Odd Lots - This Is the Booming Movement To Abolish Work as We Know It

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Over a million people are members of a subreddit called r/AntiWork, whose slogan is "Unemployment for all, not just the rich." While the page and movement have been around for awhile, discontent with the state of the labor market has been growing since the pandemic. Many workers are refusing to accept the conditions and pay that were the norm prior to the virus. On this episode, we speak with Doreen Ford, who also goes by Doreen Cleyre. She is a moderator of the AntiWork subreddit as well as the founder of AbolishWork.com. Doreen explains the growth of the movement and its philosophical underpinnings.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Oddlots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast Oddlots on Amazon music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allo. Tracy, we've obviously done a number of episodes about the so-called labor shortage. But as, you know, we kind of expressed, and it's sort of the case that we almost always hear about this story. from the perspective of a frustrated employer having trouble or, you know, finding solutions to hiring people. But usually, like, we don't get the other side, which is the perspective of frustrated workers and why workers may not be wanting to take jobs that they might have taken pre-pandemic. That's right. So we hear a lot from companies or businesses that are saying, you know,

all our workers are resigning and we can't figure out why and we're giving them higher wages and we're offering to pay their college tuition and we're providing flexible working arrangements and still no one wants to come work for us. And I think in one of our recent episodes, you were talking about starting a beige book for the labor market, which might be able to get at some of this. Because in some respects,

it almost doesn't feel like an economic shift. It kind of feels like a cultural one. Yeah. That's the thing. Like everyone's sort of poking around for different theories. And I think they all hold like some, validity, you know, there's probably an element of still very significantly the pandemic itself, whether that's affecting child care arrangements or the desire to go to a work site. I think it's real

early retirements, maybe due to the wealth effect could be a thing. Some changing of perspectives. I think a lot of people are burnt out over the last two years or realizing that they were burnt out previously and that could be shifting things. So, you know, lots of theories, some supported by data, some supported by anecdotes, but, you know, there's not like one, from what I can tell, like, one answer to why this is. And I don't think we're ever like going to get one answer. No, I think that's right. But you mentioned anecdotes. And there's one place that has become sort of the go-to place to get those anecdotes about the great resignation and about people quitting. And it is, of course, the subreddit, the anti-work subreddit. And if anyone's ever seen those screenshots of people

quitting in a really satisfying way, I have to say, you know, responding to bosses who are just being completely jerks. That's where a lot of those get posted. Tracy, can I tell you something? Yeah. I once quit a job in a really satisfying way. Did I ever, did you know that? No, I didn't. What did you do? I was working at a deli making sandwiches and I don't know, my boss annoyed me. And I totally overreacted. And I just like, that's it. I quit. And I threw down my apron and I walked out and it felt really good. And then 10 seconds later, I was like, oh my God, I just quit my job. I don't have any money. But it did feel really good. Anyway, I'll tell you the longer story sometime. But anyway, yes, let's get to the point at hand. As you mentioned, the subreddit,

our anti-work has been exploding. I think it was a pretty small one at the beginning of the year, now over a million members, I believe, absolutely surging, sort of capturing this zeitgeist that gets beyond economics of frustration with the labor market from the perspective of employers or employees or would-be employees. So I'm very excited. We're going to be speaking to Doreen Ford, one of the original moderators at our anti-work. Doreen also goes by the pseudonym Doreen Claire online, and she was the founder of Abolishwork.com. And so I'm very excited about this.

So we're going to be learning about what the anti-work movement is all about and what brings people to the anti-work subreddit. Doreen, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, absolutely. Man, I really would have loved to see you throw your apron down on the floor. That's like out of a like a hallmark film or something like that. It was really, it was really satisfying. It was like I was overreacting a little bit, but I was annoyed. And my boss said something about how he'd mess something up.

And I felt like I was in, you know, I was a pretty good employee. And I was like, I've had enough of this. Yeah, I've had enough of this. Yeah, shocker, I've had really frustrating bosses. Never quit, though, surprisingly. I'm pretty stubborn, so. Yeah, no, then, you know, I had to quit anyway. I think I had known that.

It was a bunch of stuff getting going on. Anyway, Doreen, thank you so much. Your subreddit, and you're one of the earlier, you were one of the founders of it, but an early moderator. Why do you just sort of like give us the basic gist? How small was it at the beginning of the year? How active is it now? and sort of like, what is, what does it stand for?

What does the anti-work movement mean? Yeah. So, I mean, you say we were small last year, but honestly, I don't know, 180,000 isn't too small. No, I guess not. We were around 180,000 in October or November of last year. But that is incredibly small compared to where we are, which is about 1.3 million. We call them idlers, but, you know, you could say subscribers, followers, users, whatever you want to do. Yeah, I mean, it's exploded.

We were just featured on the Reddit recap of 2021. The Reddit stats are apparently that we blew up. Please pause for effect. 279% from where we were last year. I don't think I've ever seen that statistic in my life. And I'm a big nerd. And I've read a lot of political statistics and economic statistics. And, you know, I'm not like super big into numbers.

But I don't think I've ever literally ever heard anything blow up to 279% plus what it was the year before. So yeah. I mean, we're big now. We had 990,000 users who were active yesterday, probably because of the Kellogg strikes now that I think about it. But yeah, what we stand for. So anti-work and my site abolishedwork.com are overlapping in a lot of ways. My abolish work is my personal website.

So, you know, a lot of that stuff there is going to represent my personal opinion, not necessarily the opinion of the entire movement. While the anti-work subreddit is more about the movement at large, we're a pretty big tent. movement. We have leftists of various kinds, anarchists, communist, social Democrats, etc. You know, people who are curious, people who are just liberals, pretty much anyone's welcome, as long as you don't use the rules, abuse the rules. And, you know, obviously we're not super friendly towards conservatives or, you know, anybody further than that, of course. Yeah, what we stand for is ideally a reduction of work as much as possible. And what we mean by work is not effort, right? We're not against people going in the backyard, breaking up some leaves, putting in bags, whatever.

