This Oppressive Work Space
How might we share our advantages by building a universally better experience of work?
Let us imagine. Imagine the value of increasing the flexibility, benefits, compensation and availability of all job opportunities at the same time. Imagine a standard 32 hour work week. Imagine a great effort to stimulate an independent work force by allowing solo entrepreneurs and teams of up to 10 co-founders to apply for opportunity credit (up to $250,000 per person) made available with 1% interest. Imagine a more democratic, team driven approach to scheduling for our 24 hour economy. Imagine how your work world might improve with a few simple changes.
What does sharing our advantage really cost?
Let’s think about how our workplaces intersect with politics and policy. Consider the power that is exerted over us, how we might be able to make better decisions if we didn’t have to be afraid of our employer.
- Healthcare ties us to our employers
- Employment supports our ability to purchase the requirements of life
- Workers can be fired for any reason
- Employers do not encourage workers to engage in political activity
- Workers receive no benefit from participating in government
In our economy, many tend believe that you “make it” when you become a professional worker (or you know, become a millionaire success or whatever).
When you get your “white collar” (or company issued hoodie) you have likely achieved a middle to upper-middle class life. You are on the safety plain. This middle class is generally perceived to be made of trades people, professional service workers, tech workers, teachers, doctors and lawyers. But no matter the worker, we tend to treat the workplace like it was made for workers who work more physically demanding jobs like blue collar service jobs requiring traditionally “low skill” labor like a construction, factory or farm worker. We all might have a start and stop time for the work day. We might be expected to work extra hours to meet a deadline. We might track our hours of production and effectively sell our labor at an industry or socially acceptable rate. “We don’t pay you to just sit around.” Though in reality we do pay you to sit in the chair there for 8 hours a day. This hypocrisy exists in nearly every work environment, and we all know it isn’t a very good way of measuring our worth (or value), getting our maximum productivity (what are we robots?), or achieving a good work / life balance.
The reality is that each of these types of workers would want different benefits (along with some common ones like living wages). For a growing number of professional class workers, our new work needs new kinds of breaks. Our efficiency is linked with our mental wellbeing and we lose effectiveness when we experience trauma in life. It makes sense to consider this when developing flexible hybrid work environments. It makes sense to consider that we should empower ourselves and others to easily transition to school for retraining. It makes sense to allow for exploratory career paths for entrepreneurs, innovators, designers, performers, musicians and artists. It makes sense to design for mobility of all workers to find their best path, their best work space. All jobs should have inherent dignity.
We have an opportunity during the pandemic to be critical for a purpose. We should consider the value of restructuring the workplace.
Let’s start here.
Is there a problem? Is this something that needs fixing?
I would say yes, there are at least few big problems, the first… the pandemic showed us how an economic iceberg might hit women and families hard. Will these women miss opportunities and promotions while unemployed or employed in the home?
The second, Millennials have tried to be the technological bridge for several generations of technology adopters (born during the bridge between born with, and born without the internet). Will these workers be able to take the stress of adapting to new work environments (new stresses of all remote) without adjusting corporate expectations?
The third, our industrial farming system isn’t sustainable and is fragile. How will we build a more resilient food system that respects the quality of our food and the livelihood of those who produce this food for us?
Want to dig a little deeper? I found a few articles of interest while searching around that I want to look through.
Roadmap for Rural America — for incoming administration from Family Farm Action.
https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Family-Farm-Action-Roadmap-for-Rural-America-Biden-Harris-min_compressed.pdfTHE FOOD SYSTEM: CONCENTRATION AND ITS IMPACTS A Special Report to the Family Farm Action Alliance.
https://farmactionalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Hendrickson-et-al.-2020.-Concentration-and-Its-Impacts-FINAL.pdf
The fourth, our unemployment systems needs overhauling. How can we assure that there are fulfilling, universal employment opportunities for everyone?
The reality is that our Old Rules (pre-internet) don’t work with New Kinds of Work (Internet) in our New Kind of World (Internet) multiplied by Pandemic Chaos (Internet) and Social Uncertainty (Internet).
Could there be a case for a Universal Union?
