Annie Mcclanahan: The possibility of a world disentangled from wages (ep363)
“Under a capitalist system of production or any system of production based on the extraction of value via wages, it’s always going to be the case that mechanization leads to more work and lower wages...”
In this episode, we welcome Annie McClanahan, an Assistant Professor of English at UC Irvine, where she is also a faculty advisor for UCI-LIFTED, a prison education program. Her first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture was published in 2016 and she is currently finishing a second book titled Tipwork, Gigwork, Microwork: Culture and the Wages of Service.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include the history of today's service and tip work economies, the trend of automation driving deskilled labor and microwork, the possibility of a world disentangled from wages, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Maggie Clifford
Episode-inspired artwork by Ellie Yanagisawa
Episode references:
‘Tipwork, gigwork, microwork’, a presentation by Annie McClanahan
‘The Spirit of Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization’, an article by Annie McClanahan
The Managed Heart, a book by Arlie Hochschild
Smart Machines and Service Work, a book by Jason Smith
The American Revolution, a book by James Boggs
Notes From Below, a publication centered on working-class emancipation
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Annie McClanahan: I was writing a little bit about service work and in-person service work, and I was thinking a lot about tips and the history of tipping and started to do a lot of research on that.
I was thinking about the ways in which tip work relates to the problem of how you produce what's called “time discipline” in service work. We typically think of time discipline as a quality of industrial work. Think about clock-punching and the regulation of hours and output and measures of efficiency and productivity that come with industrialization. Service work does not work quite as well under a paradigm of time discipline, because the output is often much more immeasurable. It might be contentment or satisfaction or pleasure or care, or a sense of being served with some kind of promptitude. As a result, tip work or service work has had to develop its own methods of wage payment, that don't necessarily follow the lines of the hourly wage.
I was interested in that—the long histories of service workers being paid in these non-hourly, non-regular, often informal, or non-contractually protected ways—thinking about the relationship between that history and the construction of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which excludes tip workers and lots of other different types of service workers and agricultural workers.
It was striking to me that when I was reading cultural studies, cultural theory type accounts of service work, there were a lot of questions about affective performance, emotion—the idea of being required to smile, for instance, is a fairly common paradigm and very little about this regulatory and, ultimately, political history of the ways in which tip workers get excluded from legislative reforms like the Fair Labor Standards Act, get excluded from traditional models of unionization, etc. It felt like a hole in the theory to me.
Just to give an example, the text that most people turn to for thinking about affective labor, because it's one of the first sociological texts to explicitly theorize it by name, is Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, which is about flight attendants working for Delta Airlines. Her book talks about this idea of work where the product is a smile or the product is, again, customer satisfaction.
She opens it by saying, “I'm not going to look at the things that a classical Marxist account might look at,” which is to say things such as the regulation of hours or the specific ways in which wages are paid, etc. I was thinking about that because recently there's been a sort of push for greater levels of unionization among flight attendants.
One of the things that flight attendants have been asking for is to be paid their regular hourly wage for time spent boarding the plane. Because, it turns out—I just discovered this fairly recently myself—that flight attendants are not actually paid for the time that they spend in the terminal. They're not paid for the time getting the plane ready. Their paid time starts once the airplane doors close. There's a lot of work that happens before that, including a lot of very physical work.
They describe cleaning up vomit, cleaning up trash, and helping passengers load their bags into the racks. There's been this petition produced by flight attendants to try to get the airlines to be required to pay them for this time that they are clearly working before the doors are closed. These flight attendants were describing the ways in which the bosses and the managers of these companies were stealing time from them in these little tiny increments… but these increments added up.
I've been thinking about how a lot of these forms of service work, because of their ephemeral or immaterial products, often require methods of wage payments and forms of discipline that are in fact very material and tend towards hyper-exploitation and have histories that are yoked to racialization and to feminization.
