The Rising Anti-Work Movement

 The Rising Anti-Work Movement

J.M. Rogers

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            As Millennials and Gen Z continue to resign en mass, the phenomenon once dramatically referred to as “The Great Resignation” is looking more and more like a soft workers’ strike. Having worked constantly since my 15^th birthday, I have encountered many dejected employees. As a retail manager during the late 2000s (me being in my twenties then), I often found it difficult to understand why so many of my workers were disinterested, detached, frequently absent and non-responsive to coaching strategies formulated by psychological professionals who tailored the strategies around empowering and motivating individuals. However, the opposite result was the typical outcome.

For some time, I felt that the problem must lie in my execution of the coaching sessions. Surely, the issue must lie in some lack of technique. But, after around a year of applying various approaches, some passive and some more direct, I decided the time had come to being speaking to the employees one-on-one. I asked them what the issue was directly. Was it me? Was it something in the expectations of the company that made them uncomfortable? Were they distracted by matters beyond the workplace? Like most adults, they deferred when approached directly. They made excuses, made promises to improve, and even made efforts to assuage my fears that I was not communicating effectively.

To be clear, I did not expect the answers to come. Truthfully, I had arranged the interviews so I could watch their body language, study their vocal tones, and analyze the overall energy that they were conveying when discussing the workplace. It goes without saying that working for a corporate entity is quite thankless. Most workers, and managers, feel like gears in a machine that has no discernible care for their careers or their personal well-being. When someone wears down or loses motivation, they are simply chewed up and spat out by these robotic corpo-mechanisms. The company cares more about the budget a store is spending on toilet paper every month than they care about the details of their employees’ lives. Such disinterest is unavoidable for companies that have thousands of workers. But, when the workers return the disinterest in the success of the company, one cannot help but think “like father, like son/ like mother, like daughter.

When The Great Recession got its name in 2008, it had already been gaining steam in the construction industry for nearly two years. The speculative practices of banks had eroded the real estate market's value to a nadir, leaving the banks insolvent and millions of homeowners in dire straits due to their inability to pay for homes that they needed to maximize their work hours to pay for. As the banks began to tighten their belts to regain liquidity, corporations slowed down their expansions, credit card companies put a tourniquet on new accounts, and interest rates exploded, effectively killing the era of easy credit that George W. Bush’s financial advisors (throwbacks to Reaganomics) had ushered in. As all of this transpired, the corporate retail space hemorrhaged money. Scrambling to stop the outflow of profits, they slashed labor hours and increased markdown sales in a poorly devised attempt to offset the capital crisis. One does not need to be an economics wiz to understand that increasing specialty sales while decreasing manpower is effectively working toward separate poles.

So, as I sat talking to LuLu, Ty, Jade, Viola, Jessica, David, Matt, Alex, etc., with all of this financial stress going on in the background, it began to dawn on me that even if the stoner Alex didn’t read Forbes, even if LuLu worked every extra shift she could get at Payless Shoes, and my store, even if Matt wanted to move up from Assistant Manager to have his own store one day, the corrosive effect of financial instability in the wider markets had permeated their confidence. They all knew someone who had lost a house, had all seen stores shutter their doors, had all heard the stories of looming closures, and had all seen the dozens of new layoffs that appeared at the counter asking for applications every week. They may not have known what the causal relationship between all of these features was, but they weren’t blind to the reality that society was in trouble, and by proxy, so were they.

The effect that this background tension had on workers was palpable. I could easily sense the anxiety and fear in their body language. I could almost read their thoughts: “Is he going to fire me now?” Sometimes I did have to fire them. Then sometimes became oftentimes. I can still see their faces and hear their exasperated tones as I cut them loose like climbers being cut loose from their tethers by the lead climber. Eventually, it was just me and one other employee working the store at a given time, and both of us working 60 hours a week or more while the companies pushed sale after sale in the hopes they could squeeze a purchase out of the money-starved customers.

I knew in those final months of my management career that coaching had never worked because people have an uncanny ability to detect bullshit. They may try to tell themselves that they aren’t detecting it, may try to turtle or ostrich in the hopes that they aren’t the ones that end up stepping in it, but they always know. The coaching didn’t work because the ship was going down, taking on water while frantic managers like myself ran around with tea cups. I was not naïve about the futility of these efforts, but I was as stranded as everyone else. The only difference: the corporate executives expected me to do something about it, expected me to be a good sailor and go down with the ship, fighting to offset the deluge while they escaped on lifeboats to safety. Like a dope, I did it; heaving the bodies of work friends, young mothers and fathers, aspiring managers, and benign stoners, over the railing to lighten the load. All the while, I ignored their piteous glances and tearful pleas. I could not save them. I could not even save myself. But, at least I would have a few more moments above water.

Fast forward to today, April 14, 2022. The news channels are ablaze with condemning rhetoric that sounds more like blue-collar bravado than reality: “They just don’t wanna work.” “They’re lazy.” “They didn’t go through what I did growing up, that’s why they don’t have good work ethic.” How can this be the resolution that so many purportedly “thoughtful” economists and public thinkers have come up with? They are as blind as I was fifteen years ago, the only difference is that they all have the benefit of hindsight. They all know what happened before, and what is happening now, but they insist that the issue must reside somewhere within the generational divide. I suppose it must make them feel in control to castigate those that surround them. After all, if they throw everyone else overboard, perhaps they’ll get a few more moments above water.