What we're against is this coercive element of work that makes people have to work long chips for jobs they don't like that are not paying them enough. And as we've already learned, under bosses that don't respect them or annoy them or whatever may be the case. So that's a lot of the philosophy is reducing the amount of jobs that just have no use for society, the amount of jobs that don't give respect to their employees. It's not necessarily anti-job because I don't think even in the anti-work society, I think people will still have jobs. I just think that they will have jobs that don't have that coercive element.

You won't necessarily be worried about, oh, I can't, like, I can't not work or I can't, you know, because I'm disabled or because I have to take care of my family or I have to do this or that because, you know, I might lose the house or I might not be able to pay rent or I might not be able to pay bills. So there's this economic, coercive element that we're trying to eliminate. You know, a lot of people just think, like, we're lazy slackers or something like that. And, like, I think laziness and slacking off is actually a good thing, especially in an economy where you're asked to work so often and so consistently, especially in jobs that burn you out.

You know, even when you do something you love, I work with dogs, and it's so easy to get burnt out on something that you love when you do it too often. But, yeah, that's a bit of what we're about. I don't want to go on for too long. So the subreddit itself has been around for a while, I think, since early 2013. But clearly, as you were laying out, the membership has, or the number of idlers, has absolutely surged. What is it about the past year and a half or so that you think has made the message of anti-work

really resonate with a lot more people? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is obviously COVID. it's realizing that your boss was lying to you, that you didn't need to come up for that, show up for that meeting, that the commute wasn't, that that one hour commute there and back wasn't necessary for the job and that you'd been wasting hours of your life listening to podcasts that you're not even sure you wanted to listen to. And I say that as a podcaster, by the way. I think people realize that, yeah, I don't have to do a lot of this stuff. And I'm pissed because my employers are taking advantage of me. And it's pretty clear now that they

don't care about my health. They care about the wages that I'm, that they have to pay me. They're worried about their profits. They're worried about their stockholders. They're not worried about me as an individual. They're worried about me as an individual unit of economy. Because of the pandemic, I think a lot of people woke up to that. You know, I'm big into video games. There has been a big shift in the video game industry for remote work and even some companies instigating or implementing, excuse me, four day weeks and stuff like that, or at least talking about it. So I think this has been a seismic shift in how people look at work. The other reason, the second reason, I don't have a ton of things to say about this, but people are really going on and on about the Great Resignation. I'm not an

economist, and despite what I said earlier, I'm not a statistician. So I don't know how true it is that people are quitting in droves, but that seems to be the perception at least, and perception fuels reality. So a lot of people, you know, are reevaluing their relationships to work. That doesn't mean everyone's quitting, but a lot of people, but at least some people are quitting, I guess. And so that's fueling other people's reactions to like, okay, like, this is how I see myself related to work. And that's also fueling membership. We also, of course, blew up because this is the third and final reason probably. We had this.

We were talking about screenshots earlier. There was a text-based screenshot with a person who told their boss off. I don't know if they threw an apron, but they told their boss off. And they basically blew up. They got to the front page of Reddit, which means we got to the front page of Reddit. And I mean, we were already blowing up, you know, to be honest, at that point. We were getting a lot of really popular posts. There was thousands of people on at a time.

But, I mean, that really took us into the stratosphere. And then, of course, the media tension started. I mean, we've been covered. I guess this is the fourth reason, but it's really related to the third. We've been covered in Vice like three or four times at this point. The New York Times, we have been asked to be interviewed by a German, Scandinavian, and a Dutch news. You know, we've been featured on Today.com, Refinery 29, Forbes. So, yeah, we've been all over at this point.

And so, yeah, I think all that stuff has contributed. And now even the Odd Lots podcast. I want to ask you, so everyone experienced some, or not everyone, but a lot of people from a range of sort of socioeconomic positions experienced some major change to their lifestyle over the last two years. And some people, it just meant, you know, their normal job dated. day that they did in office and working from home. But there were obviously a number of people for the first time in those early months especially were freed from the connection between

having to work and having to sustain themselves, which is pretty big. And there were these checks that went out that did a decent job for a lot of workers who got laid off of almost fully replacing their income. And that lasted for several months at the beginning of the pandemic, these checks, expanded unemployment insurance. How formative in your view were those months in this sort of like the experience of can separating income and being able to self sustain from having to go into work in terms of just getting people to sort of like reevaluate their existence and their relationship to employment? I think it was really impactful. I mean, again, I can't track everyone's individual motives for joining the subreddit.

or for giving my site traffic. There's been, it's quite a sort of a downflow, a trickle-down theory, if you will, of the subredic getting a ton of attention and therefore my website getting like a modicum of that. I think I get a couple hundred views if I'm lucky per day, which is great because honestly, I don't really write for it anymore. Moderating has become kind of like what I used to do in terms of writing. And I'm happy for that, honestly, because all I wanted to do with the site is have the movement

be like this. So, I mean, in my mind, I've succeeded. The website doesn't really need to even exist, but I just keep it up because, you know, some people have told me that their writings have inspired them or influenced them and change their mind about things, which is super flattering and deeply honored about that. But yeah, to get back to your question, yeah, I mean, I can't know everyone's individual motives, but I'd have to say that that would absolutely be something that would fetch a lot of people for us, is that they're reevaluating their positions to their income,

to their bosses, to their work. I hope that answers that. So just on that note, I mean, one of the things, well, tell me if you disagree with this, but one of the things that stands out to me from a lot of the screenshots and the conversations with bosses and those sorts of stories of quitting that end up on the subreddit,

it mostly seems to be about people getting, really, really angry at the situation and at their bosses in particular. And I don't know, you don't see that many complaints about things like wages or long working hours. I mean, it's mostly, it seems to be service people who are getting really mad because their boss has asked them to go on a shift that they hadn't agreed to and is just assuming that they can kind of control their employees' lives. So I don't know. I'm curious if that's your impression and how you sort of weigh those different factors when it comes to this trend of people quitting? There, there's a lot of stuff in the background, right, that we just don't see and we can never know.