There are all kinds of complexities around these technical details of the labor process, but we tend to look at those things when we look at industrial work. But when we look at service work, we tend to think about these questions of affect and emotion instead. So, I've been interested in understanding these longer histories and thinking about what it would mean to situate our account of service work in light of these aspects of the organization of the labor process and the management of the labor process, and the method of wage payment.
Kamea Chayne: There are lots to consider there, especially noting that our dominant culture tends to value the material over things that are less tangible.
As we situate ourselves in the context of the climate crisis and ecological collapse where many are concerned about overproduction and the material limits of endless growth, I've heard some people note this rise in service work to be a good thing, so there is a possibility for us to, for example, increase jobs while exerting less strain on our lands and waters and “natural resources”.
You've noted that the rise of service work cannot be understood outside the larger history of automation and technological unemployment, and that we cannot understand today's service economy without understanding this longer history, “one that has at least as much to do with historical, political and economic forces as with technological change.”
To set the stage for the rest of our conversation here, what about this historical backdrop do you think it's important for us to keep in mind, for us to better understand the key drivers of the increase in service work beyond, perhaps too simplistically, seeing it just as a good thing for economic security and the security of the health of our planet?
Annie McClanahan: One interesting fact is that in the mid-19th century, around the time that Marx was writing Das Kapital, even in the industrializing economies of Great Britain, the majority of the population were still not employed in industrial or manufacturing labor. The majority of the population, up through the middle of the 19th century, were still employed in a lot of service positions. And as a result of the rise, including a lot of in-home services, of industrialization, that starts to shift.
So one of the things that happened in the 20th century is the boom of, in the U.S. industrial economy, in particular, the production of durable goods that would replace things that often used to be performed as services. A perfect example is washing machines: so, you move from a late 19th, early 20th-century economy where you send your washing out to have a laundress do it, to an economy in which, because of the immense scaling up of technological capacity, you can produce washing machines at a price at which many middle and working-class folks can afford one.
As a result, in the middle of the 20th century, the economy is pretty much evenly divided between what's often called goods-producing work and services — goods-producing work as in manufacturing as well as agriculture and extraction, and services being pretty much everything else. It's a very big and baggy category. It includes everything from lawyers and doctors to janitors and folks who work in fast-food restaurants or Uber drivers, and people who are informally employed. In the middle of the 20th century, it's pretty much evenly divided because a lot of the people that would have in the previous century been working in service jobs are now working in manufacturing as a result of automation to a large extent, and outsourcing as well.
The globalization of supply chains and production started happening in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly for workers of color, who are often the first to be let go when automation starts to replace humans with machines.
Starting with workers of color in the fifties and sixties, and then steadily over the course of the next few decades, as a result of automation and outsourcing, you have fewer and fewer people employed in that type of goods-producing work, and more and more people are thrust back into the service sector.
As a result, today, about 13% of U.S. jobs are goods-producing and 87% are in services. The problem with that, from the perspective of workers still trapped in a wage economy, is that service work tends to be low-waged. There are a lot of factors that [cause that and] some of them are ideological—they have to do with the feminization of labor, the ways in which jobs such as nursing or teaching have been associated with “women's work”, have been naturalized as “women's work”, and thus historically devalued.
In addition to those two factors, there's also a technical factor.
Most service work cannot be improved in terms of its efficiency in the same way that manufacturing can.
Sure, you can get computers, you can develop complicated telecommunications systems, you can have people teach their classes on Zoom or you can have doctors do their charts on an iPad device or something.
You certainly have technology in [the service work] space and it may increase productivity a bit, but it's not going to increase it by, say, a hundredfold or a thousandfold the way innovations like the assembly line increased the productivity of manufacturing.
Because it's what's often referred to as “technologically stagnant,” service work tends to be lower-waged. Sometimes the relationship goes both ways. If you think about very low-wage service work, like janitorial work, it's not actually worth it for a company to develop a machine to take out trash cans, for instance, even if they could.
Even if you could develop a machine for taking out trash cans, it's probably not worth it because that technology is probably going to be more expensive to develop and maintain than the incredibly low wages you can pay a human being, particularly a woman of color or an immigrant, to do the same job.
