Reddit ‘antiwork’ forum booms as millions of Americans quit jobs
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I think that unless you are working minimum wage you don't get to call the sub "nihilistic, apathetic or zoomer adhd" if anything most of the members were essential workers during covid and struggle to afford basic living otherwise they would not be angry.
I am very surprised by the comments in the thread to be honest, if you work in tech, your job is pretty much useless the code you write doesn't "advance humanity" I mean let's not kid ourselves tech jobs are pretty overblown in importance compared to essential workers.
Really hope we do some thinking before taking this hostile stance, if anything we should stand by workers who suffer from shitty working conditions.
EDIT:I worked minimum wage, no wage no health care.. I worked really different shitty jobs in risky setting and there was always an implicit solidarity in the workers group, when I moved to tech (very later on) I was surprised by the toxicity and grandeur some people show as if building to-do apps is all that's left from moving to the next level of civilization, some humility and acceptance would be good along the way especially since we're lucky to have the opportunity to work remotely, great salaries and benefits and the ability to spend time doing something we like.
I worked as an essential worker when I was in high-school, and the amount of shit I had to put up was insane. Your boss is screwing you over, one way or another, the people you service demand you treat them like they are the most important being in the world. I don't say it happens to everybody, but for a lot of people, this is the reality of wage labor.
Screws are essential, but you can probably go without a few and if one breaks you will just throw it away and get another one.
A graphics card is expensive, and the computer might still work in some core ways without it! Yet that you might try to get repaired and go through an annoying RGA process to get a new one.
Which type of worker is the screw and which one is the graphics card?
Phrased another way. All workers sell their labor, but some people are effectively capital by themselves. A factory buys a piece of capital (the machine that creates the product) and the laborer.
The hospital hires a doctor who is both the piece of capital and the laborer. It makes sense that there is a higher price tag when a person is also the the machine that makes the product.
That capitalists value people and treat them nicer when they are also basically a piece of capital makes perfect sense.
If you want to also consider the worker's point of view, you need think of things like cost of living vs salary and unionizing. Computer part analogies are much too naive for that.
Sense you seemed to miss the point. Capitalists dont care about you. The dirty secret though is that communists/socialists view you as a cog in a machine too. Every large system will.
For the record, my intention was to contrast that to the antiwork sentiment, and how it is understandable, if not a direct consequence, starting from the "capitalist" model of thinking about work.
I try to advocate for pacifism as much as possible, but it's miracle and a blessing more acts of domestic terrorism/conflict aren't committed, and I wouldn't be surprised if starting see more (in the US). I strongly believe Covid is nothing more than a "Test" -- not by some divine entity, but if we, as humanity, do not take climate change more seriously, then we haven't seen shit yet.
We'll have even more displaced, disgruntled, and broken people.
People can only take so much before they break e.g. 1917 Russia
Like Voltaire said, "When the poor have nothing left to eat, then they will eat the rich."
I hope all these selfish "knowledge" workers can disassemble, clean, and reassemble an AR-15 because if shit hits the fan, knowing the ins and outs of dependency injection in next month's Bullshit.js and your salary + total compensation won't save you.
>if we, as humanity, do not take climate change more seriously, then we haven't seen shit yet.
Are you advocating for domestic terrorism in the name of climate change?
Of course this has a human face so it makes more sense to attack it on the basis that it's some sort of extremist movement akin to a disguised racist forum :/
Half of the antiwork sub is just bringing that mentality to the lower paid workplaces, that when you've got a bad boss who is hiring new people at a higher salary than you, then you should find a new job that pays better and fuck all the loyalty nonsense. Bad bosses deserve to be stuck with bad employees or no employees. Nobody should put up with that. Workers should be aggressively suing over wage theft.
But cue the emotional meltdown over how they're all just complainers, while your job hopping is just smart...
Company loyalty for thee, but not for me...
These are people whose idea of a bad day is when their code has a bug in it, or their home theatre system took too long to update, or the food they ordered wasn't perfect and delivered with a huge smile by exactly the kind of person they're trying to deride.
Many won't know what it's like to not be able to heat their living space or be without a reliable car or tell their landlord rent isn't going to be made this month.
So it's not surprising they don't get it. Life is fine for them. The boat shouldn't be rocked, everything is working as intended so long as it's working for them.
It seems to me that many are blind to the fact that there's generations of people coming through who are getting dudded on the "work hard and you'll at least be comfortable" agreement of previous generations.
Instead they're learning that they'll work hard and that's all they'll do until they die.
Wage stagnation, sky-rocketing cost of living, deteriorating working conditions, ever increasing requirements for jobs, unpaid internships, wage theft, rising inequality, astronomical housing costs in large chunks of the western world. "Once in a lifetime" economic meltdowns happening every 10 years (and nobody getting nailed for it) on a dying planet with clowns at the helm.
If they're lucky they'll get some of the wealth when their parents die.
They've been invited to play a game of Monopoly that's 98% complete and people wonder why they're not overjoyed to be playing all the while listening to older generations to just march on in with your resume and demand to speak to the manager about a job
I'm surprised they haven't burned it all to the ground. Maybe one day they will.
I'd be more interested in hearing what social class they're in.
>What about this https://hbr.org/2021/09/who-is-driving-the-great-resignation ?
>1. Resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees.
>2. Resignations are highest in the tech and health care industries.