Like, a screenshot can only, and I mean this literally figuratively, a screenshot can only capture so much about a given context that people are coming from. And so we don't know what led up to this moment. We don't know if wages were a thing beforehand or if their boss has always been a jerk to them. especially, you know, women have to deal with sexual harassment in the workplace and stuff like that. We just don't know if people, what their context is. We just know what conversation led to them finally quitting. And so it's a death by a thousand cuts kind of thing, right? It's there might have been a million different indignities before that, but that was the final straw.

But on the other hand, yeah, I mean, you're not wrong that a lot of those text screenshots aren't talking about wages or they aren't talking about better working conditions. They're talking about, hey, I don't want to come in for the shift or, hey, I've had enough with this job. They say, I've had enough. They haven't said, like, specifically what. But like in casual conversation, you're not going to necessarily get into that because you're kind of done. The whole point is that you're kind of done and you don't want to waste your time on your boss. So it lends itself to a kind of casual conversation that unfortunately doesn't give us a lot of data on why people are quitting or telling their boss to shove it. But I do think that a lot of those things don't help for sure

people getting underpaid or people getting overworked. I know when I used to work in a dog, it's not really a kennel, but it was like a doggie daycare. I was overworked to heck. It was, you know, and I didn't, I wasn't feeling like I got paid well enough for it, $10 an hour for, and I was doing the job of probably two people. You know, there's just all all of these little indignities that I think don't get brought into the context because people, when people have had enough, they're not going to start eloquently going on and on about their wages or anything else like that because I think they're done. But I still think it's a great, I still think it's a great point that we largely don't see that.

You're right. This is a really interesting thing you described, the feeling of the stress of having to work two jobs. And we actually, we did an episode recently with Stinson Dean and he owns a fleet of one of his businesses involved in logistics. And one of the things that he said that made hiring easier was purposely overhiring so that nobody feels like, oh, they can't take a day off or they're like, you know, having to pull extra shifts because that's added stress. But it seems like then there's this compounding effect where, okay, we think of labor, the frustration with the labor market is,

okay, employers, workers quit, and then bosses are frustrated, and that's probably true. But then that also must place a lot of extra strain on the workers who are still there, and to the extent that bosses don't recognize that extra strain or don't appreciate the extra lift that those remaining employees are engaging in, then that further makes the job undesirable and that that further probably increases the impulse to quit. I think that there is a large-scale pattern of employers under-hiring and making sure that their workers feel overwhelmed and stressed. I know that sounds conspiratorial. I'm not the conspiracy type of person. But like I've seen like lots of people talking about this, lots of of patterns of abuse of employers just underhiring so that their workers

always feel stressed, never feel like they can take a day off, just have to work, work, work. And they do this just because like it's just easier than overhiring. It just makes more logistical sense to them, I guess, to just underhire than overhire. That way they don't spread out, you know, that way they don't have to pay more people, that way they don't have to train more people. But there's some logical sense to this. It's just a very twisted logic in my eye. And I think overhiring is a better practice. Absolutely. I think you would have a less stressed out workplace. I think, you know, abolish work, the anti-work movement, I should say, is not just for this sort of long-term goal of having an anti-work society and undermining

capitalism and replacing with something else. You know, those are great goals. Those are our long-term, I think core goals. But I don't think we're against shorter term progress either necessarily. I think it would be great if this practice of under hiring employees would be cut out. I think that would save a lot of people, a lot of stress, especially around the holiday times. It would give a lot of people more peace of mind. I don't think on the job that I talked about, I almost never took a day off unless I was incredibly sick or unless I just couldn't make it. Or, yeah, I mean, that was it.

I don't think I ever took a day off. And I ended up getting fired from that job because I basically, like, slacked off too much. Like, of course I slacked off too much. I was incredibly overwhelmed. Like, I had to clean room after room after room, day after day after day. And I had almost no one to back me up. And I had been there the longest out of anybody. I think I'd even been longer there than the owner.

And how is that possible? Well, because they had switched owners in the two years I was there. That's how bad the business was. They were still doing this practice of, like, under-hiring. And people were burning out. I would see new faces almost every month, if not less. It was terrible. The problem in the pet industry, really, for me and my experience,

is that they care way more about the animals than they care about the people. To such a degree that, I mean, it just raises your eyebrow, I guess. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Ruffini.

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live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. I want to go back to some specifics about the COVID situation. And one of the unusual things about 2020 and the way the government actually responded to this health crisis and also economic crisis was that they gave out extra unemployment checks. So people got more money if they lost their jobs. And I'm just curious what your impression is of the role of those additional unemployment checks or stimulus payments. Was it, you know, people got more money from the government so they just didn't want to go to

work at all and they didn't have to, or wasn't more that people got money and they had a sort of bridge that they could build between jobs that they couldn't do before? I think the government like stimulus packages were like putting a Band-Aid on an open moon kind of thing, or like a gaping hole. You know, I think it was a, it helped a lot of people. Don't get me wrong. It helped me. I'm not very rich myself. So it's certainly seeing that 600, 800, whatever, that few times. Times was great. It was a bit of a shot in the arm to my wallet. But I mean, ultimately, it's just not enough, I think, for a lot of poor people. Being poor is really expensive. The economy is tailored in such a way to make being poor very expensive, whether you're

buying takeout, whether you're buying snack food, whether you're trying to engage in some entertainment outside, like movie theaters. A lot of things are just really expensive if you're poor. And so unfortunately, although that was a nice gesture, and it helped some people, I just don't think it's enough to say that it was a bridge. I think it was certainly helpful for people who didn't want to work. And of course, why wouldn't they? Why would they want to work? We were in the middle of a pandemic.