So there's this twin dynamic around service work, where technological stagnation leads to low wages and low wages also to technological stagnation. One of the things I'm interested in is simply this fact of low wages, and the ways in which in certain subsectors of the service industry, gig work, other kinds of in-person service, and leisure and hospitality, those low wages get operationalized through these rather unusual methods of wage payment such as tips.
Tips are unusual, in that those who rely heavily on tips are being paid not by the boss or the manager or the capitalist, but being paid directly by the consumer. So, that's a major cost saving for the leisure and hospitality sector because it doesn't have to pay workers very much. It outsources that payment to the customers themselves. Tips do other things in terms of increasing the efficiency of service workers, because if you are being paid tips rather than a guaranteed wage, you don't need as much management because you're going to go as fast as you can, because your wage depends on it.
So these various ways of tinkering with the method of wage payment serve as ways to eke out these smaller scales of profitability from this labor, in the absence of technological innovation and development.
Kamea Chayne: I want to go deeper into wage payments because I know you focus extensively on looking at their different forms and what that might mean for workers across different sectors, noting that the regulated hourly minimum wage, legally codified in the U.S., is actually not a norm but an exception.
To this point, what are the ethical considerations of the different structures of payments, whether hourly or piece rate or otherwise, especially in terms of what might provide more loopholes for exploitation? And then based on that, what are your perspectives on normalizing time-based wages as a way to better ensure security for different workers?
Annie McClanahan: The history of this is really fascinating. One of the things that I found extraordinary about it is how little attention has been paid to the construction of this regulatory category, called the sub-minimum wage. One of the things I'm interested in is the fact that all of these forms of contemporary service work rely on tips and also on piece rate, which is basically payment by output, forms of wage payment.
These are often considered older and residual methods of payment because again, with industrialization, when the capitalist can control the output and the efficiency simply by setting the machine at a certain speed, for instance, it's not really worth it for them to pay their workers according to performance or output. That only really becomes necessary in contexts where you have relatively little technology, so that the worker has more control over their own speed. Then you have to create these methods of wage payment that essentially incentivize the worker to work as hard as they can, and as efficiently as they can.
One of the things that I'm suggesting happens with the rise of a service sector, and particularly informalized sector such as gig work, which is excluded from regulation entirely, is the return of these older methods of wage payment, that in some sense predate industrial capitalism, or are common to very early phases of industrial capitalism, but tend to get phased out. The reason why that idea of a return is important is that I do think that we have we've taken for granted the idea that the particular way in which the hourly industrial wage gets codified in the U.S. and in other developed countries in the 20th century, we tend to assume that that's a norm towards which capitalism tends and a place at which it will stay and rest.
That's actually not true, as it turns out, because we have, in fact, more and more workers today being paid some form of payment by results, which would include tips and piece-rate wages and commissions and other informalized methods of wage payment. In the “underdeveloped'“ world, you actually have a lot of regions where countries are going directly from agricultural production to a service economy, and skipping the phase of industrialization entirely. As a result, in those places, you have essentially virtually none of these regulatory structures such as an hourly minimum wage.
It's really important for us to understand the history of this reform of the hourly wage and to think a lot about what has always been left out of it.
If you look at the history of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which became law in 1938, even at the moment that it became law, it only covered the something like 30% of workers. It was really restricted to white male industrial workers in the northern United States. As a result of a bunch of legislative compromises with politicians and business interests from the South, all of these other types of labor, including agricultural labor, domestic labor, and basically the entirety of the service sector–precisely, again, because the standard of what constitutes commerce under the Fair Labor Standards Act has to do with goods, so services are excluded from its regulatory coverage.
If you look at the labor movements towards creating a federal minimum wage, a lot of those movements were precisely the work of movements among service workers.
