Does 5 to 9 solve 9 to 5?

In the title song for the 1980 movie "9 to 5", Dolly Parton captured the inhumanity of underpaid and over-harassed working women, which includes the well-known chorus:

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely gettin' by, it's all taking and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, for service and devotion
You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion
Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me.

From this chorus you can get a pretty good idea that work isn't portrayed all that positively in the song and accompanying movie. Work here is unfair, unequal, and sexist. Fast forward 40 years and Dolly Parton's song has been rewritten — or perhaps we should say "has pivoted"? — to "5 to 9" for a Super Bowl commercial:

 Replacing the original chorus, but with essentially the same tune, 9 to 5 becomes:

Working 5 to 9, making something of your own now
And it feels so fine to build a business from your know-how
Gonna move ahead, and there's nothing that you can't do
When you listen to that little voice inside you
Well you got dreams and you know they matter
Be your own boss, climb your own ladder
That moment's getting closer by the day
And you're in the same boat with a lotta your friends
Launching ideas you all believe in
The tide's gonna turn and it's all gonna roll your way.

In many respects, nothing has improved — in real life, and in the song's portrayal of work. The Super Bowl commercial starts out with repetitious images of the drudgery of office work and bored office workers — again, not a rewarding way to make a living. And the new chorus above has you dreaming of something better and being your own boss because the daily grind is just that.

But as I've explored in my book The Thought of Work, work is complicated and can have multiple meanings. In addition to being a curse, drudgery that people tolerate to earn money, or something endured to confirm your social status as someone who works rather than loafs, work can also be a source of freedom and fulfillment — be your own boss, climb your own ladder, launch your own creative ideas.

Work as freedom and fulfillment are a reality for some (at least partly); a dream for others. And yet, 5 to 9 has created a backlash, including in provocative opinion pieces in the New York Times and NBC News. To see why, we need the remainder of the new 5 to 9 lyrics:

Working 5 to 9 you've got passion and a vision
'Cause it's hustlin' time, a whole new way to make a livin'
Gonna change your life, do somethin' that gives it meanin'
With a website that is worthy of your dreaming
5 to 9, you keep working, working, working
Working 5 to 9, 'til your dreams, come true
Working 5 to 9, you keep dreaming, dreaming, dreaming
5 to 9, 5 to 9, you can do it

One controversy stems from the apparent celebration of "working, working, working" at a time when many feel overworked during the pandemic. Particularly ironic or galling is that the original 9 to 5 was somewhat of a feminist anthem, but 5 to 9 becomes extra humiliation as women are bearing much of the extra caring burdens with children home from school and elderly relatives unable to access support services. Indeed, 5 to 9 could mean 5pm to 9am (the famous "second shift") so that women are expected to work, work, work around the clock.

Another controversy is that, whether intentional or not, the "hustling time" reference in the new lyrics taps into slang around the gig economy in which workers are continually forced to work side hustles or numerous jobs just to make ends meet. This is particularly true during the pandemic with record rates of job loss and unemployment. We shouldn't be celebrating how hard it is to make a living. 

So how should we interpret 5 to 9? Is it really a way to really break from jobs that are "all taking and no giving" such that people can earn a decent living doing "something that gives [life] meaning" without needing to work side hustles and multiple jobs, or becoming overworked through working, working, working. That is, does it allow you to take your day job and shove it, to paraphrase another well-known work song? If so, then this would be a good thing.

But the harsh reality is that for many, this takes more than a website worthy of their dreaming (yes, 5 to 9 is an ad for a web hosting and design company, Squarespace). So 5 to 9 really is 5pm to 9am, and it's added on top of other jobs. If this is the case, then we shouldn't be celebrating overwork. We should be trying to improve work so that people have can high-quality jobs that allow them to support a family without being overworked. And we should be doing so in ways that recognize rather than deny the deep inequalities rooted in race, gender, class, and other identities that shape work. But in the meantime...

9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There's a better life and you think about it don't you
It's a rich man's game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life putting money in his wallet

Should Work Be More Like BDSM Role-Play?

“You can’t say ‘orange’ to your boss.” Wait a minute, what?!? Is “orange” some kind of offensive slang I’m not aware of? I don’t think so…so taken in isolation, this sentence from David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs (p. 282) seems odd. But it’s actually quite important. “Orange” is being used here as an example of a safe word analogous to what someone would have in erotic role-playing involving bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism (BDSM). Graeber is right—you don’t have a safe word at work, but you should.