I can speak from experience that it didn't really help me too much in the long term. Basically, when I tried to file for unemployment because I had been fired, and this is the only time, by the way, in my life of almost 10 years working or so, that I'd ever been fired. So it's not like I had a history or anything like that. Yeah, when I filed for it, I said, well, my roommate is immunocompromise. So I don't think I'm going to work anytime soon. And they're like, okay, well, then you're not getting unemployment.

I'm like, but I don't want to kill my like, like, you know, things. That was still when the pandemic was fairly new. We weren't sure about how viral the infection was. I knew to wear a mask and stuff like that. But the vaccines hadn't anywhere come, weren't anywhere close to being out at that point. And so in my experience, you know, what really helped. me was the college I went to because they dispersed some excess funds that I hadn't used for my loans and they gave that back to me. And that is really what coasted me along for the rest of the

year was I was able to not have a job for most of 2020. And of course, again, my roommate was immunocompromised. I didn't want to have a job anyway because I didn't want to risk killing her. And of course, now we have vaccines. We have the booster shots. We know proper mask protocol. things are a lot different. And I have a couple part-time jobs, and I work, and I'm at school full-time. I don't really think it helped people in my experience. Of course, I can only speak for myself, not for all of America. But my general impression is that, yeah, like I said at the beginning, it was like putting

a band-aid on a gaping hole. Like, it's a nice gesture, but it's not much more. I'm curious, you mentioned the Kellogg Strike as being a very sort of big moment in terms of bringing a lot of attention back to your site. Talk to us a little bit about how you see the labor movement and strikes. And we have seen a lot of strikes in more this year than recently. We have seen a seemingly pick up an interest in the idea of unionization. What's the relationship sort of in your mind between sort of your broader goals, the abolished work goals, and what the labor movement unionization can do for workers in the here and now?

Yeah, absolutely. Again, that's a great question. And I, again, want to reiterate that the anti-work movement is absolutely for short-term benefits for the workers and stuff like that. You know, I would be happy if better wages, better working conditions, less boss interference in workers, you know, more cooperatives, worker cooperatives, that is, were formed. Yeah, I'm a big proponent of unions. I think they're great. We did a Reddit talk. Unfortunately, we couldn't record it because Reddit doesn't have that kind of functionality yet, but it will very soon.

So when we do the next one, it'll have, we'll be able to record it. But we had a Reddit talk, which is basically like a live podcast. And a lot of the moderators came on to answer the community's questions. And in the second hour, we had a couple of people come on. And we had a user come on who was a union member and talked about just very passionately for about 15 minutes, maybe 20. We probably let him go on a little too long. But we were new to the whole thing. But very passionately about how unions have helped him, how they helped his wages, how

they gave him more benefits, just a very basic union. It's not like, you know, a radical union, like industrial workers of the world or IWW. It's not like, you know, he's looking for like completely radical things like the abolition of capitalism or something. Yeah, I think labor strikes and unions both have very much to do with the anti-work movement. I think strikes and unions and direct action, which is basically like protests or, you know, activism that doesn't require like a leader or doesn't require a central head of authority to instigate. So I'm not really talking about like voting or anything like that. But direct action in general, I think, is the way to go.

I think direct action gets the goods, as the IWW used to say, and still do say. And so, yeah, I think strikes and unions have a very big place. Yesterday, I was in a convenience store and I was getting some cereal. I looked around and I was like, oh, my God, like almost everything is Kellogg's. I bought like a different brand. But like it was like one of the few brands that wasn't Kellogg's. Like the monopoly they have on cereal is wild. It's so imperceptible because we're just so used to it.

But I think if you really like look and like be mindful of it, look, I think you'll notice like how much of a monopoly they have on cereal. It's ridiculous. So yeah, all my best to the workers who are striking. We are considering pinning a thread or two about the strike. We just haven't come to a consensus on what yet. But definitely we support all the workers. Yeah. So you have been influential when it comes to supporting some of these movements.

One of the ones that you were supporting was the Blackout Black Friday initiative. How did that go? Yeah. So that was a bit of a mixed affair. I think we really jumped the gun on that. We wanted to make a big impression. We wanted to do a big action. But unfortunately, we kind of pinned the user's idea that was talking about a 10-day strike.

And that was not our original proposition. It was about a one day or three-day strike at most. And someone started talking about a 10-day strike. Someone's like, you know, let's strike year-round, et cetera, et cetera. You know, we're a big movement, but we are not big in the way that people think we are. We have 1.3 million people. But it's not like we all live in Arkansas. It's not like we all live in one given state.

I just picked Arkansas at random, by the way. It's not like we all live in one state, one country, one city. You know, we're all dispersed across the world. So that 1.3 million, it's smaller than you think. I'm not like diminishing the achievements that we've reached. But I also want us to be careful about not getting ahead of ourselves because 1.3 million is awesome. It's terrific. But it's spread out across the globe.

And yes, most of our audience, if you've seen a recent survey we did, is from the United States, by and large. But even among the United States, you know, I'm sure as everyone here knows, pretty big country. And there's a lot of farmland and countryland that's not even being. used on top of that. So we're a big movement, but we're also an online movement. And I think we kind of forgot about that and got carried away and wanted to like, like I say, make a big impression. So what we did instead was we lent we lend ourselves to the Make Amazon Pay campaign over the, over the Friday weekend. And basically it was just boycotting Amazon, pretty mild action, honestly, boycotting, you know, their services and stuff as much as possible. Obviously,

it's very difficult. Amazon's very entrenched. in the whole internet superstructure as it is because they use this. They use this like framework called AWS or something like that. It's basically based in everything. So it's very difficult to get away from Amazon. But we did the best we could with what we had. So we had to back off from the blackout. And I think a lot of people were upset about that. They felt we were going back on the movement. So many people call this corporate chills or that we were selling out the movement. But I think, and that's the, that's the rescue run in a radical leftist movement, right? is that anybody who doesn't agree with you can sometimes be labeled, you know, such.

