Work is a quiet majority interest in our lives. We can all be clear about what we’re thinking about the latest Netflix thriller, Arsenal signature, or the profile of the new length of New Yorker. We can all discuss our children and grandchildren in a socially acceptable mix of humble bragging and frustration. But we are not good at talking about the strange ways in which human labor is valued, either, for lawyers, about the meaning of paid work for us (very much, for caregivers). How can I start to clarify the meaning of my work?
And while we may strive for fairness in personal transactions, the workplace is an arbitrary, primitive place where people’s worst instincts are exposed. The psychodrama of organisational life is a story of victory and set-off, mitigated by internal plots and wider economic and political forces. Given this instability, what does fair treatment really look like in today’s workplace?
After reading three recent books exploring work in contrasting ways, I tried to clarify my own answers to these questions. Patriarchy Inc by Cordelia Fine goes deep into biology and culture, exposing the common (and second Trump era, ascendant) idea that men and women tend to want different jobs. Charlie Korennuts produced oral history of British workers in their own words, fifty years after the US version of Stade Terkell. And Emily Mullashi denies wages for the 1970s domestic campaign. This is a challenge to capitalist assumptions that labor has economic value.
Fine’s book follows the bestselling testosterone Rex (2017) and examines the theory that this hormone produces inequality between genders. In Fine’s analysis, it’s culture, not nature. Patriachy Inc. incorporates these arguments into the workplace, destroying the assertion that our genetic and hormonal differences mean it’s natural for women and men to do different jobs (for example, we neatly explain why there are so few women in corporate leadership). Fine calls this a “different but equal” argument. In her analysis, that’s something I agree with – we are rather cultured since we were born to expect a certain type of work. Fine calls this “mind shaping.” And that can be reversed.
Fine, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, brings the academic rigor that is expected of this subject. She also offers readers a rare gift (at least in the book world adjacent to business). humor. She does it “with the abandonment of gay people who are not responsible for implementing them,” setting up a practical way to focus on “what diversity, equity and inclusion are actually for: creating a fairer society.” If only all scholars (and journalists) were self-aware of the lack of impact on the world they “do”;
Fine is not a fan of corporate day. It “has a contradictory legacy, as if a social justice activist had mate with a business tycoon.” Its economic goal, a “business case” often cited, is not about fairness. “Despite the pleasant rhetoric, despite the DEI (as it relates to women), this issue is framed as an underutilization of female human capital.” The popular “female modification” strategy has not achieved results. For example, there is little evidence that leadership courses for women actually work. This approach “ignores the possibility that it is women’s work or workplace that needs to be corrected.” very.
When a man decides to do a lot of work, she insists, it will result in high status. When women were deemed suitable for their demands as “a kind of puzzle solver like a crossword,” they outlined the early history of software programming and played an advanced role. In 1957, programmer Elsie Shutt became pregnant and was forced to quit his job at Raytheon Computing in Massachusetts. She continued to freelance and recruited other mothers as the workload grew. Shutt’s resulting business, Computations Inc, was rooted in a “physically distributed part-time worker” collaboration “for days before email and zoom.” It was very successful.
There is no definitive answer to explain why women fled programming after peaking in the mid-1980s. 37% of US computer science graduates in 1984 were women. Software programming was rebranded as “software engineering” and became a high status job as more men rushed over. The screening test has now become a “suspicious, gender-based aptitude test and personality profile.” The broader point of Fine is that “social closure” occurs when a considerable number of dominant groups do the desired work. Men play the role of other men. The same thing happens whenever there is a dominant group because of its affinity for others like us. “Homosexuality.” It is often not consciousness, it is human work style, and remains unchecked. We can work to dismantle it, but with Fine’s account, this is something that many of the company’s DEIs couldn’t tackle.
