we critically discuss work cultures in modern Western societies, with the aim of setting the context of our argumentation. Then, following a methodological note, we pre-sent our research and discuss the main insights that can be derived from our analysis. In the conclusion we discuss our findings in light of Kathi Weeks’s (2011) theory of the work ethic, questioning the present and future prospects of the ‘anti-work’ trend in light of the broader post-pandemic scenario.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-16094

Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/cambio/article/view/16094