In the early 20th century, there was a federal commission to explore what was happening at the Pullman Company. Pullman was the major railway company of the period. It was a huge sector in the early 20th century, and Pullman was the single largest employer of Black men from the South. It was actually run by Abraham Lincoln's son—Todd Lincoln. He got called into Congress to talk about their labor practices because Pullman was paying this huge group of Black laborers there. And they were paying them mostly in tips. They were giving them very little in terms of a guaranteed wage. Not only that, but they were actually advertising to the traveling public that they were not paying these workers a living wage… in order to induce the public to pay them tips. So, they were trying to shift the labor burden to the customers, trying to convince the public that they had a moral responsibility to pay them better, to pay them good tips.
The federal commission was to explore tips in this context. There was another federal commission around the question of tips and red caps, who are luggage porters on ships.
The big case that ultimately leads to the change in the Supreme Court's ruling on whether or not it's constitutionally legal for the federal government to create a national minimum wage is one that involves a hotel chambermaid. Her name is Elsie Parrish, and she goes to court to demand her right to the state minimum wage that was set in her state. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling on that case, it's possible for the Fair Labor Standards Act to pass. So the Parrish case is settled in 1937 and the FLSA becomes law in 1938 as a result of this Supreme Court decision.
Here you have these two groups of workers: hotel workers, laundresses, and chambermaids on the one hand, and these mostly Black transportation porters and railway workers, on the other hand, both central to this fight for a federal minimum wage, central to the legal decisions around it. Yet both groups are excluded from it.
Tip workers and service workers would remain completely excluded from federal minimum wage protections until the 1960s, when there were amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act that broadened its reach to include service workers and all other employees, which is a major extension of the act that happens in that period.
That's the moment when they create this category called the sub-minimum wage. That's sometimes also called the tip credit wage. So, in the context of service workers, what that means is that, at the time, it's set to be 50% of the regular minimum wage guaranteed to service workers, and the rest of it they're supposed to earn in tips. The employer is supposed to keep track of how much they earn and make sure that they average out to receive the regular minimum wage. For the most part, employers don't do that.
There's an awful lot of wage theft. There's more wage theft in the service sector than in any other sector by far, particularly among tip workers.
So because of the ruling in 1966, tip workers essentially get included in the protections of labor regulation as these second-class citizens alongside other groups of second-class citizens, including immigrant agricultural workers, including prison laborers, including disabled workers, who continue to receive a sub-minimum wage today, folks that work for places like Goodwill, for instance, in these sheltered workshops. So tip workers have this wage that is 50% of the federal minimum.
And then in the nineties, there was another series of changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act. There were a lot of folks pushing for the inclusion of tip workers into the regular minimum wage coverage. That doesn't succeed. Instead, what they do is they essentially cap it at a permanent $2.13 an hour. That's where it's capped in 1994, largely as a result of pressure from the National Restaurant Association, which is actually one of the most powerful lobby groups in Congress. The NRA, under the direction of Herman Cain, who is then the CEO of Godfather's Pizza, pressures the Clinton administration and Congress to cap this tip credit wage at $2.13 an hour. That was 27, 28 years ago. It's still the same rate. So, it's still set at $2.13 an hour.
There are some states that have their own tip credit wage. California, where I live, is among them. But about half of the states still, just use that $2.13 an hour, and then another dozen or so of them have their own set tip credit wage that's still considerably less. In most states, it's under $5 an hour. It has a long and dark history. I'm interested in looking at that history and at the ways in which a lot of new forms of service worker organizing are also taking this up. There's this group that became particularly visible during the pandemic called One Fair Wage, and it's a group of service workers across all different subsectors, including gig workers, leisure and hospitality, and other folks that tend to earn tips. The organizing is done around this question of the method of wage payment.
I'm interested in the ways in which these activist organizations are taking these histories of tips, and the feminization and racialization of wage differentials, and using that as a basis for new forms of service worker solidarity across different employers and across different subsectors.
Kamea Chayne: As we think about the relationship between technological advancement and labor, techno-optimists will often make this argument or remark that as we digitize and technologies and automate more aspects of society, it will allow people to work less hours, consequently improving our life quality and giving people more time to do the things that they actually enjoy.
