Let’s Take Back Work
In 1889, the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs announced that labour-saving agricultural machinery would be banned on reserves. No binders, no threshing machines, no lanterns, in some cases not even nails were permitted. Hard work was the route to salvation, and labour-saving technology should be "earned" by a culture in deference to some kind of linear, independent march of progress.
The real idea, of course, was to keep the Indigenous population tired and hungry, and prevent them from competing with white farmers.
The idea of injurious amounts of work as a path to salvation continues today, in a culture that expects every adult to work hard at some approved set of tasks — and prove that they have done so — before they can rest or play. Overwork has been romanticized and celebrated. But recently a backlash against hustle culture and toxic productivity has started to rise.
I am a proponent of leisure and rest, for everybody. I have a very low bar for overwhelm and I need plenty of both.
But I also secretly struggle with the backlash against work, because you see, I love work.
I do. I love it.
I love to work myself. I derive deep satisfaction from checking things off on to-do lists. I enjoy the visible results of effort: an organized cabinet, an effective website, a cake, a self-published book, a party. And that pleasure is real; it sits right in the middle of my body, warm and bright. It doesn't feel like an externally imposed striving to meet someone else's standards.
And I love the fruits of other people's work. Literal fruits: everything I eat is thanks in part to the work of others. I love books, symphonies, operas, lavish parties and events, cathedrals, massive civic infrastructure. Anything that takes an inordinate amount of organization and labour thrills me the same way a mountain or ocean does. Work — especially work together — is how humans reach transcendence.
So I have been feeling weird about the backlash against productivity. When I feel good about checking something off my to-do list, I think, am I just a mindless creature of capitalism? When I push through late-afternoon sleepiness to get something done, am I just a tool of the system?
It was only when I learned about the policy prohibiting the use of labour-saving devices on reserves that I realized the problem isn't work itself; it's the way work is weaponized against us.
It helps to realize, as I just did, that work is simply another of the many sublime aspects of being human that oppressors have twisted into tools to keep people down. Eating, sex, motherhood, ceremony, dance, and music have been or still are restricted, managed, and wreathed in shame. It's not surprising that work is manipulated in that way as well.
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I don't believe work makes you a better person. I don't think people who are able to and choose to work a lot are more deserving of joy or rest than the rest of us. I don't think working until you're sick is laudable.
But I do believe work can be satisfying, joyous, and rewarding. Work — to make change in the world and contribute to your community through your own actions — is our birthright. But we have to understand the context, and be wary of how work is controlled and framed in the intersecting systems of oppression we exist in.
Let's take back work, on our own terms.
I learned about the policy about agricultural technology on reserves (and about so many other things) from Valley of the Birdtail by Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) and Andrew Stobo Sniderman.