It’s easy to envision a sadistic boss who enjoys humiliating or inflicting pain on others. We might also joke that only a masochist could put up with certain bosses or jobs that look painful to us. But at a more fundamental level, many, if not all, jobs can be seen as having a (non-sexual) sadomasochistic nature because of the dependency nature of the employment relationship. In her book Sadomasochism in Everyday Life, Lynn Chancer argues that “many workers, like the masochist, find themselves subject to chains of command that induce extreme dependency and a tendency toward the experience of oneself as inferior relative to an allegedly superior authority” (p. 106). And for bosses, “perpetually insecure himself or herself (why else would the capitalist need to figuratively bind and restrict the freedom of the worker?), no level of control really satisfies” (p. 109) so there is a sadistic-like (in psychological terms) continual push for dominance. Chancer further argues that the feeling of power is more satisfying or authentic when the subordinate exhibits some resistance or independence (hence bosses want employees with initiative), but not so much as to threaten the hierarchy.

So paid work in a hierarchical system with economic, legal, and other inequalities has important elements of a sadomasochistic relationship. But (non-pathological) BDSM role-playing has other critical features (Elena Faccio et al., Forbidden Games: The Construction of Sexualityand Sexual Pleasure by BDSM ‘Players,’ Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2014). Specifically, BDSM players design the rules of the game, are aware of their roles, and can withdraw their consent at any time by the use of an agreed-upon safe word. As Graeber notes, “This is precisely what’s lacking in real-life sadomasochistic situations. You can’t say “orange” to your boss. Supervisors never work out in advance in what ways employees can and cannot be chewed out for different sorts of infractions, and if an employee is…being reprimanded or otherwise humiliated, she knows there is nothing she can say to make it stop” (pp. 121-2).

You might say, but a worker can say “I quit.” But this is only a safe word if a worker can easily find similar work and pay elsewhere—an assumption frequent in mainstream economic (neoliberal) thought and associated public policies, but often not a reality for many workers.

Graeber argues that a universal basic income would turn “I quit” into a safe word because at least some level of income would not be dependent on a particular job. I would add that there are other things that could also be done to make work more like BDSM role play that fulfills the BDSM “safe, sane and consensual” (SSC) code:

·       Require employers to provide a written statement to all employees disclosing all terms and conditions of employment, including being able to be fired at any time for almost any reason. This might not change the actual terms and conditions of employment, but it would at least give workers more clarity about what they are signing up for.   

·       Enact statutory protections for employee free speech in which private and public employers are not allowed to violate an employee's freedom of expression either in or out of the workplace. Again, this might not change the actual terms and conditions of employment, but it could give workers more power to articulate their desires and object to certain things.

·       Grant workers the right to meet with their employer to request a flexible work schedule, a certain number of hours, or other scheduling items. This could help workers be part of designing at least some of the “rules of the game.”   

·       As Steve Befort and I have argued in Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives: Bringing Workplace Law and Public Policy Into Focus, the United States should enact an American Good Cause Termination Act in which employees can only be fired if there is “good cause” for such an action. A just cause standard is nearly universal in U.S. union contracts, and in CEO contracts. By outlawing both bad and irrelevant reasons for dismissing employees, this could give workers greater power to object to onerous conditions without having to quit, and could also better protect them if they wanted to form a union to improve their power.

None of these would necessarily fully solve the dependency issues inherent in the modern employment relationship. That is, work for many might be hopelessly sadomasochistic. Which means that it's important for us to think about ways to create a better balance to promote what I've called "employment with a human face." Or as provocatively put forth by Graeber (p. 283): “What would be the equivalent of saying “orange” to one’s boss? Or to an insufferable bureaucrat, obnoxious academic advisor, or abusive boyfriend? How do we create only games that we actually feel like playing, because we can opt out at any time?”

Perhaps surprisingly, then, making the employment relationship more like (non-pathological) BDSM role-playing with its SSC principles would be a good thing. You should be able to say “orange” to your boss. And many other things, too.

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Note: ICYMI, in last month's blog post I wrote about some of my other reactions to Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. 

Finding the Meaning in Bullshit Jobs

I’ve been reading Bullshit Jobs by LSE anthropologist David Graeber (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Graeber defines a bullshit job as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case” (pp. 9-10), and identifies five major types: 

• Flunky jobs make someone else look or feel important without any other real purpose,
• Goon jobs are those with an aggressive element that exist only because someone else has also created them and has an advantage if they are unmatched,  
• Duct-taping jobs fix problems that shouldn’t exist,
• Box-ticking jobs make an organization look like it’s doing something when it’s not,
• Taskmaster jobs manage others who don’t need managing.

