Interview: Will Stronge

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Could you talk a little about your academic background and training and how you became interested in the question of work?

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

My academic background is in philosophy — from my BA in Bristol under people like Ian Hamilton Grant and others who are more in what’s known as continental philosophy, although we did a mix there. But Bristol is one of the centres that splintered off from the Warwick philosophy department of the 90s, the CCRU era, though at the time we didn’t know that was the case. It meant we were given this quite compelling but quite eccentric schedule of philosophy to wade through — we were given Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche as if that were a normal textbook on Nietzsche. Then I studied at Kingston for an MA, and as I moved through that to the PhD at Brighton, I started getting more and more interest in political theory, and then politics itself.

From 2015 onwards, in the UK and elsewhere, the polarisation of politics made it much more interesting and I started getting involved in political discussions. With my good friend and Autonomy co-founder, Kyle (Lewis), I read lots of Gramsci and lots of texts like Kathi Weeks. I first found Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work in an Oxfam in Bath, in about 2013, and I sat on it for a few years before reading it, but it would become very influential for us. And of course, also Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. I think we were captivated by the ambition of these books and their really well-articulated critique of contemporary work. They also introduced us to a rich history of this kind of writing. We also read Ivor Southward’s Non-Stop Inertia back in 2014. Again, there was something about this very critical and revelatory understanding of contemporary precarious work.

It seemed like the future of work was clearly going to become a massive issue, plus the discussions we were having about strategy and so on through Gramsci, and that was the route from philosophy to setting up Autonomy.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

You’re working on a book with Helen Hester on “Postwork”, could you talk about what that means? I’m particularly interested in the role that feminist theory has within it.  

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

The book is in its final stages which is great. So, postwork — the term is really new. The earliest I’ve seen it is in 1998 in the Post Work Manifesto, even Andre Gorz wouldn’t say post work for example. Anti-work, as a term, goes further back. Of course, the arguments within postwork theory go back further, at least to Marx, most famously, and before him, too.

This body of theory goes back to the nineteenth century with the onset of industrialism as a catalyst for thinking “Maybe life should be beyond whatever this thing that we’re calling work is”.

Andre Gorz makes the point that the idea of work is a very modern construction — the idea that work is something you “have”, that you “look for”. That’s quite an odd position within our language but we’re very used to saying it. This use of work is crystallised by the onset of industrialism as something standardised, which everyone needs to engage with. That’s the kind of work we’re talking about when we talk about post work.

Postwork involves a very critical, unromantic view of modern work in the broad. I think what postwork does, alongside its anti-work kind of sibling, and potentially many other kinds of anti-capitalist theories and assessments of work is that it broadens the scope of what work is. Drawing from first-wave feminists, and later Wages for Housework movements, expanding what work is, including conceptual innovations like “shadow work” and so on, it creates an expansive sense. Now, that’s always open to a slippery porosity and so on, but it pushes towards a more maximalist approach to equality and freedom.  

There are two elements of postwork. On the one hand, this very critical, unromantic view of modern work and a taxonomy of the burdens and harms of work. On the other hand, there’s the post- aspect which contains its more utopian aspects, thinking beyond current systems of industrialism, and capitalism and our present moment. Since the late 90s, postwork has appeared as a term to reflect and speak to those different kinds of concerns.  

That element is definitely the bit that excites me the most — the biggest, also the most risky, the most dangerous, the most susceptible to criticism. Utopianism is a risky business. Sometimes it will involve prediction, sometimes it will involve articulating a vision, and visions are absolute clickbait for attack. But that’s also the most admirable part of authors that I respect in this space.

There are loads of good critiques of work, but what postwork does is take that step beyond; to start thinking about what things should be like. The contrast there might be between postwork and other forms of radical theory which say, “We don’t need to do utopias, we’ll figure it out in the struggle”, or that “we already have the answers”, which might just be a return to something like the 1970s with higher wages and public ownership. A sort of “we don’t need to think about new things” attitude. To me, that’s all unsatisfactory.

Of course, there are disagreements within postwork and varieties of it too. In the book, we try to make that clear — the different avenues that might be in tension with each other. There’s a new crop of thinkers that use postwork ideas to think through a post-carbon society, especially Holly Jean Buck and Cara New Daggett. Daggett is interested in growth and energy as material/cultural factors in history, focusing on energy in its relationship to work, and also considering how, if we need to mitigate climate change, we have to rethink how we deal with energy as a guiding concept. Holly Jean Buck makes a compelling argument that we need to think about carbon drawdown, and carbon capture to take the edge off our current mitigation approach — to do so we have to not only slow down, turn the taps off, but also empty the bath too. They both have different utopian visions of what this might all involve.

