Work is a central part of daily life. The amount of time we spend at work can vary depending on the industry and the nature of the job. On average, most of us can expect to work 40 hours a week for the rest of our adult lives prior to reaching the age of retirement.
Just how many hours is that over a lifetime? Apparently around 92,120 hours — that’s 21% of your total waking hours over a 76-year lifespan and a figure that doesn’t account for hours spent working overtime, commuting, and getting ready for work.
As of 2021, the number of working adults in the United States is estimated to be around 153.7 million. Each of those 153.7 million people spends over a decade of their life just working. With such a large chunk of our life taken up by work alone, many of us are starting to question whether work is even worth it.
Lying Flat and the Philosophy of R/Antiwork
You know something is trending when it starts showing up on the self-proclaimed front page of the internet, Reddit. While it’s often brushed off as an echo chamber of ideas, which it honestly sometimes is, the popularity of r/antiwork doesn’t exist in the vacuum of digital space. It comes in the wake of growing discontent about inhumane working conditions, shady hiring practices, and stagnated wages.
Its strongly anti-capitalist sentiments have made it the subject of several articles and angry comments that describe r/antiwork as an online hub for society’s laziest. Rather than reject the branding altogether, r/antiwork proudly embraces it, with the caveat that anti-work actually means anti-exploitative work, with its motto: “Unemployment for all, not just the rich!”
It seems confusing on the surface until you dig into the nuances of r/antiwork’s philosophy. To r/antiwork, the fact that they’re the ones working 40-80 hour shifts a week at minimum wage while corporate CEOs and investors make millions means that it’s the wealthy elite who are profiting off the fruits of their labor while they sit in comfortable offices and buy their nth home. The workers of r/antiwork create the value and it’s the upper class, who benefit from their labor, that are actually more fit to be called “lazy”.
In short, it’s a C-word related movement. No, not that C-word, the other one: Communism.
But not all workers of r/antiwork are leaving their workplace. Many of them acknowledge the realities of being a wage slave, someone who’s forced to work in order to survive, often at the cost of pursuing activities that they find personally fulfilling, such as spending time with family members, or contributing directly to their communities, like volunteering to help build homes for the less fortunate.
It’s a strong word and one that unveils the inherent lack of real choice that most of us have in our professional lives. We may be given the illusion of choice in whether or not we want to work, but it’s the alternative — starvation — that shows the financial gun pointed to the heads of the working class to continue working or die.
When wage slavery gets in the way of being antiwork, the only option left to cogs in the corporate machine is to throw a wrench in it.
Underpaid workers of r/antiwork are finding creative ways to slow down work. The photo above was posted 17 hours from the time this article was written and is currently one of the most popular posts on the subreddit at 4,000 upvotes. The title? “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why I make price label swords on company time.”
Other Reddit users are also reveling in the revolutionary mischief of making yourself look busy when you really aren’t to avoid being called out for not working. Bolder Redditors have taken to disappearing from work entirely on important dates to make sure their workplaces have a harder time meeting demand during peak hours.
Though most of the members of r/antiwork are Gen Z and Millenials, to think that r/antiwork is an isolated phenomenon would be extremely out of touch with what’s happening all throughout the globe. A much older movement called “tang ping” or “lying flat” in Chinese has been going on for the past few years in China’s busiest sectors. It’s a reaction to a system that’s designed to work them to the bone with work practices like the infamous “996”, a work schedule that starts at 9:00 AM and ends at 9:00 PM for 6 days a week.
The idea behind lying flat is to do the absolute bare minimum to get by at work or even one’s own life. The goal is to work just enough to survive and enjoy life day by day as a form of passive protest against a society that they feel does not reward them as it should for working as hard as they do. As Luo Huazhong, the man behind the fame of lying flat, puts it, “Lying flat is justice.”
Lying flat’s antiwork manifesto even reads “I will slack off at work. I am a blunt sword to boycott consumerism.” A blunt, price label sword made on company time at that.
That said, for other workers in the r/antiwork subreddit, the forum is more than just lying flat and pulling pranks on corporate. Its most active and vocal supporters are organizing strikes and walkouts in posts, comments, and even other social media platforms such as Twitter.
R/Antiwork Is the Internet’s Answer to Unions
R/antiwork spends a lot of time venting about shitty bosses and not being able to use the bathroom during their shift but the brunt of its momentum and energy is spent organizing walkouts and boycotts on their devices — maybe even on company time and on a company-issued phone or computer in true r/antiwork fashion.
Members of the subreddit plan on leaving their jobs on Black Friday. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a name used to describe the massive sales that follow Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s also the busiest day of the year for most retail businesses and has resulted in 14 deaths and 117 injuries.
