Will Work Really Change That Much?

 As people look ahead to the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, many are heralding a work-from-home revolution. But for centuries, it’s been easy to overstate predictions about the future of work. Even when they are not just plain wrong, such predictions are, at best, only partially true because how people experience work varies tremendously by education and skill level, gender, race, class, age, unionization, geography, sector, occupation, employer, and more. Even someone in 1935 who predicted a future of greater unionization in the wake of the then-new National Labor Relations Act would have been more wrong than right. 

Predictions about remote work are likely to suffer the same fate. Even during the height of the pandemic, less than half of U.S. workers were working remotely, and having the privilege of being able to do so was much less likely for Black and Hispanic workers and those without a college degree. When women choose flexible working arrangements, they are more likely than men to be perceived as having weakened career commitment. So even if we think that the future of work will be significantly different because remote work outlives the pandemic, this change will likely reproduce inequalities rooted in intersectional combinations of gender, race, and class. So at a fundamental level, this doesn’t sound like much of a change.

But will remote work even outlive the pandemic? The optimistic prediction is that workers who have been able to work at home will be able to have the autonomy to choose how to best structure their working arrangements. Most workers lost this autonomy with the advent of industrialization and the shift from home-based work to mills, factories, and offices. So at first glance, this could be a significant change for some workers. But less optimistically, this could become more of a return to pre-industrialization work arrangements than workers imagine. In a widely-publicized editorial, the CEO of Washingtonian Media openly admitted that if workers are rarely on-site, then “management has a strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor.’” Indeed, Nicola Countouris and Valerio De Stefano warn that only employees with “highly-desirable, hard-to-find, firm-specific, ‘core’ skills” are likely to remain as regular employees while being allowed to work remotely; others are likely to be reclassified as contractors, with the accompanying loss of benefits and security. So even if it looks like workers have a choice of working remotely, for many it could be less of a free choice and more of an economically-coerced choice. Again, this doesn’t sound like much of a change in the fundamental nature of capitalist work.

Industry leaders have also been trying to lead the narratives around the future of remote work. Finance industry leaders have largely been preaching the need to return to the traditional office while technology industry leaders have signaled greater willingness to continue with remote work. These differences may stem from a variety of reasons, such as assumptions of how to manage workers, a need for different mentoring methods in certain settings, or the tech industry’s self-interest in selling products that support remote work. More generally, there are multiple reasons why a return to traditional work is likely, such as a need for belonging, learning from others, and separating work from home. But in any case, these narratives are laying the foundation for decisions about the future of work that will likely be made by employers, not workers, without significant worker voice.

While (some) employers are re-assessing their policies on work, it is also likely that workers and their families will be doing their own re-assessments. One recent survey revealed that a full-time, stay-at-home parent is the most popular family structure for caring for young children except among those earning more than $150,000. So 25 percent of women are thinking about reducing their labor market attachment, including dropping out of the workforce altogether. Others are re-assessing whether low-paid retail jobs are worth it when they face bullying from the public because of masks, their race, or other things that have become politicized and divisive. But until there are significant shifts in power relations, a recognition of deep-seated structural inequalities and privilege, and changed social norms, these reassessments are likely to yield individual and family decisions about work that react to the options available to them rather than shape new forms of work in meaningful ways. If work is going to shift more fundamentally, we need to center power and public policy, and do so in identity-conscious and intersectionality-aware ways.

So in thinking about the future of work, we need to remember that work is complex and diverse. If we focus on remote work, increased flexibility doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the employment relationship. Workers are still trading their time for money fulfilling the policies and requirement set by employers. More importantly, a focus on remote work renders a majority of the workforce invisible, especially those who have traditionally been most vulnerable and least well-off. This is where a fundamental change is needed the most. So if we are looking at remote work to see whether work is really changing, we’re looking in the wrong place.

Is Making Work More Visible Always Better?

The theme of this year's Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting was Invisible Labor. Work can be invisible in two broad ways. First, within the domain of work, some forms of work are celebrated and highly-valued while other forms are marginalized or not even socially recognized as work. In this way, undervalued and overlooked forms of work are "invisible labor." The classic example is unpaid household work, but the conference illustrated that invisible labor can take many forms. Second, within the broader socio-politico-economic realm, other issues and interests are commonly prioritized over those pertaining to work and workers. For each of these aspects, invisible work is almost universally seen as a bad thing. That is, we should be striving to combat invisible labor by increasing the social standing, status, and rewards that are accorded to work and workers (generally or specifically). But is more visible work always better?

At the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, I presented a conceptual framework for deepening our understanding of invisible labor which follows convention by seeing invisible labor as a problem (see my blog posting "The Eye Does Not See What the Mind Does Not Know"). But as I sat listening to the two other presentations in my session, I started to question whether this is always the case.

First, Eileen Otis, a sociologist at the University of Oregon, presented her research on produce department workers in Wal-Mart in China. These workers are very much invisible to the customers, which is problematic in that this shows a lack of respect for the workers and leads to greater stress levels due to customer demands. But the workers are not invisible to supervisors, who watch their movements through cameras, secret shoppers, and unrecognized managers.

