Unproductive Labor

This episode, I'm talking with Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project or 3Ps, a think tank in Washington D.C. We discuss Marco Rubio's and Jim Banks' proposed Teamwork for Employees and Managers bill, a piece of legislation that would make it easier for corporations to establish "employee involvement organizations. The bill is not likely to go anywhere or change very much if it did, so what was the point? Matt and I discuss this bill, company unions, and conservative attempts to appeal to working class voters.

The patreon page for 3Ps is here: https://www.patreon.com/peoplespolicyproject

Matt's Twitter handle is @MattBruenig

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines.

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

What We Talked About

You can find Matt's article on the Teamwork Bill here: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/02/07/whats-the-point-of-the-rubio-company-union-bill/

Teamwork Bill: https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2022/2/rubio-banks-introduce-pro-worker-labor-reform-bill

Marco Rubio in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/help-working-class-voters-us-must-value-work/578032/

This episode, Pete interviews Will Strong and Kyle Lewis about their book Overtime: Why We Need a Shorter Working Week. They talk about work time and its connection to feminist and environmental discourses, the pitfalls of talking about work as abstraction, and the benefits of shorter working week for everyone.

Kyle is a PhD candidate at the University of West London and a working-time consultant for the think tank Autonomy. Will Stronge is the Director of Research at Autonomy and a post doctoral researcher in Politics and Philosophy at the University of Brighton.

You can find Will on Twitter @w_stronge and Kyle can be found @autonomous_coys.

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines.

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

What We Talked About

Overtime: Why We Need a Shorter Working Week by Will Stronge and Kyle Lewis

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

Autonomy

"A Four-Day Week For Schools" by Jack Kellam, Will Stronge, and Joe Ryle.

Steven Klein is a Lecturer of Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy, King's College London. His first book, The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State (CUP 2020), examines the democratic potential of struggles over welf are institutions. He is also working on a second book project that draws together the thought of Karl Polanyi with the tradition of critical social theory to develop an account of the contemporary politics of finance, debt, and money.

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines.

What We Talked About

Steven Klein, The Work of Politics (Cambridge, 2020).

Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford, 2011).

This week, I talk to sociologist Jamie K. McCallum about his book Worked Over, how the ethos of Silicon Valley shapes our work ethic, the genius and deceptions of Frederick Taylor, what Covid 19 has taught us about work in the 21st Century, and more.

McCallum is an author, teacher, and activist, focusing on labor and work issues around the world. He is currently associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. You can find him on twitter @jamiekmccallum

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

What We Talked About

Worked Over

The Real Work

The threat of scarcity, the promise of wealth, the problematic rhetoric of wage labor as a form of slavery, and the not so straight line between seventeenth century attacks on the commons and neoliberal welfare reform.

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines.

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

What We Talked About

Welfare Reform

James Suzman

A Field in England

Elizabeth Anderson

Bernard Mandeville

David Hume

In his book, Breaking Things at Work, Gavin Meuller argues that we can't think of technology in the workplace as "just" a tool but always as a tool created for a specific purpose to benefit specific groups and exploit others. As such, breaking machines in the workplace--which means many things--has been and will continue to be an important point of struggle for establishing worker autonomy, solidarity, and fair treatment.

Dr. Mueller Mueller is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He's also a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your Job is available from Verso.

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines.

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

What We Talked About

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your Job

Luddism

Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capitalism.

Wage labor is one of the core principles for organizing our lives in western societies. How did that happen? We attempt to answer that question in 20 minutes, moving backward from Keynes to seventeenth century England to Virgil's Georgics. It's quite a ride. We also talk about farming.

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines.

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

What We Talked About

John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"

James Livingston, No More Work

Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England

Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England

Joan Thirsk, Agrarian History of England

The Natural

John Denver, "Thank God I'm a Country Boy"

James Suzman, Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

In this episode, we have a conversation with Emily Guendelsberger, author of What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. She worked at Philadelphia City Paper, the Onion's A.V. Club, Philadelphia Weekly, and the Philadelphia Daily News, and has contributed to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post, Politico magazine, and Vice.

We talked about On the Clock, what it's like to work in an Amazon warehouse, the abuse call center reps receive from management and customers, and how low-wage work has changed over the last 20 years.

James Chamberlain is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Mississippi State University. His dissertation, Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, was published in 2020. It explores some of the normative and theoretical questions around the topic of work.

James has also co-edited a forthcoming volume (with Albena Azmanova) exploring a series of critical debates about capitalism titled, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy: Critical Debates. He and Azmanova have also founded a new open access journal called Emancipations.

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Katherine Huggins

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines.

Artwork: Daniel Fermin

What We Talked About

James Chamberlain, Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (IRL Press, 2020).

Chamberlain, "Post-Workers of the World Unite," Public Seminar (Dec. 6 2019).

Chamberlain, "COVID-19 and the Work Society," Critical Times (April 30, 2020).

Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Open Humanities Press, 2015).

In this episode, we talk to James Livingston about his book No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea, a pithy polemic that questions some of the underlying assumptions about work held by both the Left and the Right. Among other topics we discuss why politicians and policy makers are wrong to see full employment as a panacea, the problems with romanticizing craft and craftsmanship, and the potential and pitfalls of distributing wealth based on need rather than what individuals produce.

James Livingston teaches history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He's written six books on topics from the Federal Reserve to Disney animation. He is now writing "The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2010," and "What Was Social Theory?" He is also the founding editor of Politics/Letters.