'Work hard, get paid.' It's simple. Self-evident. But it's also a lie—at least for most of us. For young people today, the old assumptions are crumbling; hard work in school no longer guarantees a secure, well-paying job in the future. Far from equating to riches and fulfilment, 'work' increasingly means precarity, anxiety and alienation.
Amelia Horgan poses three big questions: what is work? How does it harm us? And what can we do about it? Along the way, she explores the many facets of work under capitalism: its encroachment on our personal lives; the proliferation of temporary and zero-hours contracts; burnout; and how different jobs are gendered or racialized.
While abolishing work altogether is not the answer, Lost in Work shows that when workers are able to take control of their workplaces, they become less miserable, and even open doors allowing them to fight back against the elite.
Amelia Horgan puts into words a lot of the unresolved negative feelings I’ve long had about work.
An excellent book, worth a read.
A comprehensive, yet very accessible look at how work... well, works under capitalism and how an intrinsic experience of the human experience, the expense of effort in the pursuit of material improvement is turned into an exercise in violence and oppression.