There are also, at a different scale, thinkers of community infrastructure, shared gardens, convivial tools and so on. Here Andre Gorz overlaps with people like Sylvia Pankhurst. Gorz thinks at a micro-neighbourhood scale but the ideas can be scaled up to broader postwork visions, which others have been interested in too. For example, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have this Promethean disposition to think through postwork at a  national policy level. Of course too, things like Fully Automated Luxury Communism which in their more ambitious pre-2019 guises imagined the maximal scope of a postwork society. There are various postwork utopias, then, but what they share is an impetus to posit radical proposals for the future.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What role does feminist theory have within this? 

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

I’m really glad you asked this question. It’s something that Helen and I try to think about in the book and our article. I think there is a problem with the way that some critics of postwork approach the topic. The context for this is that a lot of the recent postwork texts were written from around 2010 to around 2015. A lot of the output then dropped off and moved into other things, things like Autonomy, for example, or into politics more generally. This means that critics have a tendency to jump onto texts which are increasingly becoming quite dated. This leaves critics chewing on the same fat while postwork authors have moved on to write about other topics, meaning that a lot of straw man stuff about postwork is written, but without the presence of any antagonists. There was also a bad faith argument about postwork being something separate from feminism, an attempt to carve the two off from each other. That’s not helped by the fact there are a lot of guys writing about the topic, but to claim they’re separate you’d need to ignore people like Kathi Weeks who’s basically the godmother of this recent crop of literature, Sophie Lewis and her work on the family and Helen Hester for her work on the household and previously with Xenofeminism. Helen herself is very critical of the literature insofar as it has had too not discussed basic aspects such as social reproduction and can focus exclusively on wage labour.

In our book, we wanted to make some steps towards thinking about how social reproduction can be missed in some of these texts, but also to take steps at including social reproduction within the postwork trajectory — we shouldn’t just valorise this kind of labour and pay heed and thanks to those who do it, but rather recognise it as work and thus reduce and redistribute it etc. Those critical, utopian elements of postwork are important here, and feminist theory has and can have a serious role in infusing postwork with such a perspective. Part of the challenge too is establishing the boundaries of a postwork tradition: does it include Wages for Housework? Sylvia Pankhurst? Contemporary feminists?

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What do you make of the “don’t make cookbooks for the future” argument against utopianism? It seems that you want to make the case for the various benefits of making cookbooks — strategic, political, imaginative and epistemic.

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

I think that there’s both the content of the future — asking specifically and concretely what comes next, practically speaking — but there’s also a case to be made that making demands and articulating utopias itself is provocative and useful. It helps us to disentangle ourselves from the constant present. Making demands can open the space for, and help shape, future demands of course; manifestos and demands are utopian forms, let’s not forget.  

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Is there a current crisis in work? 

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

We’d have to go into the question of the temporality of crisis, but I think I would say that there is a current crisis of work. That’s not to say that some of our problems haven’t been longstanding, though. As for the current crisis, I think the most obvious version would be this huge growth, in the global north, of precarity and precarious jobs in terms of things like bogus self-employment, short-term contracts, zero-hours contracts, and so on. Now that’s as much a sign of employers being in the saddle (and taking advantage) and labour being on the back foot as anything, but nevertheless, it has very detrimental effects on health as well as on wages. Over the same period, the support infrastructure for workers has also been vastly degraded: things like public services, the NHS, and so on. These are two factors in a dangerous cocktail. Add to these phenomena the longstanding gender inequalities in the workplace too, both in terms of the home and employment (let’s not forget that there’s still, of course, harassment and bullying in the workplace too). Whether this all constitutes a crisis or whether actually, this is a matter of longstanding inequalities in the workplace which are being exacerbated by the withering away of public services, and of employment contracts, basic conditions, sick pay and so on, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly enough to raise the alarm once again on how the world of work simply isn’t working for a great many people. For example, the increase year on year in sick days taken due to work-related stress, anxiety, depression, things like that point to a worsening situation. 

I don’t see the crisis in something like an imminent “jobs apocalypse” because of automation, but more like a gradual erosion of worker autonomy from a centuries-old impetus built into how our economy works to speed up work, make workers cheaper and things like that. That's the reality of new tech in the workplace. I think it’s more accurate perhaps to say that there is a confluence of factors which constitute an ongoing “crisis” — but isn’t a single rupture. 

As for the future, there’s the convergence of climate crisis too — which comes with things like droughts, extreme heat, and the winding down of fossil fuel industries [and the effect this will have on jobs]. What we might mean, when I come to think of it, by the present crisis of work is something like labour market uncertainty combined with the degradation of conditions in the labour market.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

We might characterise it as a slow-moving continual crisis rather than a rupture, in that case. I wonder what you might reply to the devil’s advocate view of work which holds that there’s nothing wrong with work per se but that current bad conditions of it are the problem. 

