In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks looks at the history of the work ethic in US culture, and in particular, how it changed in the postindustrial period.

The postindustrial work ethic, with its new emphasis on work as an avenue for personal development and meaning, was at least in part a response to the rebellions in the 1960s and early 1970s against the disciplinary subjectivity of the Fordist period and the problem of worker alienation that they helped to publicize. The human-resources movement that came of its own by the 1980s attempted to change work processes in ways that would address, in profitable terms, the problem of work quality posed by activists. Thus the shift from the industrial ethic’s focus on work as a path to social mobility to the post industrial emphasis on work as a practice of self-realization is part and parcel of the confrontation of competing versions of the ethic and the struggles over the organization and meaning of the work that they signified and facilitated.

Weeks, The Problem with Work, page 60

To put this in my own words: the Fordist (or Taylorist—Weeks uses the two terms interchangeably) work ethic was one that acknowledged that most work was drudgery, but pressed that the drudgery was worth it because of the rewards it would bring. The postindustrial ethic, on the other hand, posited a different value proposition: that you should work hard because that was what made you a whole, complete person—that who you are and what you do are inseparable. This shift aligned with growth in jobs that required not only completing a set of tasks but also doing so while performing (genuinely or otherwise) enjoyment of them. Weeks continues:

There are at least two reasons why our attitudes toward work take on renewed significance in the context of post-Fordism. First, workers’ investment in the work ethic is increasingly relevant because in many forms of work—for example, in many service sector jobs—employers want more from their employees than was typically demanded in the factories of the industrial era: not just the labor of the hand, but the labors of the head and the heart. Post-Taylorist work processes tend therefore to require more from immaterial laborers than their sacrifice and submission, seeking to enlist their creativity and their relational and affective capacities. It is not obedience that is prized, but commitment; employees are more often expected to adopt the perspectives of managers rather than simply yield to their authority. Whereas Fordism demanded from its core workers a lifetime of compliance with work discipline, post-Fordism also demands of many of its workers flexibility, adaptability, and continual reinvention.

Weeks, The Problem with Work, page 69

This is a neat little trick, when you see it clearly. Faced with growing demands to make work more dignified, company owners made the dignity of the worker contingent on doing a good job. By tying the worker’s identity to the work, they undercut any assertion that the work itself was meaningless or poor—because doing so would just reflect back on the worker’s own conception of themselves. They also made ideological adherence to management a requirement of the job, effectively positioning the worker as someone who could reproduce and reinforce those ideologies in their peers, without requiring any additional effort from their managers.

To be fair, post-Fordist management is certainly better than Fordism. But we cannot accept any work ethic uncritically. And it’s past time we looked a lot harder at the one that has reigned these last few decades. In addition to our time, the postindustrial work ethic demands our hearts. It does not deserve them.

It’s common to talk about Taylorism—the practice of so-called “scientific management” that’s most known for it’s reviled use of stopwatches—as if it were a thing of the past, as if we had somehow moved beyond it. But like a lot of coercive practices, Taylorism didn’t so much retire as rebrand. As workers rebelled against oppressive bureaucracies, the postindustrial work ethic shifted from work as a moral imperative to work as self-realization in a process that Nikil Saval grimly calls “self-Taylorization.” In essence, the timekeeper was internalized.

Whereas, for Taylorism, the self-organization, ingenuity, and creativity of the workers were to be combated as the source of all dangers of rebellion and disorder, for Toyotism these things were a resource to be developed and exploited. The total and entirely repressive domination of the worker’s personality was to be replaced by the total mobilization of that personality.

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 30

Toyotism—contrasted with Fordism, which adopted Taylor’s model—involved a practice where small teams of people would manage a limited amount of work-in-progress through communication with teams up- and downstream of their work. Versions of it were subsequently adopted in “agile” software development and have become so engrained in product organizations that they are often barely remarked upon; it’s just how things are done. But as with most just-so stories, it’s worth considering how it came to be—and who benefits from the way things are.

[The head of training at Volkswagen] first explains that “transferring entrepreneurial skills to the shopfloor” makes it possible “largely to eliminate the antagonisms between labor and capital…If the work teams have great independence to plan, carry out, and monitor processes, material flows, staffing, and skills…then you have a large enterprise made up of independent small entrepreneurs, and that constitutes a cultural revolution.”

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 44

That is, by offering “elite” status to some workers, and building a system in which they monitored their own work in excruciating detail, Toyota could keep the administrators in their offices while remaining confident that the same surveillance, operational focus, and company-first perspective would be maintained—this time by the workers themselves. Giving some workers permission to perform as entrepreneurs just meant they worked harder for the company even as they became convinced they were working for themselves. Men in stopwatches are unnecessary when the worker’s own conscience will do the job.

