Every Substack page contains a glowing white box just waiting for your email address. This becomes, unavoidably, part of the work being produced. What began as a way to fund work and bring existing ideas into fruition is funnelled by hungry platforms towards an engine of content production that demands we churn out words in structurally-required scripturience. None of this is to denigrate the work of writers, artists and creators supported by such platforms. My point is that we should try and understand the effect these platforms have on the work they claim to enable.

Sam Wallman has some suggestions for how workers should behave on the job.

What the Forest app provides is the illusion that time spent on study, work, or everyday chores can also be creative and community-minded. Moreover, that the tasks of everyday life and work that are typically ephemeral, forgettable, and often of diminishing returns, can—when recorded in productivity trees in the forest of progress—leave a trace, recouping a sense of purpose and significance.

While Taylor urged managers to control their workers to ‘get more’ out of them, productivity literature and productivity tech take this imperative and urge the individual to turn this control inwards: to self control, to self manage, to ‘get more’ out of themselves. In this way, the failure to thrive in competitive work environments, to fail to succeed or even to enjoy, becomes an individual failing, hinged on an inability to properly optimise oneself or one’s time.

Since the first lockdowns, one significant social change in white-collar professions has been a large-scale shift from office-based work to remote work from home. Two years since Covid-19 was first detected in Australia, many people in these professions have come to express their preference for some degree of flexible work, a pattern that seems likely to continue.

What the viewpoints and trends surrounding the Great Resignation show is that a divided workers’ movement will find great difficulty in contending with the forces that lead many to resign from their inherent power to participate in and transform society. As ever, unity, class consciousness and a strong social safety net must be fought for at all costs.

Regardless of the obstacles, the mere existence of such a large subreddit should be seen as a victory for leftism. Over a million people thinking about their unions and their contracts is a massive step in the right direction for class consciousness, and even those who would attack the subreddit’s goals have so far only managed to boost engagement. Theory and practice have merged together into a remarkably useful tool for examining labour relations.

Nobody should be able to dictate how and when trans and gender diverse people affirm their gender, least of all employers. Gender affirmation leave is a positive step towards reducing the barriers those transitioning face and comes at only minor expense to employers. Whether this struggle achieves its emancipatory potential will depend on unions and employers listening to trans and gender-diverse staff voices and equitably meeting their demands.

What’s even harder to do when you’re unemployed is remembering that the problem is bigger than you; keeping in mind that many, if not most, rejections are not personal—they’re not serving as a rejection of your entire being, or a dismissal of your value as a person. Unfortunately, when you’re barely coping, focusing on systemic issues feels impossible—directing your negative emotions inwards and nurturing that feeling of self-loathing is far easier, even if you know it’s unhealthy.

A Climate Jobs Guarantee is the best way to immediately address both climate change and provide public jobs for all, by using a pool of publicly employed individuals, instead of having a reserve army of the unemployed, avoiding inflation without the misery and cost of unemployment.

The virus is out of control and it’s clear that patchwork responses and aggressive policing aren’t going to stop it. We learned in 2020 that generous, easily accessed income support works. Yet we are forced to watch on in despair as the Labor party and their technocratic gatekeepers continue to call for the return of JobKeeper, despite it evidently being nothing but a corporate bailout in disguise.

As antipoverty activists, we know we must unite all low-income workers by centring the relationship between poverty and wages, and the declining wage growth this country has experienced in the past ten years. It is vital that the broad left and our movements begin to see that the rights of waged and unwaged workers are intrinsically linked.

By keeping the work that is necessary for human wellbeing, by expanding the work that is necessary for human happiness, and by abolishing the work that serves neither purpose, we would be making the most strategic move of all: protecting the vitality of the planet.

Now we know we’re essential, we know our skills are really valuable, we know we gotta turn up to work so people get fed. Now there’s a sense of urgency and commitment. We’ve gone from pawns to queens.

I have a theory that frightens me: probably, the best job a writer can have is one that is as far away from the act of writing as possible – boilermaker, car salesman, exterminator.

Breaking away from the traditional model of unionism to become a movement embedded in broader struggles for social justice will not be easy, but this is the task at hand. As organised capital finds new and effective ways to transfer risk onto individual workers – such as through new forms of precarity, climate catastrophe, and far right movements – we must be prepared to take greater risks if we are to win.