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

I think there are very good arguments, which have been about for the last two hundred or so years, for the case that it is not just our current arrangement of work that is bad but that the burdens of work are by now baked into modern labour markets. We can point to the presence of a very massive, asymmetrical distribution of power in the workplace: being at the beck and call of an employer for the means to survive. You’re beholden to another’s power over you — to use Elizabeth Anderson’s framing: you jump between these different islands of private government, from company to company, wherein you leave your freedom at the door. From a republican [freedom as non-domination] standpoint, or even from a kind of negative or even positive freedom standpoint, those things are negative outcomes, but we all have to do it. Outside of wage labour, you might be relying on welfare, which is designed to be a punitive and kind of intolerable system that coerces you into jobs or face sanctions; neither of these options seems particularly appealing as a way of organising our economies, and yet it is the reality that has been the norm for many decades.  

That means there’s a freedom-based argument against more work because work — as we mean it in the usual sense -makes us fundamentally unfree. It takes up a massive portion of our lives and is rarely self-determined or freely chosen. There are also, and these aren’t to everybody’s tastes, health and wellbeing-based arguments. These hold that modern work has motives and incentives that are baked into the system — i.e. pushing for profit —  which requires pushing the labour force as much as possible. This does not, to put it lightly, dovetail well with the human body: it leads to exhaustion, mental health issues, and physical deterioration — talk to construction workers who had to retire early because their bodies have just been ruined. Our health interests, we could say, are at odds with the in-built incentives of the contemporary work system.

There’s another argument around human purpose and potential. This is separate from the freedom argument as it’s saying something like, “Is this the best way of organising our time and energy?” Should we be celebrating the creation of thousands of jobs, even if they are basically, for example, low-paid or extremely stressful, just for the purpose of facilitating exchange in the market and keeping the circuits of the economy firing? How should we organise our collective time and collective activity — what are the objectives, or what is the purpose? What do we want to do collectively? And then of course, if we want to actually survive as a species, we actually need to act on these questions and shift our ways of working in order to completely change our economies and put them on a more sustainable footing. To avoid doomer-ism here I think we probably can solve a lot of the problems that I mentioned in terms of the crisis of work if we commit ourselves to it (and all that that entails).

So, there are three arguments framed around freedom, health, and purpose that hopefully underline a critique of modern work per se and not just our current labour market in 2023. Alongside these, we should mention all of the gender and racial inequalities that the current system is built off, whether it's the colonial past, which has been the (often forgotten) foundation of modern industrialism, or gender inequalities which are at the core of the modern distributions of work These elements of work as we know it are not trivial, but must be faced if we want to truly evaluate our system of labour.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

The purpose aspect seems to me to speak also to the question of the finitude of time — that people only have so much they can do in any given life, and that the current arrangements of work crowds out a great deal of other things. So perhaps there’s an argument from individual as well as societal potential or purpose, too.

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

There’s that famous book written by Bronnie Ware — a nurse who recorded the testimonies of people on their deathbeds. Almost everyone says, “I work too much”. We can also see, in this light,  why people in France are fighting for their pension age to remain high: people want their time free of the need to work. As we approach the end, we harbour serious regrets about the things we could have done instead of a life of toil. That’s one (individually reflective) thing. And then the second is saying, “Actually, we can organise our time and energy in all these purposeful collective activities, in a much better way”.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How do you understand democratising work?

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

Democratising work would be allowing those who engage in work to have some say in the purpose of the work, the way it's arranged, and the way it is distributed. This is a helpful paradigm to some extent because it can scale from policies within a single workplace to changing society as a whole. Now, the devil is in the details, but I think it’s a useful frame for us to work under, because if you accept the agenda, then it means that you're really kind of evaluating according to individual and collective autonomy — and how well the organisational form meets the goal of individual collective freedom in that sense?

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Could you talk about another work reform in the shape of the Four Day Week trials? What’s happened?

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

In 2022, we started recruiting for what would become the world's largest Four Day Week pilot of firms of different sizes, the largest had one thousand, and this was across various industries — a fish and chip shop, a robotics firm, advertising, and so on. It was a six-month trial with various surveys and interviews with staff and managers.  We assessed company revenue, sickness absences as well as questions about experiences including social and family relationships. The results were incredibly positive.

Most of the firms (91%) are still continuing. There has been interest in pilots in other countries too. Our pilot has shown an evidence base which we can use to talk about in a more public way rather than as just a hypothetical question.

We’re now running rolling programmes where firms can sign up and take an eight-week workshop course as part of preparing to move to shorter hours. This means that we’re also creating a larger and larger evidence base — to make the case for the policy even stronger.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I have a question about the evidence base and strategy — is there a risk that things do not work out? Perhaps some of this is addressed by the approach of design at the level of the firm and of the trials themselves.