I could go on a tirade about how ashamed these older generations should be. Many of the highest-ranking employees of major corporations are Boomers who have not yet satiated their lust for more money and have not quenched their thirst for Caribbean cruises and semi-annual trips to Disney World and Las Vegas. These same individuals rode out of The Great Recession in relative comfort compared to their younger cohorts. Yet, here they sit accusing those very same people they have thrown overboard for not willfully consuming any more of the bullshit that is being parsed out. Their vitriol is only rivaled by their greed and apparent ignorance of the nature of market dynamics, and in this, they have achieved a state of American Super Hero, a state that can only be achieved by someone who values profit over personality and routine over adaptability.

The millennials are not coming back to suckle at the toxic tit of the Boomer industry, nor should they. In their compassion, they have told little bro and little sis, Gen Z, that the gold they’re being promised is pyrite, and that the only way forward is to go their own way. The upswelling in small business LLCs tells the story that no one in the conservative media wants to hear: The workers don’t trust the bosses anymore. The great flaw in the Boomer logic that led to this was in the vast expansion of the college-level education of their offspring. Millennials are smart, and the oldest of the cohort are jaded by the cannibalization they witnessed in their early 20s. Rather than mindlessly filing onto yet another vessel bound for the reef, they have pulled away in their own little makeshift boats, choosing to brave the stormy waters of the free market on their own.

Who can truly blame them? The only hope that the old cronies of corporate America have for funding their endless vacations and small-town oligarchies is to do what the robber barons did in the 20s, exploit immigrants. And they will do this without a second’s hesitation, all while trying to bury the rants of their prime when they swore that Mexicans were going to steal all of the good American jobs. Now they will willfully give away those “good American jobs” to pad their own retirement funds.

If they were to pull aside some of their remaining employees and ask them what I did: “Why are you unhappy?” “Am I doing something wrong?” “What about this job makes you uncomfortable?” they would quickly realize the apprehension, the quiet resentment, the corrosive doubt, that plagued the workers during The Great Recession. They would discover that their employees were afraid of losing their houses, their cars, their marriages, of losing those pesky personal lives that only seem to get in the way of good business practice. The other thing they would realize is that there is no way to repair this burned bridge a second time. Mechanization aided by AI is consuming more and more jobs, and those that are wealthy enough to capitalize on the trend will devour all of the excess profits that once went to funding things as laughable as family dinners, honeymoons, and afterschool programs. The Millennials know that they have been cheated out of their inheritance by liver-spotted tyrants, and they are making the only choice that makes any sense; to take their own chances in life.

Every LLC that has opened in the past year is a little raft, pulling away from the cratering hull and its panicking crew. More will continue to open. More people will risk it all to win the Bitcoin lottery, and most of them will lose, but who else do they have to bet on? When I see lawyers, accountants, tech workers, service industry workers, and county workers mobilizing to seek out more bountiful seas, I see a pattern. Some of the switches are driven by money, some by the thrill of chance, but most are driven by disillusionment, apathy, depression, frustration...doubt. These are the emotional staples of the post-recession workforce. These are the emotional leftovers of traumatized workers who lost everything fifteen years ago and see the same losses on the horizon. The societal cortisol drip is increasing, and this time, rather than fight to keep their jobs, they are choosing flight to keep their sanity.

Is this the beginning of the socialist shift? Is this the end of free-market democracy? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Some habits are just too engrained, some philosophies too emblematic, to ever shrug off. What I do know is that corporations are going to come under ever-increasing scrutiny for their relationship with workers and that this scrutiny will give way to ever-increasing difficulty in satisfying worker demands. The American workers will push for more and more because they do not trust the existing power structure in a post-2008/post-Covid society. Worker outflow is a trickle that will become a stampede if another recession is announced. Most assume we are already in one, another sign that the Millennial is more in tune with the economic sector than ever before.

The expansion of social networks has allowed for constant communication, something that largely prevented panic from taking hold during the ‘08 saga. Word spreads faster than ever, and when the water starts to drown the bilge pump, Millennials, and Gen-Z will, and are, choose(ing) to take their chances among their peers instead of their “betters.” This will only serve to exasperate an already toxic generational rift, and while Gen-X tries to sneak into the captain’s quarters for one last handful of pyrite, they will be swallowed up by the whirlpool.

Thus, the economic child will abandon the economic parent and in so doing, destroy the lineage of industry that has persisted since the post-Civil War society. The mechanistic turnings of industrial society, like the gears of the mighty corpo-mechanism, will plow on powered by centrifugal force, grinding up the oligarchies of the former era with mindless precision. Such is the way of American industry, of American life. The past is burned to illuminate the path of the future. The soft strike will come, then the hard one. The Great Revolt will rise and then fall, and from the wreckage, another age of survival and warfare, akin to that of the early 1800s and 1900s will ascend. These are not extremist wishes. These are the observations of an individual who has studied his people, studied history, and lived through the crest and trough of crises. I pray that I am wrong, but the industry has no god, only bottom lines and quarterly reviews.

I realize it seems a bit dramatic, the escalation from the 2008 economic abandonment of the burgeoning professional generations to the revolution that pushes America into its new era, and maybe it is. I have no crystal ball at my disposal, but I do have eyes and a sense of reason. This is not about personal agendas or grudges. I am simply reading the tea leaves that so many seem unwilling to turn over. From the stoner that sat in my office and cried because he didn’t know how he was going to pay the rent on the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his fiancé and sixteen-month-old baby, to the ambitious would-be manager who felt cheated and cursed me before knocking over a snack display on his way out of the double doors for the last time, the tea leaves have fallen one by one. The American backyard is now filled with them, only now they are brittle and dry, now they are quick to flare up at even the slightest spark, now they are ready to burn.