What might be some of the fallacies or misunderstandings of this perspective, especially as you note that “automation” rarely means that robots will replace human workers with one fell swoop, and that "the technological mediation of service work in part ensures that human workers continue to be precariously employed, highly efficient, and low-waged."
Annie McClanahan: This comes back to this question of the idea that service work is technologically stagnant. On the one hand, it's really important to see that and to emphasize that, in part because it gives us a sense of why it tends to be low-waged, and in part, because it tends to give us a sense of why an economy driven almost entirely on the service sector is not ultimately going to be a very high growth economy.
The political economist, Jason Smith, has a really wonderful book out called Smart Machines and Service Work, where he talks about the ways in which service work presents a problem for economic growth in the developed world, and suggests one reason why economic growth across the developed world has really slowed considerably over the last few decades in ways that ultimately will create a problem or crisis for capital accumulation. In that sense, it's really important to understand the limits to the automation of service work.
On the other hand, it's also important to understand the ways in which technology, even if it's not automating this work, is doing two separate things that technology has always done to labor, including industrial labor: one of them is to deskill it, so to break up the labor process into tinier and tinier and tinier pieces, and to reduce workers' autonomy over their labor process and their ability to apply their knowledge to the labor process; and then what's sometimes called “sweating”, a term that brings us the idea of sweatshops.
But you have sweating outside of manufacturing as well, when workers are forced to speed up to a degree that is difficult or dangerous to their bodies and when they're paid very low wages for doing so. A good example of the ways in which technology contributes to this speeding up in the service sector would be Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers, who're using these wearable devices that monitor every movement that they make, how fast they're doing things, whether they're taking bathroom breaks, etc.
There you have technology that's being used not to automate them entirely, because for a lot of these jobs, there actually aren’t the technology to do these basic things, things that we might think of as basic things, such as unpacking a box. It's very hard to develop a robot that can do that, it turns out.
There's still a need for these human laborers, but it's almost as if the human laborers are becoming “appendages of the machine”.
That’s the language that Marx uses to describe automation, because of the ways in which the technology forces them to work very fast, very hard, in these highly tailorized or managed ways.
The other thing to note about the use of everything from a wearable device for a warehouse worker, to an algorithm for a delivery driver or an Uber driver, is that technology is not being used to replace the low-wage skilled service worker herself, but it is being used to reduce the need for management. The way that an algorithm works in the platform economy is that an algorithm essentially allows the app itself to do all of the work of human resources and management, and it can do that work for tens of thousands of employees at a time. That's the way that the Uber app works.
You don't have mass-scale automation the way that you did in the, say, the automotive industry in the 1950s and 1960s, but you do have increasingly less need for mid-level managerial positions and more need for very low-wage skilled service work positions.
That, in turn, will have consequences for things like what percentage of jobs in this new service economy require a college degree, and the number is getting lower all the time.
Even if you don't have that large-scale automation of service work, you do have the use of technology to produce these smaller efficiency gains and the use of technology to automate certain aspects of the work, particularly around management.
Kamea Chayne: As another example of de-skilling, I want to bring in AMT, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, which for our listeners who aren't familiar, it's an Amazon-owned crowdsourcing website for businesses to hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do. That’s according to their own framing.
There's this “yes, and” nuance that you highlight, which is that portraying such technology-mediated work as brainless labor, as Lily Irani put it, strips the workers of fully self-actualized humanity and justifies the distinction between highly exploited menial labor and higher-compensated creative work.
But at the same time, it is still true that breaking up work into the smallest components of micro work, as you mentioned, makes the work experience itself more alienating, tedious, repetitive, and I would add, dehumanizing and health-compromising, because I don't think humans and our bodies are designed to do the exact same things and the same movements for hours, let alone entire workdays and workweeks. So I'm just curious what you find important to add or expand on here, as people often justify this form of advancement and innovation as a way to make society or business more “efficient.”
Annie McClanahan: One of the historical origins of these crowdsourcing platforms like AMT—and there's a bunch of other ones, AMT is the biggest—is temp work.
