- In part this is because such studies tend to compare countries, and comparative data on hours of work are not good.
- Perhaps part of what keeps people attached to the current work regime are the opportunities work provides for social interaction. That would mean that for the switch to noncommodified productive activities to capture the same set of benefits as paid work, people would have to shift in concert away from paid work—so that they could be productive with other people in noncommodified ways. I discuss this issue in more detail in the following chapter.
- There is some evidence, from a German study, that while being unemployed is associated with a low overall assessment of life satisfaction, when the unemployed are asked to report on their moment-to-moment emotional state, their overall level of happiness is about the same as that of employed persons (Knabe et al. 2010). The authors of the study suggest that their findings indicate that the control that the unemployed have over their time produces enough happiness to cancel out the “saddening efect” of unemployment. For a given activity, the employed experience more happiness than the unemployed. But the fact that the unemployed are more able than the employed to steer their time toward those activities that produce relatively more happiness for them means that they can make up for the happiness deficit they experience for any given activity. This is a surprising finding given the stigma attached to being unemployed in modern capitalist societies and the tendency of the unemployed to become socially isolated.
- In the 1990s, Robert Brenner criticized the sanguine view of post-Fordist work expounded by Piore and Sabel and, to a lesser extent, by the regulation theorists, according to which work, after the demise of the mass production paradigm, became reskilled and increasingly democratized. Brenner noted that the new work regime involves a combination of the micromanagement of workers, so that their productivity comes to be measured by the number of seconds worked per minute, and the use of a superficially horizontal work team organizational structure to make workers responsible for quality control. As he and Glick argue in a 1991 paper: “Whatever else it ofers, ‘lean’ production does nothing to increase the level of the workers’ skill, let alone make them into craftspeople. Indeed, far from the anti-Taylorian revolution that Regulation theorist Alain Lipietz envisions, the foundation for the productivity gains secured on the shop floor is hyper-Taylorization—the super-deskilling of jobs by means of their breakdown into their simplest possible components” (p. 118). The authors go on to argue that insofar as workers under the new regime gain any initiative, it is solely in the matter of “helping the company further identify slack and waste in the system” (Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 119).
- Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath, “Why You Hate Work,” New York Times, May 30, 2014, SR1. Research indicating the discontents of work is not a new thing. Investigations by industrial sociologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century, for example, likewise discovered widespread dissatisfaction with work (Watson 1940; Walker and Guest 1952; Chinoy 1955).
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Notes to Pages 18–20