When Are You Not Working
When are your time and skill not producing for the market?
Words by: Tara McMullin
"Work-life balance" is an increasingly passé term. Some say it's impossible to equally balance paid work on one side and life on the other. Others advocate for noticing when one realm of life needs more from us and responding in kind. Still others taut the benefits of work-life integration—finding the ways life can complement work and vice versa.
I'm sympathetic to all of these arguments. "Work-life balance" isn't a term I've used for many years. But as far as our alternatives to work-life balance go, they all seem to uphold the basic premise that there is work and there is life. This premise is a fundamentally gendered one. When there is work on one hand and life on the other, we don’t see the home as a worksite. “Life” stands in for leisure or family time and precludes the required reproductive labor that is still predominantly done by women or outsourced to people from marginalized communities.
It's no surprise that the idea of "work-life balance" first emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a way to describe the needs of newly minted working (white, middle-class) women. Women who entered the workforce also juggled their responsibilities at home. It wasn’t a question of balancing work with leisure or even quality family time. It was a question of how the laundry would get done, the meals would get made, or the house would get cleaned. It wasn’t work-life balance at all; it was work-life work balance.
Of note, working-class white women, as well as most immigrants and women of color, had never been the subject of anxiety over the ability to balance work and life. Their availability for constant work was taken as a given.
Life work—or reproductive labor—is the work that goes into preparing family members (and often oneself) for the next day of work or school. It reproduces labor power each day so that employers can use that labor power to produce goods and services. In that way, life work may not be paid, but it's still work done in service of the market.
A couple of decades after "work-life balance" became a hot commodity (econ pun intended), the gendered division of life work started to even out. But that has not meant that female partners in dual-income heterosexual relationships have less life work to do.
Not only have we been forced to take on individual responsibility for needs that used to be community or employer responsibilities, but also because we've learned to pursue all of our activities in the mode of work.
The amount of life work required today is vastly more than it used to be.
Exercising makes you more productive and helps manage stress. Online therapy turns poor working conditions into a personal project. Social media turns you into a personal brand. Eating well increases your mental acuity. Listening to podcasts helps you skill up.
And what about TV time? According to Dallas Smythe, an economist of communications, you're putting in hours as part of an "audience." This work is all about learning what problems or needs you might have and what you might buy to solve them. And our audience work is hardly limited to TV or radio time anymore. We carry the tools of this work with us everywhere we go.
Similarly, philosopher Ivan Illich coined the term “shadow work” to describe the various activities required to meet one’s needs when paid a monetary wage (i.e., we go shopping for food because we don’t work to grow our own food). And economist Guy Standing describes how members of the “precariat” (e.g., gig workers, freelancers, day laborers, contingent workers, etc.) have to do unpaid work like identifying opportunities and pitching themselves in order to do paid work.
“The total worker, in brief, is a figure of ceaseless, tensed, busied activity,” writes philosopher Andrew Taggert for Aeon, “a figure, whose main affliction is a deep existential restlessness fixated on producing the useful.” Taggert explains that the “total worker” isn’t the person who’s constantly working because of an unmanageable workload but instead, the person who adopts a single-mindedness to achieve daily tasks with “productivity, effectiveness and efficiency.” The total worker adopts “planning, skillful prioritising and timely delegation” in order to get it all done. The total worker believes every activity can be enhanced by approaching it in the same way they would tackle a project at work.
We're becoming—or have become—the "total worker."
For all these reasons, I believe "work-life balance" and even "work-life integration" are woefully insufficient to describe our relationship with work today. Work and life are not two separate spheres (they never were). And life is not without its own forms of work. We must become fluent in the language of "total work" to dismantle it and make different choices.
Tara McMullin (When Are You Not Working) is a writer, podcaster, and producer who investigates the future of work through philosophy, critical theory, and culture. She’s the author of What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting and the host of the What Works podcast.