What if we designed new rights for workers that were negotiated in public? These insights might come from frequent reports of adverse experiences and needs based upon the characteristics of the job and jobs like it. If we had a central path to work toward more flexible work environments, would more women stay employed during future economic disruptions (like the pandemic)? What if a Universal Union became a core feature of our budding digital democracy? A direct way to interact with our representatives at every level, to build better communities and stronger work spaces.
We could start by reducing working hours through the remainder of the pandemic, this would create new employment. What if we legislated $15 minimum wage along with policy guiding working 1 less day per week per employee (32 hour work week), the government will pay the difference in employment costs for a transition period (2–3 years). In exchange, workers will enroll in a huge participatory study of employee happiness in the workplace (during the closing months and years of this pandemic, potentially run by USDS).
Working together as different kinds of community
Why did the protests of this summer not gain further policy traction?
One possibility, there was not an obvious economic threat. We don’t really spend time working with other types of labor in solidarity. Our lives revolve around our friends and family that are woven around our work and location. We don’t have a good place to hold dialog across our sprawling communities. Propaganda efforts targeted various points of exploitation to divide working classes.
Well what if all of us who work, and will work most of our lives agreed to do something about it. What if we got together and said all together that we want a better way to work, what if we made that together… a basic but powerful government that works online to capture reality with more transparency, must register to participate.
How? It’s not for me to know or decide exactly. BUT the system needs to be agreed upon through an adaptive, and redundant public design process. For instance we might want 100 design teams to work with 100 communities of various sizes. Problems might be posed by the community to the design team. The design team would help prioritize and solved these problems with community involvement. We already have a pseudo-independent government body that could help build it USDS (read more at USDS).
What is it? The initial version might be an interactive public feedback system built for representatives to collect direct data from their constituents. This system once proven, might be adopted by amendment applied to create a permanent window for transparency into the data and logic being used to run our government.
So many questions… How might we participate? Who are the laborers of today? What if every worker had a union to represent them by law? How could this be made simple and maintainable? How might one explain this and other solutions understandable in a 3 minute video and a 3 minute deeper read?
The Gaslighting of a Generation of Tech Workers
There is a deep Millennial pain from the forced role of being a generational connector in a time of rapid technological acceleration.
Senior leadership and management doesn’t always understand the impact of change for core technology or processes. They pass those burdens of limitations, or ethical concerns onto the specialists, generalists, and laborers who are used to implement the building of digital cash machines. These decisions are rarely justified or explained well. When we do not acknowledge the burden created by the increasing complexity of human systems, we do not see the labor or the stress being cause by the lack of acknowledgement this our invisible labor. Because of this feeling of invisible labor, we mistakenly discount the power that comes from this labor (we are not cogs or machines).
What should employment look like in the age of technology?
At a personal level as a tech worker I often feel restricted by my work environment, even though it is much more flexible than the work spaces that many of my friends or family get to experience. I try to focus on being patient with myself and others. Some days it feels like I’ve been waiting for years, waiting, learning, experimenting, waiting… for opportunities that others can not see and I can not explain yet. I think we act now, and from here forward we all should be fairly valued for our contributions of labor, and we should collectively protect our leisure as a measure of our societal advancement.
I believe —
The experience of life is notated like music. When played without breaks and differentiation it is all noise. We need a workplace that respects our unique skills and challenges in life in order to give each of us the capacity to contribute our all for the greater good. We need a work space that is kind, cooperative, and that values our individual contributions.
- I love different kinds of work and the privilege of being immersed in my work (some might call this flow), therefore I care a great deal about how work feels for others.
- With this privilege as a lens, I want to set a baseline, to work on redefining the experience of work in our emerging culture of independent service professionals, remote teams and 24 hour cycle businesses. Let’s change the dial from “a-job-is-a-job” to “pleasant” for everyone.
- In this always on world, I want to work on improving the experience of communication to help people understand one another with permission and empathy.
- With my passionate energy I like to work on foundational challenges. I perform product and system research and development that tries to change a fundamental assumption about how the world works.
What are your wants in the workplace?
The web is not a static place, these words are meant to start a conversation not demand a specific outcome. I’d love to get your comments and earn your cooperation.
