Do What You Love by Miya Tokumitsu

Author:Miya Tokumitsu [Tokumitsu, Miya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regan Arts.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HOPE AND CLASS

The burgeoning labor movements described briefly above represent a significant departure from somnambulant dedication to hope labor. Workers from university seminar rooms to assembly lines are insisting that worker protections meet their needs far better than hope does. For many of these workers, particularly those in white-collar environments and bearing advanced degrees, their actions are forcing them to confront their status as laborers for the first time.

The paradox of DWYL is that, while exhorting people to perform work that they love, it denies that this work is work at all. Persuading professional workers not to think of themselves as workers is one of the profoundest achievements of established class rhetoric. When people speak of the working class as a constituency to which they do not belong, embedded in their speech is a disavowal of their own status as workers, specifically as workers toiling for an employer or entity other than themselves. The social desire not to fall into this class is so powerful that, as we’ve seen, people will assume massive amounts of debt, submit to intrusive surveillance and managerial control, and work for hope instead of wages. This, too, is a disavowal of their own work.

Hope remains a major force keeping the swelling reserve army of credentialed, would-be professionals toiling for paltry wages (or no wages at all). While scores of college grads working for free in unpaid internships could be doing paid apprenticeships that impart tangible skills, they opt for the uncompensated purgatory of coffee fetching and photocopying in the hope that such service will lead to a lucrative, lovable job. Is it worth it?

Being a unionized sheet-metal worker may pay the bills, and it may even be enjoyable in that it bestows a sense of accomplishment at the end of a shift or pride in a craft well executed. Such work may instill a sense of pleasure in that it facilitates the care and well-being of the worker’s family and loved ones. Yet these are not the fashionable joys of work, dismissed as naive and insufficiently ambitious, particularly after the greed-is-good 1980s. Apparently, for a fair portion of the population, the only joys of work that count are the ones that facilitate a complete, narcissistic identification with the job and bestow the accoutrements of upper-middle-class existence. Superficially, sheet-metal work isn’t a job that pretends to bestow “intrinsic joyful affects” to the liberal-arts-degree-holding throngs. But a statement on the Sheet Metal Workers International Association (SMWIA) Web site is remarkable: “The SMWIA strives to establish and maintain desirable working conditions for its members through their employers. Doing so provides them that measure of comfort, happiness, and security to which every member is entitled in return for his or her highly trained and skilled labor.”36 Comfort, happiness, and security in return for skilled labor—is this not the collective wish of commencement-address audiences at $60,000-per-year schools?

Class anxiety not only fuels DWYL culture, but this anxiety also exacerbates already widening class divisions. Despite earning very little or nothing at all, interns still manage to survive.

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