The website “Black Friday Death Count” has listed all of the Black Friday-related deaths to hit the news since 2006. Some of its most insane entries include workers being trampled to death in stampedes during Walmart sales. The incidents aren’t isolated to the U.S either. One Black Friday sale death tells the story of how a woman in the U.K received a lethal head injury after a TV fell on her.
But while the spotlight is on the retail and service industries, u/senduntothemonlyyou advocates for a mass walkout that reaches all the way up the corporate ladder. The user wrote in their post, “I’m also seeing people saying only in retail. No. If you work for a company that produces a product; sales, admin, drivers, factory workers, low-level managers, you all have a role in the system.”
Fortunately, r/antiwork does have allies in the more “prestigious” sectors of labor. Another post entitled “We’re all quitting” by u/Catcalimoneyfood says that they work at a startup where they and their coworkers labor under a CEO who the user describes as a “narcissist micromanager” who contracted COVID and barely survived. In order to keep the company afloat, u/Catcalimoneyfood and their 4 other colleagues have been working tirelessly for the past two months.
What was supposed to be a sigh of relief when the CEO returned became a defeated groan because, as thanks for two months of keeping the company running, all the employees received was three weeks of berating. When they leave this November, u/Catcalimoney estimates that end of quarter results will “completely fail” as they will leave “$8 million in sales pipelines left untouched.”
If that sounds serious to you, then buckle up for what r/antiwork truly wants: the return of powerful unions.
The end of the 19th century saw a new era of industrialization for the U.S. This was the era of the steel and railroad magnates who have gone down in history as one of the richest men produced by the modern capitalist system. As was typical of the time, and even today, there was a complete disregard for workplace safety. This early stage of industrialization was a world the existence of the Occupational Safety and Health Adminsitration or even the 40 hour work week.
The late 1800s to 1900s saw the deaths of 35,000 workers killed in workplace accidents and another 500,000 maimed while working in factories, often with injuries that would leave them permanently disfigured or disabled and incapable of continuing work. Nor was there such a thing as fair pay. Workers were openly paid less than their counterparts doing the same work if they were female or were minors, a practice that we’ve since abolished today.
The Problems Facing R/Antiwork’s Cause
Though the supposed labor shortage in the service sector is now driving employers to attempt hiring minors, for drastically lower wages, users over at r/antiwork are spreading the word on how this “opportunity” is only a way for companies to exploit minor labor and avoid having to pay grown adults a living wage.
Honestly, it could be worse. While employers clearly have the upper hand in negotiations, given that they’re the ones paying the wage slaves, early unions realized that corporations’ reliance on their labor also made it expensive to hire and train replacements for them.
The solution? Stop working to force the big boss to pay better, make the workplace safer, or cut back on working hours. Of course, this didn’t stop employers from trying to bring in replacements for strikers, workers in labor unions would intimidate strikebreakers into joining the strike and prevent replacement workers from coming into work.
Earlier strikes made it difficult to replace skilled workers given the costs of retraining new hires. But in the digital age, r/antiwork’s white collar professionals contend with replacement hires in other areas of the U.S and the world.
“Domestic Outsourcing in the United States: A Research Agenda to Assess Trends and Effects on Job Quality” found that the growing gap between high-paying jobs, often white-collar and office-based, and low-paying jobs, which involve more in-person and customer-facing jobs, is partially driven by domestic outsourcing which allows companies to hire third-party independent contractors who are not subject to conventional labor regulations. This is without accounting for the effect of offshore outsourcing which has moved manufacturing and even office jobs to countries like Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines.
It’s a potentially problematic phenomenon, depending on how the r/antiwork movement reacts to it. Racial discrimination was a shadow looming over the earlier labor unions of the 19th to early 20th centuries. Anti-Chinese sentiments were prolific in the 1850s, particularly in California where predominantly white labor unions rallied against Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino migrant workers for accepting lower wages than white workers, itself another effect of systemic racism and a lack of bargaining power against employers.
It’s easy to point fingers at racists who claim migrant workers are “stealing their jobs”, even though immigrants are actually taking on jobs that native-born workers don’t want to work at, but warped perceptions of reality are often based on some measure of fact. In the case of racial labor tensions, that reality is this: that immigrant workers and offshore employees are used by corporations to increase their profit margins.
Time will tell whether r/antiwork doesn’t fall into the same anti-immigrant and anti-POC rhetoric that its predecessors ended up espousing.
The r/antiwork movement isn’t just for Millenials and Gen Z vent posting on their phones. Contrary to what the lack of news coverage might make you think, labor strikes have been growing in scope and reach all throughout the U.S this year. Plus, even if you work a dream job like I do, you can still be antiwork.
Being antiwork isn’t just about improving work conditions for certain groups or individuals. It’s about pulling all our strength together to advocate for better pay, better conditions, and better benefits for every worker in every corner of the world.
It’s 2021 and it’s time we all became antiwork.