I mean, I don't think it's like super widespread, but the internet definitely brings out that corner of like your movement that's going to do that. Let me ask you a question, if you don't mind. I'm curious, you know, like when people think historically about labor activism or unions, I think, you know, people have this idea of people in hard hats, holding their fists in the air, standing in a picket line outside of a plant or a factory with signs, et cetera. And, of course, that's still a very real phenomenon, those images that people historically have of unions. But on the other hand, your movement and a lot of what's sort of like the interest in labor market activism strikes me as being a little more decentralized, a little more, you know, as you put it, you're not, it's an online movement, a little more ad hoc, maybe direct actions that protests that aren't a result of like some union vote with a local union leader, et cetera.

And I'm curious whether you think, like, ultimately, you know, people, you know, I'm just sort of in your crystal ball, do people, like, and they fantasize or they hope for a resurgence of a labor movement or a union movement in this country, is it going to look different in your view than what it historically has? Or could it be this sort of like big, on the ground, centralized unions? Like, what's the future in your view? What does it look like? More like what you do or more like what they do? I think it's going to be, I'm going to be boring here, and I said, and I think it's going to be a mix. Look, the genie's out of the bottle. We can't put the internet back.

God help us. I kind of wish we could sometimes. But like, we can't put the internet back. We can't put technology back where it was. You know, really messed up stuff would have to happen for that to happen. And I don't want it to happen. I like a lot of things about the internet, even though I don't like a lot of things about the internet, too. My boring answer is I think it's going to be a mix.

I think there's going to be the on the ground, boots on the ground kind of, kind of, kind of of union organizing, holding the line, picket, picket lines, protesting outside given workplaces, factories, whatever. But I also think, yeah, there's going to be a lot of quote-unquote slacktivism. There's going to be a lot of online organizing. There's going to be a lot of like mutual aid from online sources, you know, using GoFundMe's or using Indiegogo or whatever. There's going to be all of these online ways that we've developed over the past 20 years, you know, Twitter and Facebook and all the social media to organize that I just don't think is ever going to go away. And if you look at it, honestly, all of that union organizing that we're talking about,

the boots on the ground, the Kellogg stuff, the John Deere stuff, I mean, like you said, there's been a lot of strikes this year. All that stuff has used online organizing as well. It hasn't just been boots on the ground. It's also been online. So I really think that speaks to my point about it being both. I think the future of union organizing is on the ground, but I also think it's up in the air. It's up in the air. It's online. My crystal ball is on the fritz right now. But if I could give my best

guess, I mean, that's what I think. I think we're going to continue to see more decentralized, affiliating unions, which is kind of what I want to see. You know, I want more and more unions. I want unionization to come back. It's so rare in the private sector. And it's only barely a thing in the public sector. And even in the public sector, there are some aspects of it that are not good. I'm not uncritically pro-union. There are some bad unions out there that have union leaders that are not good, or that just protect people that shouldn't be protected. I'm not going to get to specifics, but I mean, I'm sure some of the listeners can think about who I'm talking about here. Like I said, Crystal Ball on the Fritz, but I think it's going to be a mix.

So you brought up pros and cons of the internet, and I wondered if I could maybe ask you a personal question related to that. But I imagine being moderator of an enormously successful. subreddit takes up a lot of your time. And I guess there's some irony there in the sense that you are providing a very valuable service and presumably doing a lot of work and not necessarily getting paid or compensated for it in a traditional way. How do you, how do you sort of think about that and how you divide up and dedicate your own time to these different causes? So my answer to that is partly what I said at the beginning, right? Right. Anti-work is not anti-effort. I'm totally fine with putting a lot of effort into things that I care about, and I happen to care about the movement.

So there's no contradiction there. A lot of people seem to think there is, but there isn't. Please, please, please go tell everyone that I'm not getting paid for this because some people are definitely under the misapprehension that I get paid for this. And I assure you, I do not. I don't have like a perfect answer. Like, no, it's not stressful at all. And it never gets on my nerves. And I'm all but happy to submit my time to the movement. No, it sucks sometimes. You know, some people are jerks. Some people troll us. Some people flame us. Some people brigade us basically coming in from one subred to another where they shouldn't be and

like spamming us. I help run the Discord and I help run the subreddit. So I don't just run the subreddit, you know, not to correct you, but just to specify. You know, yeah, it's time consuming. But that's why it's a collective effort. That's why it's not just me. It's a whole team of moderators on the subreddit. We're looking to expand even more moderators five to 10, more moderators.

and it's not just me, it's a whole host of people who are really good at this, who invest a lot of their time so that this community can thrive so people can feel safe, so people can feel comfortable. Is that unpaid? Yeah, but is it meaningful? Like, yeah, of course it is. I think also part of this, one of my fellow moderators pointed out, is people proving you don't need the profit motive to do things that are worthwhile, that are valuable to other people. Like you said, we're providing a service to other people by giving them this platform to talk about their problems. with work. You know, is there some superficial surface level irony? Of course there is. But we've got to work within the context of capitalism. It's like Noam Chomsky said, right? I'm not going to complain

when my book is put in Barnes & Noble. I got to work with what I got. I'm paraphrasing, obviously. He said it much better than that. Yeah, I think we've got to work with what we have. And what we have is unfortunately an incredibly flawed and broken system. Or maybe it's working exactly how it's supposed to. But either way, it's not good. But we've got to work with it because we don't have the alternative in place yet. But I'm hoping down the line we will. And I'm hoping that the subreddit and the Discord and anything else is a good platform for people to organize and to subvert capitalism and to basically like find a

different way, find a better way out of this life that demands us to subvert all of our needs to work. Let me ask you another question. And this is about sort of the difference between sort of personal activism and personal behavioral changes versus policy changes. So boycotting Kellogg is a personal choice or not buying anything on Black Friday as a personal choice or simply refusing to show up and doing whatever possible to not work as like a personal choice. Then there's like policy choices. There could be a change to rules around minimum wages and so forth. And we see this dichotomy play out. We see

it in, for example, the debate about climate change. How much climate change people should should make personal choices, say, not eating meat, versus how much the pursuit should be on the policy front, whether it's a hard cap on carbon emissions or some sort of policies that reduce funding for major emitters, stuff like that. And so I'm curious, like, your view, like, how do you think about the two and which do you think is more powerful? Is it the organic? Like, we're just going to keep growing the subreddit and growing the awareness about what you see is the unfairness of capitalism? Or are there, like, policy changes that you would hope to see eventually put into place that would meaningfully change how the economy is structured? Yeah. Okay, great question.