Temp work is not a new phenomenon. Organizations like Manpower start to become important to the U.S. economy in the 1930s. They provide this typically low-wage, temporary workforce for large companies that need laborers to do work that's either completely deskilled or largely deskilled. So, basic clerical labor. In a sense, the crowd-working platforms develop out of that longer tradition of temp work, but they also mark some innovations on that model: innovations which may be good for profitability and certainly are good if you want to lower wages, but are really terrible for workers.
So, one thing that it does is that it de-skills it even more. It makes it possible to break up the work into incredibly small pieces so that a job on Mechanical Turk might involve clicking yes if something has the color yellow in it, and no if it doesn't. The platform allows all of these different workers' jobs to be kind of coordinated together, in the same way that a division of labor on an assembly line makes it possible for one person to hit a nail on the head and another person to move the thing that they're hitting the nail from one inch to the right and one person to put in a screw, or whatever.
These crowdsourced platforms like AMT do the same thing essentially with this clerical work. They do that deskilling that creates an incredibly alienating experience of labor. The other thing that people have pointed out in terms of this question of alienation on the crowdwork platforms is that if you're a temp employee and you go to work for a company, you typically understand what company you're working for and what the larger tasks that you're involved in are. Even if you're doing something, say, alphabetizing files, you can read those files, you can have a sense of, “Okay, I'm going to this law office and I'm taking their files from old cases or something.” You have some sense of what you're contributing to.
AMT Workers don't, because the entire process is black-boxed from them by the algorithm. So there have been a lot of cases where AMT workers have discovered after the fact, that they were doing things like photo-tagging, for instance for the U.S. Defense Department, towards projects to train drone warfare. So you have a moral injury that these workers are subjected to without even necessarily knowing. It takes away the rights of workers to decide morally and ethically what work they are willing to do and what projects they're willing to participate in. So deskilling has really profound effects in a lot of cases.
The other thing that AMT does is that it speeds up the labor process. When you're on AMT, your computer and the algorithm, the app is registering the speed of your clicks, it's registering how your fingers are hovering on the mouse. In some cases, the camera will be registering your physical posture. All of that is towards increasing efficiency and trying to encourage workers to produce faster. Then because AMT pays its workers by the piece, so there's no guaranteed wage. In fact, they don't even call them wages because they're so outside of regulation, they call them rewards. You do these tasks that you take on where you're paid these “rewards” for whatever that output is. Because you're being paid only as fast as you can work, there's a forced speed-up that the technology enables.
Then, the third way that the technology is important is, again, this question of automation of these managerial positions, which certainly AMT allows for. You don't need the temp company, you don't need the person at the corporate firm hiring the company and dealing with the temp company. You don't need an HR department. All of that goes through the AMT algorithm and the platform.
But also the data that comes from AMT is used to train machine learning algorithms, that are themselves oriented toward the automation of different knowledge work. An example is transcription services, translation services, and accounting. All of these jobs dealing with numbers and language and data, those are the mid-level paying jobs, like paralegals or translators where it does tend to require a college degree or some amount of training or some amount of specialization—that's the work that's being automated out precisely through data just gathered and collated from these very low-waged, often globally dispersed micro-workers.
There is this very complicated circuit of low wages and minimal technological innovation on the one hand, and then automation and high levels of technological mediation on the other.
You can't exactly separate those things out, increasingly, it seems to me, in the context of this deskilled knowledge work in particular.
Kamea Chayne: It certainly sounds like they feed into each other. And what is baffling to me is when people talk about things like productivity and efficiency, as if that should be the end goal of our society. Because I question what that even means—why do we care about efficiency so much and efficiency of what and for who? Who does economic growth in such a broad sense of the word benefit, when it masks all of these inequalities within with that broad stroke?
And, as you've noted, "the key “innovation” in this sector isn’t an innovation at all but rather a movement backward: despite its technological mediation, deskilled gigwork relies on the kinds of piece-rate or “payment-by-results” systems common to a much earlier and less technologically developed period in the history of capitalism."
