| Rest Is Resistance | Tricia Hersey | Casual |
| ...enslaved people worked twenty hours a day in the blazing sun. The reports of working from 4 a.m. until midnight, every day is unimaginable and earth-shattering to me... I remember once sitting outside on a hot summer day, barely able to breathe and thinking about the brutality of working for twenty hours straight in this level of heat every day. My throat became tight as tears rolled down my face imagining my Ancestors bearing this madness. To learn that my Ancestors' bodies were pushed to a machine-level pace of production, as plantation owners experimented with what a human body could sustain, is a grief I will probably hold forever in my heart and in my body. |
| On the Clock | Emily Guendelsberger | Casual |
| Do not listen to this nonsense. Don't be cruel, but be firm. Escape is possible; things don't have to be like this. The current way we've arranged our society is not inevitable, and it's far from natural. America got this way because we spent the past half century outsourcing the running of society to technology, data, and free markets - even though none of those things can tell if everyone's miserable. |
| Do Nothing | Celeste Headlee | Casual |
| It's time to stop viewing your off-hours as potential money-making time. It's not worth it. You can't put a monetary value on your free time, because you're paying for it in mental and physical health. Do not let corporate values determine how you spend your days and what your priorities are. |
| Caliban and the Witch | Silvia Federici | Academic |
| Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle - possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. |
| Do What You Love | Miya Tokumitsu | Academic |
| What could be a greater gift to oneself than self-employment, the true source of worker autonomy? To refuse the surveillance and discipline of managers, to work in honor of one's unique visions, to forgo the PMC in favor of individual practice... And yet, for most, the reality of self-employment, entrepreneurship, and freelance work exacts a high cost. Most obviously, without a large, continuous contract, the income is anything but steady, making any kind of long-term planning (home buying, retirement planning) nearly impossible. Furthermore in the United States, flying solo means forgoing premium employee-sponsored health insurance, employee-matching retirement savings accounts, and paid sick leave or vacation time. |
| Lost in Work | Amelia Horgan | Academic |
| That our jobs are one of the only places in which people can express themselves is a travesty. It's not that people should not find fulfilment in work but, given the time demands that work places on most people, and the destruction of and cuts to other sources of meaning and fulfilment, there are only rare chances for other moments of fulfilment. |
| Work Won't Love You Back | Sarah Jaffe | Casual |
| ...users on today's Internet are something more than just the product - they're more like a self-checkout counter where the thing they're scanning and paying for is themselves. The users are being sold to advertisers, but they are also providing the labor that makes these companies profitable - labor that is unpaid, and indeed invisible as labor. |
| Over Work | Brigid Schulte | Casual |
| Researchers have found that desk workers in an office setting tend to be interrupted about every three minutes. And after that colleague has dropped by or we've switched screens to check email, texts, social media, or a pinging notification, it can take, on average, twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds to get back to where we were. Over and over and over throughout the day. |
| Cubed | Nikil Saval | Casual |
| Nilles enthusiastically concluded that telecommuting was a viable option. He mentioned hesitations: supervisors would no longer be able to control their employees; and workers themselves might miss out on the social atmosphere of office life. But the company went forward with it. As soon as it began to be effective, the project was canned. It turned out managers felt threatened by telecommuting: they weren't able to control their employees in the same way as before and had to change their methods. |