Working

 I got a shock when I got to working that people were surprised that I would actually work. Hey, IK needed the money (still do) and how else was I going to get it but working?

Maybe this is an effect of the Covid pandemic that I am coming into mid-action.

What seems to be happening is a change in how we're working the low-level jobs - t`he sort I am working nowadays.

CNN reports Labor flexes its muscle as leverage tips from employers to workers:

The overwhelming majority of strikers and potential strikers are doing so for the first time in their careers. Many say they are driven not just by wages or benefits. They say they are striking, or planning to strike, in a bid to do their jobs the way they believe they should be done, and to gain basic improvements in the quality of their lives, such as time with their families, which they say they deserve.

One of the main issues running through many of these strikes, or looming strikes, is workers' anger.

"My nurses and health care professionals are angry," said Elizabeth Hawkins, the negotiator for a union of 32,000 nurses which could soon be striking 14 hospitals and hundreds of clinics in Southern California and Hawaii run by health care giant Kaiser Permanente.

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"The nonunion workers simply don't want to stay in or return to back-breaking or mind-numbing jobs," said Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration who wrote an essay comparing the record quit rate to a "general strike" which has been seen across wide ranges of industries and companies in some other countries but never in the United States.

Reich said the pandemic may have done more than shake up the supply and demand for labor in the US jobs market. It may have caused a reevaluation of the very nature and quality of work.

And The Guardian published The big idea: should we work less?: 

It’s not surprising, then, that there’s renewed interest in the idea of shorter working hours – importantly, without a loss in pay. In particular one idea that was widely criticised when it appeared in the Labour party’s 2019 manifesto has suddenly gained in popularity in western countries: the four-day working week. US representative Mark Takano has introduced a four-day week bill in Congress, the Scottish National party has proposed a four-day week trial, and Spain is launching a three-year pilot programme trialling a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay. (Working less is also a demand in China, where the new “lying flat” craze has young people saying no to always-on culture.) Pre-pandemic trials in Iceland revealed that shorter hours led to happier workers and that productivity stayed the same or even improved. After pressure from unions, 86% of Icelandic workers now either work shorter weeks or have the right to ask to do so.

But much of the conversation around shorter hours, notes Kyle Lewis, co-director of the thinktank Autonomy and co-author of the forthcoming Overtime: Why We Need a Shorter Working Week, has focused on progressive companies driving the demand. The reality, he says, is that a change like this is political and will only be possible if multiple actors mobilise a range of strategies to make it reality.

As Aidan Harper, co-author of The Case for a Four-Day Week, pointed out recently, most rapid reductions in working time have come in periods of crisis, as a way to distribute available work and reduce unemployment, most famously during the Great Depression. Now, as then, “there are simply too few jobs for too many people,” Aaron Benanav writes in Automation and the Future of Work, but this hasn’t resulted in widespread leisure time, rather in persistent underemployment, a global proletariat spending as much time hustling for work as it does actually working for pay. While some degree of make-work jobs formed the backbone of Depression-fighting programmes, Benanav notes that the economist credited with that programme, John Maynard Keynes, actually argued that, long term, the work week would shrink drastically – perhaps down to 15 hours.

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Perhaps the most important reason to consider working less is that the looming climate catastrophe makes the Covid crisis look manageable by comparison. The way we work, produce and consume has set the planet on fire, but the good news is that a shorter work week, according to research from Autonomy and more recently by the environmental organisation Platform London, can be part of the solution. Platform, working with the 4 Day Week campaign, found that “shifting to a four-day working week without loss of pay could shrink the UK’s carbon footprint by 127m tonnes per year by 2025”. That’s more, the report notes, than the entire carbon footprint of Switzerland. Lots of work means lots of commuting and energy-intensive consumption of ready-made meals and door-to-door delivery.

Sounds like a good idea that everyone will find a reason rooted in fear and pettiness wu\ill reject