Fines for structures that support corporate life. I turned to Charlie Korennuts to see what would happen “on the ground.” Is this working? He interviewed 100 people across the UK, with 68 people identified solely by age and job description and made it into books. Through this long (probably too long) book, the general thread is that it is a meeting of fate or accident that determines many working lives, rather than a planned career.
For example, her 40s childminder regrets that she was unable to attend nursing due to an injury at 20 years old. “I worked in a residential care facility. One of the residents tapped me on the back with a walking stick and knocked me down. To this day, I still have my back and shoulders.”
Colenutt groups interviews into sections such as “Sales Work,” “Boss Work,” and “City Work.” Online sex workers are the same as “bodywork” panel beaters, security guards and warehouse workers. She is a student, finds herself complementing inadequate loans and “frees” her work, but her account offers a glimpse into the invisible, low-wage sector that serves well-paid corporate jobs.
At the end of Colenutt’s project, one of his conclusions is that “pride is everyday.” We often struggle to define what the pride of our work is. Here, I think the Koren Nuts cracked it. “The interviewees who are most proud of their work were those who performed mental alternatives. In their minds, they replaced the actual client for those who loved them, mostly for their family, or for themselves.” For example, “Even if the car you’re working on is a sithole, it could be someone else’s mom out there. Think of it that way.”
A way to find meaning in the workplace is the simplicity of “lack of abstraction, immediate and satisfying tasks, autonomy, and smallness.” These are all on the human scale. Now, Colenutt says we are facing generative AI and “trends in complexity, speed and scale.” Can our vulnerable happiness survive?
Colenutt leaves us hanging. I am more decisive: I believe in progress. Why can’t you do it? I have improved immeasurably since the early 1990s when I was routinely asked if a woman was planning on getting pregnant in job interviews, and my first boss asked if the women in the office had at the same time got our period.
The biggest questions about the work that Colenutt and Fine Approach focus on what we value. Emily Mullashi’s household wages are even further. It explores a feminist campaign that pays housewives. Why do we tolerate the lack of financial value assigned to compassion? And is there another view possible?
The book is a timeline description of domestic wages in the broader landscape of women’s liberation in the early 1970s, and also includes a biography of the chapter-leading five key figures in the global movement. I previously knew nothing about the key chains of this second-wave feminism and the women behind it, including American activist and anti-racist organizer Selma James and Italian academic and political extremist Mariarosa Dara Costa.
These two women are still alive and Callaci respects their legacy. “(Darra Costa) When I asked her what household wages meant her personally, I was surprised by her Kurt’s answer: “It wasn’t personal,” she told me: Through research and political struggle, she concluded that it was the correct analysis of capitalism. ”
Karachi, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came to the subject when the burden of caring for children overturned a critical conception of gender equality. “Household wages” are “probably best understood as a political perspective that begins with the premise that capitalism extracts wealth not only from workers, but also from unpaid work that creates and maintains workers.” Like employees, the employer gets “second labor at the house that keeps him.” When the movement emerged in the 1970s, it was presumed that the worker was him.
All humans want the same thing from our lives and our work: love, connections and friendship, fair opportunities, and fair rewards and recognition. It’s an imperfect world, but for the sudden and brutal dismantling of the US and beyond, I have to hope and make fresh and wonderful thoughts and actions.
Most fundamentally and dreamlike, Callaci explains how wages in a domestic campaign have created a vision beyond work. “Anything we want is rooted in subsidized childcare that has freed women. Nap. Art. Swimming in the sea. Slow, gorgeous sex. Time to cultivate friendship.
What a glorious world.
Isabel Berwick writes FT’s Working IT Newsletter and is the author of “The Future-Proof Career.”
Patriachy Inc: What We Are Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work at Cordelia Fine Atlantic Books £22/WW Norton $29.99 (From August), 352 pages
Is this working? Charlie Collennut Picador £20, 400 pages of people who do them work we do
Housework Wages: Movement Stories, Ideas, Promise by Emily Carasi Allen Lane £25/Seal Press $30, 288 pages
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