So first off, I think when it comes to any kind of major issue, collective action is the thing we need to do. My individual protesting Kellogg's yesterday by not buying Apple Jacks, I really wanted those Apple Jacks, is not going to affect Kellogg's. No employee is going to get a better wage, no stockholder is going to sweat. No boss is going to, you know, chatter their teeth. Like, nobody's going to care that I didn't decide to do it. So that is really a personal choice. And I don't think it has a big effect on the collective economy. I mean, you know, I'm talking about the entire United States. And honestly, Kellogg's is a multinational corporation. So I'm not even talking about the United States. So yeah, I think collective action is where it's at.

Unionizing, striking, protesting, cards on the table. I'm an anarchist. I don't really think voting works. I only speak for myself. Not everyone in the anti-work movement is an anarchist. Not everyone agrees with me on that. There's been plenty of debate about how impactful voting is and how much we should vote for policies or politicians. Is the minimum wage an animating issue for you? I wouldn't say it's an animating issue, but I certainly, like I said earlier, would welcome workers getting better wages. It's not a crucial focus point for me, but absolutely I care about what workers are making. But honestly, the minimum wage being what often people are fighting for is $15 is not even enough. If you followed inflation over the years, at least from what I've heard,

again, not an economist, not a statistician, but from what I've heard, it seems like it'd be much closer to 20 or 25 an hour, which is wild to think about. But if you follow inflation because wages have stagnated over the years, that's where it would be. So yeah, would I welcome better wages? Of course I would. I'm not against that. And I wouldn't fight against it. But I also don't think it's the anti-works main drive. We're not just a reformist liberal movement that is trying to vaguely make capitalism nicer, right? I think it's great to make economic systems work for the people who structurally uphold it like workers do, but I don't think that's the main point of our movement. So yeah, I, you know, speaking just again, I have to emphasize because I don't want people

to think, oh, well, everyone's pie in the sky and they don't care about politicians or whatever. Like, no, that's not the point. Like, again, we have, we're a big tent movement. We have, we have, We have people who are Democratic Socialists who really like Bernie or AOC. We have communists who think to some extent that voting might be useful. We even have some anarchists who think that some policies are better. I even just said the minimum wage would be at least be some kind of improvement and could be a short-term gain for workers. But ultimately, I think what we need to do is undermine and subvert capitalism by creating

alternative economies, by creating alternative structures, by subverting the current structures that are in place through unionizing, education, organizing, et cetera. And that's really where I am. I do think collective effort matters, but I just, I think that it comes in the form of direct action. I don't think it comes in the form of policymaking or voting for politicians. But again, that's, that's me. So speaking of capitalism and alternative economies,

I wanted to ask you about another subreddit, which in some respects kind of mirrors the action or the development. that we've seen in the anti-work subreddit, but this is, of course, Wall Street Betts, which has absolutely exploded over the past year and a half. Lots of people stuck at home, given the COVID situation, and lots of people decided to take up trading and, you know, yolo their money on GameStop options or whatever. And Joe and I have been kind of curious about whether or not this is creating a wealth effect. So people might be making more money from trading crypto or meme stocks or whatever and whether or not that's a factor in people quitting as well.

Is that something that you've observed or do you think there's much overlap between anti-work and Wall Street Betts? There's some minor overlap, but I don't want to overstate it. Wall Street Betts is a subreddit that is trying to have its members get rich off of capitalism. We are trying to fundamentally undermine and subvert capitalism. So yeah, I think that there's some minor overlap, and it's not like people from Wall Street bets are not welcome, but I think we have very different goals in mind. Now, some people who want to get rich off capitalism through stocks and trade and stuff like that might be anti-work or might want to

be lazy with their money, but I don't really think that's the way to be anti-work. Antio work is a collective, solidarity-based community where, you know, we share the wealth, we share with each other. we, you know, if I ever got rich, and I hope I don't ever because I don't really want that. But if I ever got rich, rich, I would like to get to the point where I don't have to worry about money, but I don't want to be rich, you know what I mean? If I ever got to that point, like, 99% of that money is probably not going to me. It's probably going to other people or it's going to organization or it's going to charity or it's going to somewhere besides me because no, thank you.

But, you know, a lot of the people in Wall Street bats are there for themselves, you know, and I'm not saying like, oh, I'm a perfect angel or I've never made a mistake. or I've never, or I would never, I've never been selfish before, right? But I genuinely think that a lot of that movement is to just benefit individuals. It's not to, it's not to create a better world. It's not to undermine capitalism. And it's not to propagate an anti-work ethos. Well, you know, it's funny when Tracy said, oh, I want to ask you about another subreddit,

I actually thought she was going to go to somewhere else that we've talked about. And that is like the fire movement and the idea of like retiring early. And that's obviously very different too, because those are people like, oh, I'm going to try to make like $2 million by the time I'm age 30. And then if I spend those those people, I'm sorry to interrupt you, those people want to work themselves to death and then get out of their jobs. And I just, yeah, I just want to say we've been dealing with the fire movement for years. And people have always been like, oh, this seems like the perfect place for fire. And I'm like, no, it's really not because like we have very different goals. Yeah, that's basically what I figured. But one thing, though, I'm curious, like, in the movement, I mean, like, they're all about, like, sharing strategies so that, like, once they quit working, they can live as long as possible with, you know, how to, how to stretch their dollars as long as possible. Is there a sort of, like, self-help or, like, collective tips in your world that's sort of, like, how to, basically how to not work that you guys, like, sharing strategies of work avoidance?