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

The most important thing here is the specific organisational dynamics. When relationships are fraught it’s very hard to try something new and get real buy-in from all levels. I think that’s when a four-day week initiative could go wrong. When we do scoping exercises for organisations, it can falter when management aren’t seeing eye to eye within themselves or with the staff under them. There’s always a risk there. At the same time, running pilots is also a good opportunity to reassess things like company culture, and company organisational dynamics, because it is a process of thinking about work processes and how to work better. There’s a chance to co-design the workplace through it, basically. So, there’s an opportunity there as well as a danger.

I see there being a number of different avenues through which the shorter workweek can become policy: firstly, government policy, either as a public sector employer or as a policy maker, secondly, trade unions coordinating action, and thirdly, early adopter, first-mover employers. The employers who want this see it as something they’re pioneering, they are recognising, whether for recruitment or retention reasons or for reducing sickness absence. Early movers are very important in the history of working time reduction, they’re all part of this wider push. This means that pilots are a very important part of this, even if they’re not going to change society on their own.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What’s happening with the UBI trial? What problems does a UBI address in the present and potentially in the future, too?

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

This is a proposed trial of two micro-pilots in England — 15 people in each area — in London and Jarrow. Micro-pilots are a tried and tested method for getting a relatively low-cost pilot off the ground in certain locations. The sites were chosen after community consultation with a number of different locations across the UK, and those two were very keen on exploring the idea of basic income. The proposals were designed in close collaboration with the community itself as well as with Northumbria University and Cleo Goodman who works at Autonomy. The pilot is proposed for two years, at £1600 per month which is what we consider to be a near maximum kind of basic income amount.

We want to test what a full basic income would do rather than test a lower amount, the optimal version. We’re currently in discussion with a few different sources of philanthropic funding. I hope it gets off the ground — it’ll be England’s first basic income pilot. There’s one in Wales currently which is quite exciting, but it’s only for a particular kind of person, which is care leavers.

What could it solve? The impetus behind basic income proposals can be found in all sorts of different initiatives throughout the last 150 years. One early example was Eleanor Rathbone’s campaigning for a widows’ wage during WW1 or for universal child benefit, or a mothers’ wage, which was an early version of what the Wages for Housework movement would later demand. Interestingly, many of the arguments and principles put forward by Rathbone and the movement she was a part of were similar to many arguments today about basic income — things like allowing for a shared distribution of the value produced in society to all, dissolving the idea that to survive you have to engage in the labour market, and so on. Advocating for universal security, allowing people to survive outside of the labour market, this can also be seen in, of course, Wages for Housework, but also the National Welfare Rights Organisation in the 60s and 70s including people like Johnnie Tillman who was campaigning on a much more radical platform than Rathbone. This meant expanding economic security by distributing incomes for all which is at once an argument about distribution of value but also, for those campaigners, a way of exploding those categories of more valuable or less valuable citizens, (usually based on whether you’re a worker or not). That’s an important philosophical point.

One specific issue that something like a basic income in places like the UK would alleviate would be the hugely unfair, unequal, and often cruel welfare systems that we’ve had for generations — from the workhouse to labour exchanges to Jobseekers Allowance and now Universal Credit. These systems have been designed to make life outside of work intolerable and ingrain an understanding that the only way that you're going to be able to survive really is if you're looking for a job, no matter what that job is.

Looking to the future, we’ve already seen in the last few years that we’re presently jumping from crisis to crisis — things like the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the 2008 financial crisis and so on, and with the increasing climate catastrophe we’re moving towards — there are all sorts of unforeseen things. We can expect a century of tumult if the last decade or so is anything to go by. Something like an unconditional income floor is a security that is more adequate to these changing conditions than the current welfare system, which was designed in a post-war period where full employment, at least full male employment, was the norm — when it wasn’t really expected that you’d be thrown out of work or have to take on part-time work for long periods. Our system, in short, allows a lot of people who don’t fit neatly into boxes to fall through the cracks. In the future, there will be lots of disruption in the labour market, either internally or exogenously, and basic income will help us prepare for that.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Which book or other text would you recommend to people who want to read about work or democratising work?

[.cdw-name]Will Stronge[.cdw-name]

The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 by Daniel T. Rodgers. It’s one of those books that revealed to me whole swathes of labour history which I wasn’t aware of before. It details a transition from an era of self-employed craftsmen in the mid-nineteenth century to the onset of the wage system and the factory system. There were all sorts of experiments in cooperativism and democratic control as a response to the undemocratic nature of the factory and waged workplace. There were movements too for shorter working weeks, to limit the amount of time that people had to spend in these horrible waged factory workplaces. The wage system was seen by many as an abomination that should be done away with and at the same time, it was a radical catalyst for political responses to it. It’s a really fascinating book which I’ve just learned so much from; you’ll see it pop up a lot in my and Helen’s book.

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