Second, Chris Warhurst, a sociologist at Warwick University, presented his research on the new invisibilities of interactive service work. While showing how many service worker are invisible because they work behind the scenes (such as dish washers and room cleaners) and how contemporary emphases on knowledge work have removed considerations of the body from academic analyses (thus rendering it analytically invisible), at least one element of front-line service workers has become starkly visible. That is, for positions that directly deal with customers, there is an increasing drive by restaurants, hotels, shops, and other service establishments to hire workers who look good and sound right. So in the UK, working class individuals who say "lovely" (which has Celtic origins, and thus working class associations) are discriminated against, while workers who say "exquisite" (which has Norman origins, and thus middle class associations) are favored.

These papers, then, seem to reveal that a more nuanced thinking about invisible labor is required. In particular, some degree of invisibility might be good for workers. The Chinese produce workers search out areas beyond the reach of managerial surveillance systems, such as the coolers, where they can have some dignity and autonomy. If their managers gave them more autonomy through less surveillance (a form of greater invisibility in some respects), this wouldn't be necessary. Moreover, if the UK service workers were less visible to the customers--by which I mean the customers were less sensitive to the characteristics of service staff--then perhaps service sector employers would be less likely to discriminate against those who don't look good or sound right.

Ideally, work and workers of all types would be fully respected so that problems of manager surveillance, customer disrespect, and discrimination would disappear. From this idealistic perspective, greater levels of visibility for work would always be better. But for the time being, perhaps greater visibility is not always better for all workers.

Epilogue: The day after I made this posting, a commentary piece "Where Have All the Workers Gone?" appeared. This similarly raises issues about the new invisibility of work (e.g., no one ever sees an Amazon worker) and is well worth reading. But I think it overstates the extent to which work has been visible before the rise of the supposed new technology era. And to the extent it was visible as claimed in that piece, the visible workers were largely white men.

Invisible Labor: The Eye Does Not See What the Mind Does Not Know

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of participating in a very stimulating conference on invisible labor hosted by Washington University's Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital. My contribution was reflected in an old adage that states that the eye does not see what the mind does not know.

We only see and value work when it conforms to our mental models of what work is. In the public imagination, why is work less visible than other key aspects of human life? Because dominant ways of thinking about work reduce it to a curse or to a commodified, instrumental activity that supports consumption. So we do not think of work as having deeper value, and therefore we overlook work in favor of other human activities. Similarly, why are certain forms of work invisible? Because when we think of work in certain ways, especially as a commodified, instrumental activity, then forms of work that are thought of as different from or only weakly fulfilling these dominant conceptualizations of work are devalued and rendered invisible.

In these ways, then, how we think about and conceptualize work have real consequences for what is seen and valued as work. Unfortunately, conceptualizations of work are frequently narrowly-conceived and typically unstated. To better understand issues of invisible work and questions of what forms of work are valued and why, it is important to explicitly consider the diverse ways in which work can be conceptualized.

I have written about these conceptualizations in my book The Thought of Work, and in earlier blog posts (e.g., What is Work, and Why Does It Matter?), so I will summarize my ideas in the following table:

Work as...	Definition	Implications for Invisible Labor
1. A Curse	An unquestioned burden necessary for human survival or maintenance of the social order.	All work is devalued; other human activities are more important and receive more attention.
2. Freedom	A way to achieve independence from nature or other humans, and to express human creativity.	Work that fails to achieve economic independence or lacks creativity is less likely to be valued and visible.
3. A Commodity	An abstract quantity of productive effort that has tradable economic value.	Visible work is exchanged in primary labor markets; high pay required to indicate economic value.
4. Occupational Citizenship	An activity pursued by human members of a community entitled to certain rights.	All forms of work should be valued more highly with rights provided to all types of workers.
5. Disutility	A lousy activity tolerated to obtain goods and services that provide pleasure.	Work that does not support high levels of consumption is less likely to be valued and visible.
6. Personal  Fulfillment	Physical and psychological functioning that (ideally) satisfies individual needs.	Work that does not provide intrinsic rewards is less likely to be valued and visible.
7. A Social Relation	Human interaction embedded in social norms, institutions, and power structures.	Invisibility of work reflects socially-created institutions and power structures.
8. Caring for Others	The physical, cognitive, and emotional effort required to attend to and maintain others.	Though frequently invisible, caring work should be valued as real work.
9. Identity	A method for understanding who you are and where you stand in the social structure.	All forms of work should be valued more highly and more visible.
10. Service	The devotion of effort to others, such as God, household, community, or country.	Though frequently invisible, service towards others should be valued as real work.

By making these conceptualizations explicit, we have a better foundation for thinking more clearly about how we define work and for gaining a deeper understanding of why all work or some forms work are invisible. By broadening our thinking on work, this framework can further provide a foundation for crafting inclusive definitions of work that recognize not only the deep importance of work for individuals and society, but also the value of diverse forms of human activity that should be fully embraced as work rather than overlooked or marginalized. In short, in order for the eye to recognize wider forms of work, we need to train the mind to think more broadly and deeply about work.