The common theme here is that these are all pointless jobs. They are not bad in the conventional sense of having lousy pay and working conditions—indeed, Graeber notes that many bullshit jobs are corporate and government jobs with good pay and safe working conditions—but they don’t have any real value. Citing the fact that 37% of survey respondents said that their job does not make a meaningful contribution to the world, Graeber then claims that “if 37 percent of jobs are bullshit, and 37 percent of the remaining 63 percent are in support of bullshit, then slightly over 50 percent of all labor falls into the bullshit sector in the broadest sense of the term” (p. 62). 

Suppose that this is true, and, as Graeber argues, it’s largely a post-war phenomenon. Then this means that in that time period, “upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work” when we equate work to doing something meaningful (p. 265). That’s a provocative way to think about what might be happening in the world of work. Moreover, Graeber also points out that “if you combine this with the bullshitization of useful occupations (at least 50 percent in office work; presumably less in other sorts), and the various professions that basically exist only because everyone is working too hard (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen, to name a few), we could probably get the real workweek down to fifteen hours—or even twelve—without anyone noticing much” (pp. 62-3).

Admittedly, I’m not convinced that the true magnitudes are as large as claimed. In Bullshit Jobs, the supporting anecdotes perhaps represent the worst cases and I'd be surprised if we couldn't find dsyfunctional examples in all occupations. But it's entire occupations that are then characterized as being bullshit, as in this description of goon jobs: “If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers” (p. 36). By the end, pretty much all administrative and finance-related jobs have been labeled as useless, including human resources. So I think we need to be concerned with fallacies of composition. But even if the actual number of bullshit jobs is (a lot?) less than claimed, the implications in the previous paragraph are still important to confront, albeit perhaps better phrased as questions (e.g., how many people have essentially been put out of (meaningful) work?).

On a personal level, having a bullshit job is a problem because work should be providing meaning and rewards beyond a paycheck (as I’ve written about in The Thought of Work and elsewhere). In this way, the micro-level problems with bullshit jobs are contained within Karl Marx’s articulation of the problems of worker alienation under capitalism. But I’m not seeing how this aspect of Bullshit Jobs improves upon the concept of alienation. In fact, it seems that workers in bullshit jobs are all alienated, but the concept of alienation importantly also draws attention to the ways in which non-bullshit jobs can also be alienating.

Graeber goes onto argue that bullshit jobs create a moral envy in which workers with bullshit jobs feel resentment toward those with meaningful jobs, even though in Graeber’s eyes these meaningful jobs often have worse pay and working conditions. In fact, envy and resentment among managers, who are all seen as occupying bullshit jobs, towards those below them who are doing real work “is a key part of the justification of underpaying such workers” (p. 248). Frankly, I’m skeptical of this. Indeed, I would argue the opposite—blue collar and service workers are paid less because of prejudice and bias (not envy) that subconsciously allow managers to overstate their own importance while devaluing the contributions of manual and service work. Graeber also gives a lot of power to the finance industry and government officials in intentionally creating processes that lead to bullshit jobs in order to line their own pockets or prevent others from being able to navigate social safety nets. The former seems compelling but I’m not sure how much of the big picture it can explain, while the latter might be the unfortunate result of other priorities that are seen as legitimate by policy-makers (e.g., fraud).

But in some respects, these might just be second-order squabbles. For what Graeber really seems concerned about are the polarization in society (which is connected to work in one way or another) and freeing up work so that individuals can choose their own meaningful paths (including the freedom to find fulfillment without working at all). These are critically important issues that deserve all the attention they can get, and Graeber's ideas on the primary concerns are worth serious reflection. So in the end, if the provocatively overstated style of Bullshit Jobs causes more to confront these deeper issues, then I can overlook—OK, you know I have to say it—the bullshit.


Update (January 14, 2019): Just published research finds that the fraction of workers who report that their jobs are socially useless is a lot lower than what's claimed by Graeber, but it's still non-negligible.  

Say What? "Don't use words that invoke images of actual work"

Earlier this month there was an article on Yahoo! on the "6 Worst Home Fixes for the Money." The worst of the six is a home office remodel. Part of the rationale is that with the proliferation of wireless devices, people can work anywhere. Fair enough. But what caught my attention was the advice given for those selling a house with a home office: "call it a study, den or hobby room....don't use words that invoke images of actual work. Or the office."

So that's where we stand as a society. Work is so lousy that we shouldn't dare bringing up images of work when trying to sell positive visions of our home. As work is currently structured, our work is something we need to escape from and leave elsewhere. Certainly workers should enjoy time away from work. But if work is so lousy that we shouldn't "invoke images of actual work," then we need to re-think how we as a society structure work. Lastly, note that this suggestion to avoid bringing images of work into the home also reflects a longstanding, gender-biased view of work in which child-rearing, cooking, housework, and other caring activities done within the home are not real work. Indeed, real work is already going on in our homes! We need to re-think how we think about and value work.