Sarah Jaffe

The carrot that was eventually offered to the industrial working class was what is often called the Fordist compromise, named, of course, after Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Company. Workers would give up a large chunk of their time, but a manageable one—generally five eight-hour days of work a week—to the boss and in return they would get a decent paycheck, health care (either provided by the company, in the United States, or, in other countries, provided by the state), and maybe some paid holidays and a pension to retire on.

The day-to-day conditions of Bangladeshi garment workers—or, say, the workers who assemble iPhones at the Foxconn plant in China—range from tedious to backbreaking to deadly.

Yet even Amazon, in denying the reports of hellish conditions written up by journalist Emily Guendelsberger, touts its “passionate employees, whose pride and commitment are what make the Amazon customer experience great.”9

But the process of outsourcing or automating these jobs out of expensive locations like the United States and Western Europe has shifted the nature of work in those rich countries and resulted, strangely enough, in employers seeking out those very human traits that industrial capitalism had tried so hard to strip away. Those human traits—creativity, “people skills,” caring—are what employers seek to exploit in the jobs we’re supposed to love. Exercising them is what is supposed to make work less miserable, but instead it has helped work to worm its way deeper into every facet of our lives.12

Neoliberalism was born in Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratic socialist Salvador Allende and, with the advice of American economists, reorganized the economy by force.

Today’s ideal workers are cheery and “flexible,” networked and net-savvy, creative and caring. They love their work but hop from job to job like serial monogamists; their hours stretch long and the line between the home and the workplace blurs.

The spread of “globalization” meant that the unpleasant work could be shoved out of the rich countries into the poor ones, where labor was cheaper and governments easier to bully out of regulation.

Wildcat strikes were common in Lordstown in the early 1970s, where a diverse group of young workers rebelled against the very idea of work. They did not just demand more money, or even a share of the profits; they challenged the idea that anyone ought to spend their lives on an assembly line. But in the end, those workers wound up trading autonomy for security.37

High on the job-growth list, too, are computer programmers, who might earn higher salaries but are also expected to demonstrate passion for their work—though they show it through their long hours more than in outpourings of emotion. Their work is closer to the jobs of other creatives—entertainers, perhaps, or journalists like myself—rooted in our old notions of artistic work.41

The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker.