Therapist: What about today? Is today the worst day of your life?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Therapist: Wow, that's messed up!
If you can identify this quote, than we can probably identify with each other. I've spent most of me e-life assuming bloggers are pathetic antisocial humanoid blobs lacking the neccessary skills to interact in the face-to-face social world, until I realized: most of the time these people spend publishing posts, monitoring message boards and playing MMORPG's is time when they are on the clock without meaningful work to do.
Some biographical information might be useful in making a connection with my purpose in this blog. First, I am a May 07 graduate of one of the top-10 liberal arts colleges in the country, where I majored in anthropology, minored in urban studies and concentrated in Africana studies. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Throughout the course of my undergraduate studies I maintained two jobs that I drew immense meaning from: as a barista in a student-run cafe on campus, where I spent one semester as a co-manager, and as a student archivist and research assistant in our library's Special Collections department. When I had free time, I took on additional temp jobs (as a student docent in our art gallery and as a writing tutor for middle school student) and volunteered on occasion. In April 07 I married my husband in a simple JOP ceremony, which we celebrated with a Moroccan a la carte dinner for 30 of our family members and closest friends. My husband, who arguably knows me best, would describe me as stubborn, intelligent, and perhaps slightly off-kilter. The purpose of providing this information is not to brag or whittle my identity down to a few desirable traits, but rather to create a profile for you to understand who I am in the capacity of my job. Oh, and one more thing. I hate my job.
At the close of my senior year, I was a candidate for a year-long international travel grant and a Peace Corps applicant. When it became clear that neither of these prospects was going to materialize in my post-graduate life, I immediately started applying for jobs. My husband is a graduate student who works part-time as a graduate assistant and receives a respectable stipend, but we enjoy a certain quality of life that said stipend could not provide. Watching each of my other graduating friends struggle to find suitable employment and face rejection after rejection was emotionally draining and intellectually disappointing. It became pretty obvious that our liberal arts education meant jack shit in the dwindling US job economy, and that the entry-level jobs available to us were a far cry from our research grant work, original thesis manuscripts, and intellectual classroom discussions. We were about to become cubicle jockeys.
In desperation, I performed what I call "flash applying": I registered accounts on job search engines and blindly submitted electronic applications to every entry level job within a 20-mile radius of my zip code. I received a few miserable interview opportunities with outsourced human resources firms and temp agencies, managing to land one interview at a computer software company based in the CBD of the nearest city. The title of the job was listed as Marketing / Administrative Assistant. Arriving at the interview, it felt glamorous to me to be walking into an office in a sky-scraper identifiable in the city's skyline. During the course of my hour-long interview, the CEO and my future employer described my position as 60% marketing, 40% administrative responsibilities. He said I would eventually take over payables, receivables, and accounting for the US branch of the company, as well as manage our online and print-ad marketing campaigns. Despite claiming he had other interviews to conduct and that he would notify me by the end of the week, the CEO called me later that afternoon to offer me the position. In my excitement and relief at having secured employment, it never occurred to me to wonder whether this was the first clue to my boss' penchant for bending the truth or using unorthodox methods to secure a contract. After some weighty contract negotiations (my contact omits stipulations for sick leave, extended leave, overtime and overtime compensation), we finally settled on an agreement.
Now two months on the job, I can only regret my naiveté and rashness. The office is severely understaffed for its high level functions; when I came on the job, no one was available to train me to perform meaningful duties. I was handed hard copies of inventories and expense reports and asked to imitate them for that month's documentation. I was given two software programs to learn independently and to manage our accounting and marketing database. Speaking of marketing, which was to make up 60% of my working time: my boss seems to have omitted the prefix "tele" to that job in the interest of making it seem worthwhile. The only marketing I have done so far is of the cold calling variety. Tasks that my supervisor assumed would take me a month to complete, such as the accounting that they had allowed to back up for 6 months, I accomplished in two weeks. Now, with the exception of a 2-3 day period at the end of the month when I work on expense reports and accounting, I struggle to fill my 8-hour days with meaningful work. At times I will sit in my cubicle for an entire day, chatting with my husband on Gmail after asking my supervisors for more work, only to have the CEO approach me minutes before I'm set to leave to ask me to take care of a personal matter for him. Throughout my working days I would be thrilled to have something meaningful and business related to do; instead, he waits until the last minute to give me bitch work!
Last night while discussing my employment woes with my husband, I discovered I needed a "johobby," a hobby on the job. Blogging is as good as any. It can fill empty time in my cube while allowing me to appear and sound busy, provides a positive outlet for my work-related frustrations, it gives me a venue to continue writing and thinking along my Marxian slant (see below), and ideally will create an e-refuge for kindred cubicle jockey spirits. I've established only two guidelines for my blog: I can only post while on the clock from my cubicle, and I can only create posts inspired by my job and its malcontents.
