Quitting Time
Hi— it’s me, Cooper. In an effort to share more perspectives than my own (and share the labor of writing a regularly occuring publication) I have asked some of the smartest people I know to write for C. Etcetera. Thus far those people also happen to be my friends. (You can read the guest review of Superman here). Below is an essay on time, work-discipline, and capitalism by Thomas M. Watson, Ph.D. and bricklayer extraordinaire. If you’d like to write for C. Etcetera drop me a line.
Quitting Time by T. M. Watson
I have trouble with work. Last week, while sobbing on the phone with my mother, I told her I was going to quit my job. I had to quit my job. “It is easier to find a job when you have a job,” she said. “And we all know you need structure.”
It’s true, I have trouble with structure. I spent my twenties, for the most part, avoiding economically-measurable work by going to graduate school, and after about five years, I had a nervous breakdown. One flexible deadline six years away isn’t good for a man with a wont to eat ice cream for breakfast and drink beer with lunch.
I know I am not alone my trouble with work. I hear it, from young and old. The youth, they do complain. My elders complain too. When I was out with my parents for dinner the other week, before I had contemplated quitting my job, my father stated that people of his generation got a job and stuck with it. Younger people seem to want to change jobs and careers every few years, he claimed. I wondered aloud if this was due to a lack of stability in the job market itself. I, myself, didn’t set out to switch careers three times before thirty-five.
After graduate school, I sought a solution for my unstructured ennui by fleeing into a job that with strict labor-discipline. I work as a bricklayer now. Work starts at 6am, but I have to be there at least five minutes early. The units are all of a standard size and weight — any variation in them has to be corrected, by me. My movements are scrutinized for their efficiency and precision. At 2:15, we drop our tools.
Our experience of time has evolved alongside industrial and post-industrial capitalism. The attitude of pre-capitalist societies towards time was frequently described as “task-oriented.” Just as in graduate school, my day was divided into mornings, which were for reading, and afternoons, which were for writing, in an agrarian or hunter-gather society the day is structured by tasks that should be completed based on a flexible schedule. There is no great distinction between “work” and “life,” no momentous clatter of tools at “quitting time,” just an unending flow of activity.
As clocks and other machinery grew more accurate and work moved outside of the home and commons into factories and workshops, work started being measured by the minute. The steam-mill started hissing and the looms began to clatter at seven: the workers had to be present and ready to work. Punishment awaited those who weren’t.
In some ways, this heightened sense of time-discipline has given me a feeling of freedom: I work eight hours. If they want more, they pay more. I don’t answer e-mails after work, expecting only an occasional text with an address where I should bring my tools tomorrow. In many other ways, it feels oppressive. I am sick of being told how to walk, speak and act. As a single person, I inevitably perform all my own household labor. No matter how hard I “give ‘er” for the company that day, the washing has to be done, meals prepared, my body tended to. Women, who before the dictatorship of clock-time, simply worked alongside men, were now left with the necessary, unpaid work of reproducing the conditions required to live.
In Capital, in his dense but beautiful sing-songy scientific way, Karl Marx outlines the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In general terms, capitalist competition forces firms to innovate more efficient means of production. Goods become cheaper, but the new technology is expensive. Workers are forced to work for less profit, and can thus consume even fewer goods, despite their cheaper price. The situation spirals.
In our current period, the rate of profit is falling, dramatically. After the industrial revolution or the two world wars, capitalism functioned on system of forced inclusion (we are kicking you off your common land and moving you into urban housing to work in factories and buy market-produced goods). In response to the falling rate of profit, it has moved to one of exclusion (we are refusing to offer you education, evicting you from your home, and you will live on the street).
Certain exogenous factors can buck this trend: the discovery of fossil fuels, for example. War also raises profitability, though that is a cheap high.
In the brief quarter-century after WWII, Americans could float on fossil-fuel fumes into government-subsidized housing and white-collar jobs with pensions. Increasingly excluded from profitable employment, affordable housing and transportation, younger people may have lost any incentive to stick with one career. Employers, grasping for more of a shrinking slice of profits, are loath to offer benefits and living wages, and never seem to want to let you drop your tools (always another e-mail to answer). The scare freedoms offered by a life ruled by clock-time have evaporated, unspooled into a digital world of infinite availability, global labor pools, and unprofitable, unproductive AI tools that send resumes and careers swirling into an endless, thirsty purgatory.
It seems no surprise to me that different generations have different experiences of employment and thus the very structure of their everyday lives. Of course, many born in the decades following World War II also never found stability in the job market, but precarity and flux have become the norm, even amongst the so-called middle-classes. In our time, trouble with work is near-universal.
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