When your job treats you like a person
Today, I crashed my employer’s website. Again. More accurately, I got myself flagged as a hacker on their management system, the upshot being that the site wouldn’t load for anyone at their IP address. I think this is the seventh time I’ve done it.
If I had done this at any other job I’ve had, I would be quaking in my boots, writing up justifications of my every click and keystroke and why it was an honest mistake and how I was terribly sorry and will improve! As I write this, however, as the new part-time engagement coordinator for a small community farm, I’m laughing at the comedy of errors. I’m not afraid, because this is the first job I’ve ever had that treats me, first and foremost, like a person.
I’ve spent most of my career as an adjunct college English instructor. For comparison, my partner is a software engineer. At first glance, our careers couldn’t seem further apart: public vs. private for-profit, humanities vs. STEM, union vs. non-union. Yet our working lives have been eerily similar. We both have workloads that require more hours than we’re paid for. We both have chronic health problems from hours staring at screens. We both have to rush through our workload at a pace that precludes careful, polished work. We are both working in systems guaranteed to perform poorly: I teach too many students for too short a time to really educate them; he spends much of his time in useless meetings or correcting errors resulting from an endless succession of “sprints” to complete rushed projects.
All this exemplifies what Marx terms alienated labor: work that produces nothing meaningful to the worker but rather saps our strength and leaves us with less of ourselves the more we produce. Writing for Jacobin, Matteo Tiratelli argues that this erosion of meaningful work is an inevitable consequence of a capitalist economy: “capital... is devoted solely to the search for profits and the ceaseless drive to increase its value. To put it another way, our economy is structured by an insatiable quest for exchange value that is not limited, directed, or controlled by what people actually need.” In capitalism’s never-ending quest to do more with less faster, shoddy quality, waste, and exhaustion are inevitable byproducts.
At one extreme, this creeping meaninglessness can result in what David Graeber terms a bullshit job, one made up almost entirely of useless busywork. My partner has sometimes fallen into the bullshit subcategory Graeber calls a “duct taper”: a person “hired to manage the problems that ensue as a result of not fixing real problems,” such as “coordinating badly chosen, poorly integrated software programs.” Yet Tiratelli observes that, for most, alienated labor is less about “bullshit jobs” than bullshit tasks within jobs that have some inherent value. In my case, many of my interactions with students are meaningful, yet the austerity model of education, which demands larger class sizes for substandard pay in spite of spiraling tuition hikes, grinds away much of the joy that might be devoted to learning.
Yet with little alternative, many cling to these jobs. A few years ago, I wrecked my health taking on extra tasks to try to look competitive for a tenure position. I worked sixty hours a week for about thirty hours’ pay. I didn’t get the position, but I did have a realization: I was behaving toward my employer like an abused partner toward their abuser: breaking my back to be “perfect” just be seen as “acceptable” for next-to-nothing in return.
My partner, too, has developed work instincts similar to those of an abused intimate partner. He has experienced a pattern of being laid off with little notice, for reasons ranging from downsizing to outsourcing to mergers to failure to meet productivity targets. This pattern has eradicated any trust he might have in any employer. He is always afraid of underperforming, offending, waiting for the day he’s told he’s unemployed again, health benefits termed, income slashed, back to the full-time job of looking for a job.
This is the context in which I started my job at Tryon Life Community Farm, a 7-acre wooded farm close to my house. I’d been volunteering for the farm for a few years before synchronicity put this paid position in my path. I immediately found it disorienting, much as a survivor of abuse might feel when they first find themselves in a relationship with an emotionally healthy partner.
I’ve often worked with people I like, people who became friends, but this is the first time I’ve worked as a member of a community based on community first and job description second. I know that whether or not the farm can afford to keep paying me, I’ll still have a place there. I’ll still be welcome, included, a neighbor, a volunteer. Importantly, my economic privilege allows to me to prioritize work goals other than money. That inequity acknowledged, it is a comfort to know that my acceptability as a member of the community is not contingent on meeting performance benchmarks—or on my being an employee at all.
This is a relationship based on trust. Though tax forms verify my employment, I have signed no contract: never offered one, never asked. I feel no insecurity about this. I have no “boss” or supervisor; the farm actively works on sociocratic principles of lateral power sharing. If I have questions, I can email any one of a number of people who might have an answer. I keep a time sheet to account for my hours, but except for the lead-up to big events, I rarely have fixed deadlines.
There are disadvantages to this model, like the antique management software insisting on flagging me as a hacker! Or how my bumbling efforts to figure out how to “coordinate engagement” resulted in one person besides me showing up for our recent land-tending work party. By the standards of the dominant economy, work is slow and inefficient (though in ecological terms, it is highly efficient and resource light).
At the same time, I’ve slowly awoken to the feeling that this is okay. The software problems get worked around. Our two-person work party pulled out a lot of invasive bind weed, and we had such a good time doing it that we unintentionally worked overtime and then took some extra time to feed blackberry brambles to the goats. If the project we’d hoped to work on this month doesn’t come together, there’s next month. If we can’t raise enough funds for re-roofing this year, there’s next year. This farm has been an active community for twenty years, slowly seeding the work of recommoning: creating space where people can share and tend land in relationship. There’s room for learning, for mistakes, for failure, for slow and steady. We’re okay.
My Buddhist sensei once said that when you first begin to clear your mind and be truly aware of what’s around you it can feel like you’re falling. This job has given me an analogous reorientation. In the netless free fall of our neoliberal society, this kind of humanizing work makes you realize you’re held.
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