For me, it's really worth unpacking what our basis is for measuring advancement or backward, growth or stagnation. Because I almost feel like those in political, corporate, and media power at least, have been overcomplicating these social constructs, such as orienting us towards endless economic growth in order to justify something that only really benefits a few at the top.
I think about, for example, why don't we just center ourselves on lowering stress and anxiety, lowering chronic illnesses, improving people's sense of belonging and community and life satisfaction and health, increasing biodiversity, and so forth? So instead of using some broad, constructed and disassociated measurement to supposedly indicate “advancement”, why don't we just focus on our health and quality of life itself? That's what I hope we orient growth and advancement towards.
Annie McClanahan: I think that's totally right. This problem of wage stagnation in the U.S. economy is no small thing. It's a problem even from the perspective of people who want economic growth, because the fact is that if wages are stagnant and then there is a lot of consumption that is presumed to be part of the American working and middle-class experience that becomes unavailable.
If you have an economy, for instance, where the majority of people are working in jobs for which a college degree is not required, but they are taking on those college degrees as there’s more demand than ever for higher education, even though these jobs are changing all the time… then with the folks who are working in these jobs where they're being paid less than the college degree that they earned ostensibly were training them for, they're not going to be buying a house or a car.
In fact, this is part of the discourse around the fact that millennials are taking on a lot less of that consumer debt.
It does produce a potential crisis, even for theories of economic growth, let alone for the well-being or vitality or sustainability of the individual workers themselves.
The other thing that's interesting to me is that if you think about this question of technological stagnation and these jobs that have been very hard to automate… a lot of them are jobs in industries similar to the industry that I'm in, which is education. Often, teaching is given as a primary example of this technological stagnation, which is that I can use a computer to speed up my teaching process, or develop a curriculum or whatever. Still, I can’t increase it at this massive level.
But one of the things that has been happening as a result of the experiments in online education that have come out of the pandemic is that I do think that there's more and more interest among both universities and capital in trying to automate more aspects of education and a lot of eagerness even among people that, from my perspective, ought to know better. Some of my coworkers at the university are thinking about, “Well, what are the affordances of this technology and how can we use it to essentially teach more students?”
The idea is that it would be a solution to the crisis of access to higher education is just astonishing to me. It seems to me so important that we preserve these few aspects of social interaction and engagement left in our lives that are not mediated by computers and devices. Is it good to have opportunities for something like telehealth, for folks who don't have access to doctors or maybe options for people who, for whatever reason, need to rely on online learning for education as a solution to the problem of access on a small-scale—I think those are fine. But on the larger scale, I am just very worried about what it does.
It's incredibly important to me to be in person in a room with my students as much as possible. That's a value that seems so self-evident to me, but I think is under some amount of threat right now.
Kamea Chayne: A broader question I have is whether automation and digitization itself generally in terms of the productivity and deliverables, ends up inevitably accelerating the increase in our economic disparities and socio-ecological injustices.
Because given the impossibility of endless capital accumulation and endless material growth, doesn't automation, given the current incentives, at least just lead us to accelerate ourselves towards collapse and self-destruction? Or maybe I'm just too cynical about its potential to actually translate into improvements in our collective well-being and feelings of being valued for our full humanity.
Annie McClanahan: It's really complicated. In the 20th century, there were lots of folks, particularly up through the about the 1970s or so, who saw the possibilities for automation as a form of human liberation from work. Because in an ideal world, the creation of more efficient machines means that we don't work more, we work less.
I just was teaching to my students the other day, this amazing text from the 1960s by this Black auto worker and activist in Detroit, James Boggs, who has this book called The American Revolution, where he's writing about his experiences as a factory worker. He has this image of this idea that we would have these machines that would be so productive that they would liberate us from the demand to work 40, 50, 60 hours a week and produce a world in which we could fulfill our human potential and our human capacities in all these different ways.
It's a really wonderful utopian account. But he himself acknowledges that that is what mechanization would do in a system where we hadn't decided that the ability to reproduce oneself and to survive and subsist, would have to be dependent on the wage.