Yeah, I used to do that. And then I'm sure. sure it happens on anti-work every day, people sharing strategies and tips. I will also say that if people want a book that I absolutely officially endorse or whatever, not as not speaking for the sub-right just for myself, but it's been prominently featured before and people have loved it, but it's called laziness does not exist. It's a great book. I recommend you have the author on if you ever want, but they are an awesome, awesome writer. They have a lot of tips about how to take care of your mental health, about how to respect yourself and basically like make sure that you're not working as much, talks about the myth of laziness. I really recommend that book. I have, I've done

an audio reading of the article version on Medium.com on my YouTube channel. It's a great book. It's a great article. It's called laziness does not exist. I think that's a great place to go for sharing tips. But it just casually happens every day. You know, I don't really keep track of it because most of the things I do is moderating is keeping track of the people who are not doing that, who are being jerks, who are being trolls. So I get like on hand. offhand tell you that. But I can tell you more so on the Discord that plenty of people like are sharing resources with each other all the time. We have a support channel. We have a heavier support channel for like, you know, bigger topics and stuff, personal stuff. We have an ideology channel.

We have a lot of channels on that Discord that are about people supporting each other. So yeah, it absolutely happens every single day. Maybe to sum up a lot of the issues that were brought up in this conversation. Could you give us your your impression of what you think workers and employers actually owe each other in terms of the worker-employee relationship? Oh, I'm tempted to go all anarchists or anarcho-synicalists here and say the workers, oh, the boss is nothing. You know, I'm very moved by Buddhist philosophy these days.

And I think that at the end of the day, we're all human beings, you know, even, even, Even the boss. Even the boss is a human. Even the boss. Even the boss. I'm saying it's more from like an anarchist perspective because this is hard for some anarchists to hear. But even bosses at the end of the day are people.

And they have incentives from capitalism that I think are very distorted and very misaligned with being good and compassionate towards other people. And I think we have to be respectful and mindful of that. That doesn't mean that we have to respect it or that we have to go along with it or that we can't subvert it. But I think it helps to understand. it. You know, I've been friends with a manager before. You know, one of my best friends a few years ago was my manager. And I had a very kind of strained friendship in some ways ideologically because I didn't

agree with her. She was my coworker previously, so she had gotten promoted. I had kind of like an inside look at like the kind of distorted conflicts that she had about like, oh, you know, I don't want to say this to you, but I have to because it's coming from the higher up. And, you know, if I could get in trouble or I could lose my job or, you know, you could get in trouble and I don't want that to happen. On some level, I get it, you know. But on the other hand, it's a messed up system. And I don't know, though no one part is centrally and crucially responsible for the harm that comes out of it, workers have to rebel against it regardless. And unfortunately, that is going to disrupt people's wages. That is going to disrupt boss operations. That is going to disrupt corporations. But

I think that's the way it has to be. I think it is an oppositional relationship. And I think that employers own employees a lot more than the other way around. I think in the economy we have, it's often seen as the other way around that employees should feel thankful to employers. But really, employees are the ones who are holding up the system. And employers are the ones who should feel grateful that workers are still going to work, especially during a pandemic, especially during stagnating wages, especially during a very hamstrung economy that just went through a recession 10 years ago and probably still hasn't

fully recovered. So I, yeah, I really want to emphasize here that, yeah, like I think at the end of the day, everyone's a human being and they deserve respect. But also at the end of the day, capitalism is a very disrespectful system that does not treat people with compassion. And we need to rebel against it. So there needs to be some balancing of like, my boss is a human being, but also this system is inhumane. And I need to figure a way in my personal life to balance that. And that's really important. I mean, I think that itself is a very good encapsulation of sort of what you've been saying.

But, you know, look, if you talk to managers and bosses or business owners, and we've certainly talked to a lot on the podcast, you know, they're talking about, like, oh, we're raising wages. And in many cases, we're lowering hours and we're giving signing bonuses or we're offering free training, free education, free college. We hear that from big companies in particular, but not just big companies, all kinds of things. and, you know, trying to come up with ways to make the work site a more appealing place for workers because they feel this frustration. What don't they get? What is it that, you know, and I've seen some of this on the subreddit, which is that, you know, something is like, oh, there's an offer of a signing bonus, but then, you know, it's still like the devil's in the details or maybe it's hard to get or it screws over existing workers who don't get it. What do you think companies are still missing right now in terms of what is. is that makes it hard for them to hire and why people are sort of like frustrated and don't find many of these offers appealing. So yeah, this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier.

I think kind of what you were saying there speaks to what they're missing. Capitalism is the systemic inequality between capitalists and employees. I mean, the bosses and workers, I think the hint is in the name, right? Capitalism. It's a system that centrally values employers over employees all the time. systematically. That's the whole point of capitalism. And they just don't get that small little fixes like signing bonuses, which as you point out, sometimes screwed over other workers, you know, are just not enough. It's not enough to undo all of the systemic inequality that is built up over the past hundred years. That's why we've seen all the union organizing in the 30s and 40s. That's why we saw Occupy Wall Street. That's why we're seeing the growth of the anti-work movement. That's why, you know, so many, so many strikes have been happening. That's why all this is happening. because capitalism is systemically opposed to workers getting their fair share, to getting their fair due when it comes to work. You know, and ultimately, I do want to abolish work, but I want work to be replaced by effort

that's actually rewarded, cooperatively, collectively, collectively. You know, again, I'm an anarchist, so I'm speaking for myself here, but, you know, without bosses, without corporations, without even the government. And so, you know, worker cooperatives and worker collectives are the mainstay of that kind of economy and people working for themselves, too, is something I'm not opposed to. I think bosses just miss the fact. And even if you're not an anarchist, I think what the bosses are missing there is that this is not a problem that could be taped up. You can't put bandages on a gaping hole. You've got to like see like what is causing that. Again, going back to Buddhism, like,

you've got to look at the causes and originations of like what's going on here. Like you can't just like mindlessly apply Band-Aid after Band-Aid. Like that's just not going to work. The sign-in bonuses are just not enough. What you really need to do is what I think ideally should happen. Of course, I don't think any boss will ever do this because capitalism doesn't give them incentives, but it step away is let the workers do it because the workers are the ones who have the decentralized knowledge. Funnily enough, Friedrich Hayek, who is a fairly conservative economist on some levels, has a great theory about why workers are the best suited to do that.