And of course, that “elite” status is, by definition, scarce. It depends on other workers continuing to toil in the old, Taylorist ways, performatively monitored and repressed. (Gorz points out that at the time he was writing about Toyota, the workers organized under the entrepreneurial model represented a mere 10-15% of the workforce; the rest were subcontractors, who were “increasingly Taylorized” as they moved down the ladder.) And, more to the point, it depends on a system in which fewer and fewer people are employed at all.

It could hardly be more clearly stated that the workers taken in by the big companies are a small “elite,” not because they have higher levels of skill, but because they have been chosen from a mass of equally able individuals in such a way as to perpetuate the work ethic in an economic context in which work is objectively losing its “centrality”: the economy has less and less need of it. The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less. It is economically more advantageous to concentrate the small amount of necessary work in the hands of a few, who will be imbued with the sense of being a deservedly privileged elite by virtue of the eagerness which distinguishes them from the “losers.” Technically, there really is nothing to prevent the firm from sharing out the work between a larger number of people who would work only 20 hours a week. But then those people would not have the “correct” attitude to work which consists in regarding themselves as small entrepreneurs turning their knowledge capital to good effect.

So the firm “largely…eliminates the antagonisms between work and labor” for the stable core of its elite workers and shifts those antagonisms outside its field of vision, to the peripheral, insecure, or unemployed workers. Post-Fordism produces its elite by producing unemployment; the latter is the precondition for the former. The “social utility” of the elite cannot, for that reason, be assessed solely from the angle of the use-value of its production or the “service rendered to users.” Its members can no longer believe themselves useful in a general way, since they produce wealth and unemployment in the self-same act. The greater their productivity and eagerness for work, the greater also will be unemployment, poverty, inequality, social marginalization, and the rate of profit. The more they identify with work and with their company’s successes, the more they contribute to producing and reproducing the conditions of their own subjection, to intensifying the competition between firms, and hence to making the battle for productivity the more lethal, the threat to everyone’s employment—including their own—the more menacing, and the domination of capital over workers and society the more irresistible.

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 45

That is, the existence of an elite workforce—whether it’s workers managing a kanban process in a Toyota factory, or workers driving agile development at a product company—is predicated on an underclass of people who either work in less sustainable conditions or else are proscribed from work at all. The former has come into some awareness in recent years, as workers at Google and elsewhere have organized not only well-paid engineers and designers but also support staff and contractors who are paid in a year what an engineer makes in a month. Those very highly-paid engineering roles simply couldn’t exist without the people toiling in the support mines or tagging text and images for AI training—often dreadful work that’s barely remunerated at all. But what Gorz is calling out here is that isn’t only bad work that the elite work depends on—it’s also the absence of work. The “disruption” that the tech industry has so long prided itself on is just another word for “unemployment.”

But there’s also a gesture here towards another way: the less that elite identifies with their work and with their companies’ successes, the more they admit of their own insecurity and of their collaboration in creating it, the less menacing that threat becomes, the more space is opened up for different futures.

I am not saying, however, that post-Fordist workers cannot or ought not to identify with what they do. I am saying that what they do cannot and should not be reduced solely to the immediately productive work they accomplish, irrespective of the consequences and mediate effects which it engenders in the social environment. I say, therefore, that they must identify with everything they do, that they must make their work their own and assume responsibility for it as subjects, not excluding from this the consequences it produces in the social field. I say that they ought to be the subjects of—and also the actors in—the abolition of work, the abolition of employment, the abolition of wage labor, instead of abandoning all these macroeconomic and macro-social dimensions of their productive activity to market forces and capital. They ought, therefore, to make the redistribution of work, the diminution of its intensity, the reduction of working hours, the self-management of the hours and pace of work, and the guarantee of purchasing power demands inherent in the meaning of their work.

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 46

Abolition is both destruction and reconstruction; in abolishing work, you become able to create it anew. For too long, “work” has been synonymous with waged work, with the work we long for an escape from. And everything else becomes the “life” that stands in opposition to work, as if work were somehow an equal to the life it sucks dry. But what if work was all the change we make in the world, with all the people we make that change with—colleagues and comrades, neighbors and friends, kin in all the kingdoms. What if work wasn’t only what we do at work, but all the ways that work moves out into the world, and all the work we do elsewhere—whether in our homes or in our streets. What if our work is all the things we give a fuck about? What becomes possible then?