Under a capitalist system of production or any system of production based on the extraction of value via wages, it's always going to be the case that mechanization leads to more work and lower wages.
The possibility of this other version of the automation tendency becomes impossible precisely because of the ways in which capitalism extracts value.
The other thing that is not available or not obvious to somebody writing about these questions in the 1960s but that is clear now is that the other side of automation and mechanization is the ecological catastrophe. So, if you think about the environmental impacts of even something that seems so immaterial such as a server farm, for instance. That is the place where all the data from these platforms and apps are stored and processed. The ecological and energy impacts of those are really significant.
Insofar as these machines still depend on the energy and fuels that are unsustainable and limited, they will never be a solution to the human catastrophe of capitalism, because they will only cause climate change and resource extraction to speed up.
Kamea Chayne: In terms of looking at our path forward, you share: "Whether we are talking about insecure work or technological unemployment, about low-wage work or no work at all, we are reminded that if we are to persist, it will have to be in a world in which neither one’s livelihood nor one’s life depends on access to the wage."
In a culture that assigns such a high level of importance and value to the very idea of jobs for people to earn a living, and also where entire education educational systems are designed to train people into thinking that this is the way that things have to work, what do you want to invite us to rethink or to challenge? And what are some of your dreams and visions for how we may be able to organize and care for ourselves and our communities beyond being tethered to the wage?
Annie McClanahan: One of the things that I find really powerful about thinking about these longer histories of service work is looking back to the forms of labor organizing and also the social solidarity in common among those whose access to subsistence is mediated by the wage that has not been highlighted as traditional parts of the workers’ movement.
Everything from the work of African American laundry workers in the South in the late 19th century to these immigrant women working in hotels in the early 20th century, to the long history of waitress unions that historians have written really powerfully about, they're also excluded from the traditional industrial unions.
Looking at these longer histories of the ways in which folks who are unemployed or underemployed or part of a surplus population or part of the service sector or part of the informal sector, the way that they all live the same crisis, which is separation from the means to reproduce themselves... I think insofar as we can find ways to think about strategies for combining the struggles of all of these groups of people together, whether it's waitresses or uber drivers or sex workers, through these new kinds of strategies of resistance and these new forms of militancy and new forms of knowledge production...
There are a lot of possibilities there for dispensing with older forms that have maybe become superannuated and finding revolutionary new forms of being in common against the exploitation of the wage and against the regime of property.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. We are now going into our final lightning-round closing questions. What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Annie McClanahan: I'm really obsessed right now with the genre of the worker's inquiry, which is a type of writing that's written by workers themselves. A lot of folks have been doing really great work in this regard, particularly around gig workers. The publication Notes From Below has been producing a lot of really wonderful workers’ inquiries from Amazon workers and delivery drivers and logistics workers. I'm really excited by this as a genre of knowledge production.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Annie McClanahan: It comes from the scholar Chris Nealon. He writes, “The volatility born of the contradictions in capital might better point to a different, earlier understanding of theory as the relentless surveying of grounds for solidarity among those for whom the regime of capital only spells suffering.” I just love that image of the relentless surveying of possible grounds for solidarity. It seems that that is what the theory that I love the best does and the theory that I write tries to do.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Annie McClanahan: My students. It feels a bit obvious to say that. But it really is the most powerful part of what I do on a daily basis. I've long been interested in pushing back against the idea that young people are somehow subject to this ideological mystification around everything from their student debt to their economic outlooks. I have my students read workers' inquiries similar to the ones that I was describing a minute ago and also write them about their own job experiences. I find them to be incredibly intelligent and canny and clear-eyed about what their jobs are like and what needs to be different and so on. These questions of work, in particular, I find young people right now are really engaged and aware and thoughtful and critical. It's one of the things that gives me the most hope.
Kamea Chayne: Annie, thank you so much. We appreciate you and thank you so much for sharing your immense wealth of knowledge here with us. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Annie McClanahan: We have to find a world without wages.