Today I'll start with an introduction to Marx. Since starting my job I've often wondered whether today's office workers are analogous to the office workers of yesterday. There are obvious differences: physical working conditions are significantly improved, and under what I term neo-capitalism, today's workers work not to produce, but to consume. The similarities lie in the realm of our relationship to our work - or lack thereof. Taking the lead from Marx's writings on the estrangement of labor (see excerpt below), it becomes clear that alienation from labor is a state in which many contemporary corporate office workers find themselves. Labor, almost by definition, should be a highly embodied experience; rather, I am finding my performance of labor requires strict self-denial of both body and mind. Furthermore, the value of my labor translates strictly into exchange value, rather than esteem value or use value: in other words, the labor I perform is only so good as the income I earn, or the ability to consume that I gain from my labor. The labor is perhaps significantly more alienated from his or her labor today, when labor is linked to consumption, than during factory-era production, when labor was linked to producing a tangible good. The labor I perform, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, does not produce anything culturally esteemed or personally meaningful. The labor I perform merely ensures my ability to consume culturally esteemed products which are made elsewhere, by anonymous or identityless labor. This leads to the possible topic of a subsequent post: the fact that my identity is forged not in the process of production or through a relationship with what I produce, but in the process of consumption and through a relationship with what I consume.
In examining my own and my co-workers' typical workday the attribute of self denial - physical, mental, and emotional - is certainly paramount. My day begins at 6 am with the desperate bleating of a merciless alarm clock. After rushing through a shower I force my body into an uncomfortable ensemble of corporate attire - the more starched and the less forgiving of the female form the better. I rush through a carb-infested breakfast with my still half-asleep husband while watching Fox's rendition of the morning news. I speed-walk to the train station and climb aboard an over-crowded commuter train, on which I read the local free paper while trying to avoid being drooled or spilled on by drowsy corporate commuters downing Starbucks' latest. I arrive at work sometime before 8:30 am, turn the lights on in the office, and sit down at my cubicle to prepare for another day with little on my to-do list. I discipline my body to sit in a horridly designed computer chair at a desk in front of a luminescent screen for hours at a time without producing anything. I take a scant 20-minute lunch break to sit outside in the sun. On some particularly lucky days my boss will send me on an errand; I know all the quick, medium and long routes from our office to FedEx Kinkos, the post office, the pharmacy and the hardware store. By the end of the day my wrists are sore from bending to accommodate my keyboard, I have a crick in my neck from staring at my computer all day, my eyes are strained, my back hurts, and I feel fatigued despite having not used my body at all. When I arrive home around 5:30, usually exhausted despite my lack of production, my husband and I try to enjoy dinner and a walk, conversation, reading or watching some telly before going to bed. My quality time with home lasts perhaps 4-6 hours per workday, depending on our respective schedules. For some of my coworkers the workday is far worse; many of them are known to work up to 11 hour days on a regular basis.
Foucault particularly has discussed the disciplining of the body featured in Marx's writings on capitalism, and they are certainly highlighted by contemporary office workers' plight. The indifference to the body and its needs for exercise, leisure, and pleasure is coupled by an equally detrimental neglect of the needs of the mind, both intellectual and emotional. (This blog is one attempt by me to try to meet the needs of my mind while on the job.) These issues are not only systemic to contemporary, consumption-based capitalism but to a cultural ideas about work: for example, a full-time work week consists of 40+ hours of labor, irregardless of what is (or is not) produced in those 40 hours. This cultural reality is reflected in the "benefits" available to full-time laborers which are not extended to part-time workers, despite the fact that many full-time office workers such as myself could easily complete our assigned tasks in a 20 hour work week or less. What of the logic of allowing a worker to labor for as long as he or she needs to complete his or her work, and then allowing him or her the rest of the day to be used for leisure or whatever is desired? Why do we discipline ourselves unnecessarily to a 40-hour work week rather than to an accomplishment-based work schedule? Who benefits from our discipline?
Furthermore, what relationship do we have to our labor? Only that which is provided by our relationship to what and how we consume. Particularly for those in positions such as mine, where one can pass an entire 8-hour workday with "producing" anything, what is the motivation driving our labor? It is merely to consume, and in so doing to bring meaning to our labor.
Excerpt from Marx's first manuscript: The Estrangement of Labor
"Up to now, we have considered the estrangement, the alienation of the worker, only from one aspect -- i.e., his relationship to the products of his labor. But estrangement manifests itself not only in the result, but also in the act of production, within the activity of production itself. How could the product of the worker's activity confront him as something alien if it were not for the fact that in the act of production he was estranging himself from himself? After all, the product is simply the resume of the activity, of the production. So if the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. The estrangement of the object of labor merely summarizes the estrangement, the alienation in the activity of labor itself.
What constitutes the alienation of labor?
Firstly, the fact that labor is external to the worker -- i.e., does not belong to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labor is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is forced labor. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of labor for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it he belongs not to himself but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, the human brain, and the human heart, detaches itself from the individual and reappears as the alien activity of a god or of a devil, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another, it is a loss of his self.
The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions -- eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment -- while in his human functions, he is nothing more than animal."
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