Like they have the best decentralized knowledge to make decisions on the floor. I spent almost 10 years in retail and almost always the workers knew what was going on more than the bosses did. There were some points when that wasn't true, but usually that was just stuff that was coming from up top or hey, the boss of my boss is going to be here today or some background stuff that doesn't really matter to the customer or doesn't really matter to the community member or the worker.

I really think that they miss out that this is a systemic issue and you're not going to solve it with buy-in bonuses. So I just want to ask you one more question. and I feel like I'd kind of be remiss not to ask it. But you said you worked or you said you worked part-time jobs. You have to support yourself in some way. And I'm sure there's someone who's listening to this. And they're thinking to themselves, how does she support herself?

Is she some kind of trust fund person or something? And how do you fit working and the need to support yourself, the need to gain income with your anti-work ideology? Funnily enough, I have to support myself under capitalism. So I do part-time work. I work with dogs. So first off, it's a lot better than most of my previous jobs. I'm a dog walker by trade, question mark, if that's the right expression there.

I spend a lot of time on my feet, a lot of time walking. But it's one of the best jobs I've ever had. It's pretty easy. I get to, don't tell my bosses, but I get to listen to a lot of podcasts. You know, I love dogs. I love taking care of them. So this job is a bit of a passion job for me. Now, I still feel burnt out sometimes.

there are times where the dogs want to play with each other and I'm just like, oh, my God, I can't be bothered. This is just so much effort just to get you guys outside, let alone, like, stop you from playing once you're on a walk. But I love what I do a lot more than what I did previously. That doesn't mean I don't have bad days. That doesn't mean that I love my boss or the owner or anything like that. But like, it's much better than what I used to have. Now, of course, does that make me some hypocrite on some way? Sure, whatever. I don't think hypocrisy is that interesting of an ideological conundrum. hypocrites under capitalism, right? We all have to buy products. We don't fully support. We all have to give our tax money to a government that is still waging war all across the world. I mean, that's what

Henry David Thoreau went to jail for, right? So, yeah, we're all hypocrites on some level. I don't really think that's an interesting observation about me. And yeah, I'm also a student, you know, a full-time student in Boston. I'm studying so that I can become a professor. That's a lot of effort, too. But again, you know, third time, not against effort and not against jobs. So I don't, it's not really for me anyway. It's not hypocrisy on a big level. But yeah, sure, it's definitely hypocrisy on some level. I'm not working for myself. For the most part, I do, I do have, I am a pet sitter as well. So I also do some work for myself that is not done through a company or a boss, I should say. But it is still done through a company.

It is still done through a corporation based out of like Seattle or whatever. You know, I have to meet due with what I got. Yeah, I support myself by basically two part-time jobs. And then, then sometimes school gives me some kickbacks if my loans are overpaid or something. And that's about it. And I also live with my partner. And so she and I will sometimes, you know, we usually split like food and rents and stuff like that and utilities and bills and stuff. So that makes it a lot easier too. Because living in Boston is not easy.

Right. That was great, Doreen. Thank you so much for coming out. Yeah, absolutely. I love doing these. Thanks so much, Tori. Tracy, I thought that was really interesting. I mean, I think like, you know, obviously there's like a lot there.

There's sort of there's the anarchist philosophy. There's the feelings of frustration that people are just realizing, even if they're not anarchists, with the way work works right now. And I think like this sort of idea of like digital organizing and sort of like loose affiliated online communities that push for some goal or that push for some impulse is just getting out more and more. important. It's going to be more and more powerful. Yeah, I think that's right. And also, I thought what Doreen was saying about treating each other like humans seems to be an overriding theme in a lot of these discussions and a lot of the posts on the actual subreddit. So,

again, to the question that I asked, like, often people don't seem to be complaining that much about specific work hours or specific wages, specific grievances, but it's usually, you know, some sort of argument with their boss where the boss just assumes that these people are, you know, able to work at their beck and call, basically, that kind of is the tipping point for someone quitting. And I wonder, I sometimes wonder how much of the tension between workers and employers could be alleviated if people, like, were, A, just nicer, and B, if they were able to set expectations and actually stick to them. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. And that's really good question. And this idea that, like, bosses don't have sort of restraint about these

assumptions. And I think, you know, a lot of, like, what gets called a labor shortage really is a labor shortage at the standards that people were expecting two years ago. Totally. And the problem with that is, like, why is that the standard? Like, there was a set of economic conditions that existed in 2019, but that was a set of conditions that was different in 2009 and 1999 and 1989 and 1979 and 1979. And there's this sort of like, at any given moment, okay, certain economic conditions can support X or Y.

but the idea that things aren't normal or that there is a shortage just because, oh, companies can't hire the way they did at a certain time is like this very weird, like, framing that I think is unjustified. Absolutely. Now, speaking of anti-work, it is 11 p.m. in Hong Kong. Okay. So shall we leave it there? Yeah, let's leave it there. All right. Let's create some boundaries.

Okay. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stallwork. And check out Doreen. She is a moderator, or one of the moderators of the anti-work subreddit. Go check it out. Extremely interesting. And the founder of the abolishwork.com website. Follow our producer, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today.

And check out all of our podcasts on Twitter. to the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.