Per my message last week, I just attended the New Work, New Culture Conference in Detroit this last weekend. Now, this was organized by folks from the Boggs Center, so the overall orientation of the conference was one of activism against the "occupation" of Detroit.
I don't know the number of attendees at this point, but it was a gym packed with people, many from Detroit but also many who traveled in from other states and even some international attendees. The speakers (not chosen by Frithjof) were pretty disparate; some of them didn't know each other and/or weren't very familiar with or to the Detroit group or Frithjof's immediate cohorts. There were enough people there I think unfamiliar enough with New Work basics that just explaining what it is was a daunting task. Frithjof's spiel focused on "most people don't like their jobs, and certainly the unemployed or precariously employed don't like the system... we can do better!" while Blair Evans of Incite-Focus Detroit provided the really amazing illustration of how community production through a fab lab can work (the video for both of these things as well as the other presentations should be up at some point). Small group discussions went over topics covering various ways of "getting off the grid," e.g. community farming, generating electricity through home-grown means, aquaponics, time banking, acquiring funding for these various types of projects, etc.
However, a good chunk of the conference seemed more to have to do with community organizing, and much of that wasn't so much providing information on how to do it as actually providing a pep talk, i.e. doing the organizing as if we were the community. To me, this was somewhat confusing and misplaced: New Work is an umbrella of ideas, not itself an organization. Various community efforts can find inspiration and guidance from New Work, but New Work is not like the Green Party or some other organization that needs to sit down and as a group to come up with a mission statement and sketch out its values and all of that. The problems with work are so widespread among different populations that very different looking solutions are needed to attack each of them, and overall, the focus needs to be on getting these programs going and solving real problems by whatever means, some of them involving government, and industry, and grants whenever these are available, though in many the most pressing cases no such help is forthcoming, so the solution does have to look more like communities making their own way by their collective bootstraps, as will largely be the case with Detroit.
Unsurprisingly, most folks involved in helping the unemployed or running community gardens or the like are self-proclaimed radical leftists, and so the message that the economic powers that be should best be fought by actually competing against them (by giving people the means of supporting themselves in a community without having to purchase so much from corporations) I think may have been unexpected. A difficulty in explaining New Work to a wider audience is convincing them that these technologies and techniques pioneered largely by hippies are possible to bring into the mainstream, i.e. without having to live in a commune or become an ascetic, and likewise (per my post that made Thoreau stand in for all anti-technologists, which I realize is not a great depiction of Thoreau, but nonetheless describes quite a few people who idolize him) some of the folks present were clearly not used to the idea of actually promoting technology, where its use is actually dictated people the community members designing it, who can insert their environmental ethics into the process (e.g. in deciding what materials are involved, the downstream and upstream costs).
I certainly left with a lot of names of folks to try to interview for Frithjof's YouTube Channel, so as to display the diversity of focus and viewpoints among the range of leaders who showed up. For from seeing Frithjof's particular vision as the end statement of the project, I'm eager to document other people's takes on how to best react to the hopefully by now uncontroversial observation that the current job system is terrible. Given the ubiquity of the problem, there should be no excuse for any portion of this non-movement to say "those people don't have the right values and so can't be part of this." Promoting New Work is like promoting democracy when democracy was a new idea. Again, particular efforts to do something in a particular city should be highly focused in setting out their goals, but advocates of New Work in general need to keep from getting bogged down by the details of specific proposals, elements of some particular vision, or philosophical points. Maybe you don't believe in the poverty of desire, maybe you emphasize entrepreneurship and someone else sees that as anathema to New Work. Maybe some want to focus on pushing the government to implement strategies to permit alternate work strategies, and others see any government action as a fundamental abuse of power. All we need to agree on at this point is recognition of the job system as legitimately problematic and that solutions really are realistically possible within our lifetime. That's a hard enough sell to the unconvinced!
-Mark Linsenmayer
“…the economic powers that be should best be fought by actually competing against them (by giving people the means of supporting themselves in a community without having to purchase so much from corporations)…”
Nicely put, Mark. Aside from aspiration of self-providing through community gardens, solar panels, 3D print shops, and whatnot, another form of competition is between privately owned firms and co-operatives. If worker ownership and management is superior, then go on, prove it. If co-ops can be just as economically productive as privately owned firms and it’s a lot more fun to work at one, then co-ops will out-compete privately owned firms for employees. The major disadvantage that co-ops have is the lack of financial capital. So, someone’s gotta dream up a way of providing capital to co-ops. Any ideas?
Sometimes I feel like Winston Smith when I think, “You know, capitalism is all right.” (He loved Big Brother.)
I think we need to be careful to understand “competition” in a real-world way. We don’t want monopolies (actual or de facto ones) that are let off the hook from innovating and providing good service, and when people complain about government services like schools, or a local union, or a public utility, or even their neighborhood board, they’re often complaining about exactly that: there’s this entity that was ostensibly created to represent them, to serve their interest, that isn’t functioning the way it should.
However, to think that adding competition (e.g. “school choice”) to the mix will help is often magical thinking, and can end up doing more overall harm than good (like enabling the rich to exempt themselves from the system into some private system that they control, while leaving the rest of the people with an even less well funded, and so less well functioning entity). Unraveling the problems with any such entity requires a much more nuanced approach. (For example, everyone agrees that the situation for doctors sucks: you’re pretty much forced to work crazy hours to pay for high medical school loans and insurance, and though doctors are about as politically well connected and rich as you can get, the market approach of them simply choosing some other way to structure things has not so far yielded any real solutions, though I vaguely recall some advance in the last decade re. exactly how much you can exploit residents, i.e. because keeping them up so long was actively endangering patients).
