Abolition is both destruction and reconstruction; in abolishing work, you become able to create it anew. For too long, “work” has been synonymous with waged work, with the work we long for an escape from. And everything else becomes the “life” that stands in opposition to work, as if work were somehow an equal to the life it sucks dry.

But what if work was all the change we make in the world, with all the people we make that change with—colleagues and comrades, neighbors and friends, kin in all the kingdoms. What if work wasn’t only what we do at work, but all the ways that work moves out into the world, and all the work we do elsewhere—whether in our homes or in our streets. What if our work is all the things we give a fuck about? What becomes possible then?

— @aworkinglibrary commenting on André Gorz’s, Reclaiming Work

https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/everything

#Books #Reading #Work #Unions

#books, #reading, #work, #unions

Drucker’s subsequent description of the insensate labor of unskilled men in factories draws almost entirely from Taylor’s portrait of them—and accordingly condescends to their abilities to plan and organize work. In actual fact, it wasn’t so. Before Taylor, work was already organized by teams of factory workers, who in large part had control over how they worked. The knowledge they applied to work was largely “tacit” in nature, agreed upon among workers themselves rather than “explicit” (to borrow a famous definition from the sociologist Michael Polanyi). What Taylor sought in particular—indeed, what constituted his signal obsession—was to extract this tacit knowledge and install it in another set of people, the “industrial engineers.” Drucker called them “the prototype of all modern ‘knowledge workers’”—a plausible assumption but one that excised the tremendous amount of knowledge that already existed in the work process.

it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers.
There have only ever been workers

— @aworkinglibrary
https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/knowledge-workers

#Work #Life

(as someone who began his work life on the factory floor, cleaning CNC machines, and have slowly moved along the spectrum of work to now doing devops, I’ve experienced every single inch of the journey above. )

Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/112794289198355889

#work, #life