As Sandel argued, I think there are many values that we as a society have (or SHOULD have, i.e. which would be the generally agreed upon verdict of a bunch of smart people from all walks of life thinking hard about justice and the good life) which the market doesn’t reward, and this is a matter of straight up human nature, i.e. we almost always go for short-term gain over long-term interest.
So one of the themes that came up at the conference was that the typical way we work and buy things overwhelmingly takes money away from the local economy (especially if you’re in Detroit), i.e. the big companies aren’t centered there, and by working for them, you’re selling your labor to them wholesale, and they then get most of the value of it. And by buying from them you pay retail, and your money likewise largely flies away. For an area like Detroit to improve, more of that value has to stay there, but for that to happen, there has to be first, a cultural change so that people will understand this cycle and factor it into their decision making, and second, real, viable alternatives for purchasing and employment. If you can get the government to realize all of this and institute tax policies and such to promote these measures to help its own economy, then great, and also get foundations and philanthropists and whoever else you can involved. All such intervention is pretty antithetical to a true free market approach, but given that there is no value in itself to free markets, and that free markets are already hopelessly skewed by numerous factors (not just government), twisting markets to achieve desired social goals is just fine. The task of the philosopher, or any other thoughtful writer in a democracy, is to help figure out what social goals and desirable and help promote them, as ineffectual as this role may often seem… Per our Marx episode, I think people underestimate the power of ideas in shaping human history… just as environmentalism has become influential enough to influence numerous policies–though not nearly enough–a New Work approach may eventually be powerful enough to exert pressure on employers and government agencies… I can say my own employer really prides himself on offering a work environment that allows his dozen or so employees to pursue their passions, though our consulting company is hardly a typical American workplace.
I’m wondering if there are any concrete guidelines from New Work for how firms should operate. (I’ve listened to all the PEL material on New Work, read some of the blog posts about it, poked around the New Work website, etc. and much of the specific suggestions remain unclear to me.) Community self-providing is cool, and I’m all for it, but it has limits. For example, we’re going to depend on corporations from microprocessors from now until the end of the information age. Intel spends about $3 billion annually on research and employs thousands of highly educated, highly skilled computer scientists and engineers, who require facilities with cleanrooms to get their work done. To have microprocessors (one of the most important objects that exists in the 21st century), we need Intel-sized corporations. The only choice we have, as far as I can see, is what kind of corporations they are. Theoretically, Intel could be a massive worker-owned, worker-managed co-op, like Mondragon. Since firms are going to continue to be the main hubs of economic activity for a long time, does New Work have any suggestions about how firms should be run? Is it just a matter of employers offering more flexible hours to their employees?
Hi, Trent, That would be an excellent topic for a video.
For the most part, I think existing “good management” practices apply: make people feel like they have ownership of their work, give them decision making power whenever possible, listen to them re. what they do or don’t like to work on and try to have their duties reflect that, avoid dress codes and any other rules not actually required for productivity, give workers maximum flexibility to work when, where, and how they want, try to make the workplace environment fit people’s motivational patterns, foster a sense of community, and most of all, don’t humiliate and debase them or assign them work that just feels useless.
All this can be and in many cases is done by “progressive” companies today. The big addition, the one absolutely essential for New Work, is that you have to let them work fewer hours, if they want to. I know you’ve invested in them, that their knowledge is valuable, that job sharing arrangements end up costing more in terms of training and management with more people to deal with, that you end up having to pay benefits to more people. But not everything can be about profit. Environmentally conscious companies make choices that do cost somewhat more, but which are worth it because they reflect their ethics. Maybe they even brag about it to customers and so attract a customer base who will pay more for “organic,” “dolphin safe,” “fair trade,” “no child labor,” or “made in the U.S.A.” We should have a similarly catchy and recognizable label to label something as a “New Work Enterprise,” which would mean that the business recognizes that for most of its employees, this job is not going to be the thing that gives their life meaning, and so they will need the time (at the very least) to pursue their other interests. (This is not so bizarre as it sounds; the consulting group I work for has wording similar to that actually in the employee handbook.)
If a company could beyond merely giving a part time option actually help foster the “callings” of its workers, all the better. That was actually how the original arrangement that Frithjof and his cohorts proposed to GM in the 80s when they were laying people off in Flint, MI, i.e. instead of laying off half the workforce, cut all their hours down, not just per week, but so that they’d be working full time part of the year and then not at all other parts, and then hook them up with positive guidance to figure out their passions and help them pursue them, e.g. through training them in how to start a business that they were interested in. Given the expense of actually firing people (severance, unemployment), this was supposed to be a better deal for GM, and would moreover give them employees who were NOT burned out, and so were actually more productive.
Thanks, Mark, that makes it all a lot more clear. So, essentially, New Work is a movement for better management, not worker management or anything so radical.
http://manuallabours.wordpress.com/
Mark, did you present? If so, what did you speak about?
Nope. Most of the presentations were by people who were actually doing things.
Thanks for your ongoing contributions in this area, Mark. From the exchange between you and Trent, one thing became (more) clear to me regarding New Work: a delinking of the jobs system, i.e. how we provide for ourselves as both individuals and communities, and Capitalism with a capital “C.” (Probably obvious but it struck me nonetheless!) This is radical in an interesting, postmodern way in that we don’t have to get bogged down in debating the impossible question of “is Capitalism good or bad?” We can look more squarely–and existentially–at the fact that time will always be our most precious asset as human beings and therefore how can we live a life not contingent on trading huge quantities of this asset for a measly return. For artists and writers this has question has always had a long legacy, but it’s clear that it’s application reaches far beyond.