Your source doesn't really contradict the parent comment. The top posts in the subreddit don't match the demographics in the hbr article. Looking at the top 30 posts this month and filtering for anecdotes, I see:
1. some sort of office worker that works weekends
8. something about a skilled tradesman
12. salesman at a dealership
13. a worker at some sort blue collar job (mentions "work boots" and "work pants")
19. someone working at starbucks
20. someone who works as a "Underwriter"
21. someone who has an "engineering degree" but was offered a $40k/yr job
23. someone who is being asked to wear uniforms
26. welder
29. police academy
I'm not sure about you, but from the sampling of these posts, the anecdotes seem to be mostly people working blue collar/retail/service jobs. Programmers and doctors are not present at all.
I don't think it's a minority though.
Yes, something like this actually deserves to be removed, especially when it reaches critical mass. Because it does more harm than good to the extent that yeah american youth are just going to get dominated on a global field if most of our zoomer ADHD youth equate having a boss to slavery.
And it doesn't matter at all how few people may or may not participate in this particular subreddit. This is the third time I've seen a post about the subreddit in mainstream news. It's popular and the sentiments are only going to grow with more time and more encouragement, to our detriment.
I have no idea about the other subreddit you mentioned, but it does sound superficially like a spot racists would meet up. But it's been banned so I'm just judging it by its title.
The sidebar literally advocates for abolition of work.
They won't ban antiwork because it encourages giving up, consooming, laziness, weakness. Exactly the kind of NPC audience reddit milks money off of. Ad revenue, reddit gold, buying emojis, constant scrooolllling, etc.
You are just naive, there will always be authoritarianism, forever. You're just on the receiving end or the administrating end.
There is an argument that a subreddit could be out of line with the site, and not hosted. Granted it would be a bit of a stretch given the kind of content on reddit. I don't think r/antiwork crosses any line, but it's really up to reddit
The problematic behaviour is advocating for a ban on the discussing these ideas.
… so all in a days work for reddit?
- Would it be that most people could choose not to work? (I.e under some kind of UBI program?) I’d like to not have to work ;)
- Would it be that the benefits and pay for many jobs would be vastly improved? That also sounds pretty nice.
- Maybe it’d be that companies have to compete harder to be actually nice places to work. Also a good thing.
What exactly would be to our detriment? Something about lack of work ethic? But why does that really matter? Is it so that we can maintain technical prowess? But why is that important?
What if we were happier and less stressed instead? We’re really failing hard in America to consider our economic systems from the perspective of human flourishing and quality of life.
So, I find your comment very strange. What are you so scared of with the movement for better working conditions such that you want it to be outright banned from the internet?
People wanting to "abolish work" may rather leech on society, it is a consequence of social media brainwashing: gambling, crypto, FIRE, 4hww, etc. These concepts have wide scale, harmful implications for the future of humanity
* What you feel /r/antiwork stands for based upon your interpretation of the title?
* What a couple of anonymous posters on the forum wrote?
* What the essays in the FAQ actually argue for?
Leech on society... I think you've got this backwards. The "leech on society" is all rent-seekers.
Maybe we should ban landlords, seems they're pretty leechy by just holding onto a residence so they can make people who can't really afford it, pay them just for the privilege of having a bed to sleep in....
Should a doctor or nurse be paid as a restaurant or retail worker? Who is the "essential" worker? Look at the market, tech is becoming more essential, not services.
If you don't upgrade your skills and stay stagnant, you will be decimated. If you are young, you can still learn and adapt, change careers and industries.
You cannot afford to think like a boomer anymore: adapt or die. This is the harsh reality.
The market is far too irrational and complex to assign essentiality based on salaries or valuations.
You seem to be bringing up the hoary "learn to code" lesson, but plenty of people trying to make money in crypto or achieve FIRE are former coders themselves. In their view, they upgraded their skills.
It means you are exploiting those who grow the food you eat and produce the services you consume for nothing material in return.
From the remaining workers point of view, since there is nothing material available, it would be better not to produce the surplus consumed by those choosing not to work and have Friday off instead.
Stuff doesn't make itself. Most of us work in solidarity with the farmers and the service workers that make our comfortable lives possible.
Whatever r/antiwork is, it's none of these three things.
For contrast: nihilism would be proudly not wearing a mask in public spaces during a pandemic, because reasons, and then bragging about it.
> something like this actually deserves to be removed
Absolutely. Because complaining about wage theft is worse than actual wage theft.
Imagine a world that censored complaining. That'd be a world without Outlaw Country. That's not a world want to live in.
Johnny Paycheck - Take This Job and Shove It https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj2iGAifSNI
We are free to imagine and strive for a different world than the one we find ourselves in, and I would argue those trying to stifle that are the ones who should be banned from forums.
> Over a million people are members of a subreddit called r/AntiWork, whose slogan is "Unemployment for all, not just the rich." While the page and movement have been around for awhile, discontent with the state of the labor market has been growing since the pandemic. Many workers are refusing to accept the conditions and pay that were the norm prior to the virus. On this episode, we speak with Doreen Ford, who also goes by Doreen Cleyre. She is a moderator of the AntiWork subreddit as well as the founder of AbolishWork.com. Doreen explains the growth of the movement and its philosophical underpinnings.
* https://player.fm/series/series-1504378/this-is-the-booming-...
* https://open.spotify.com/episode/2YK3j1IsQAxj0JXHIplX6h
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-the-booming-mo...
What makes this gaslighting attempts so mind-numbingly pathetic is the fact that even some FANGs, which are supposedly references in terms of high-quality, highly-paid work, are renowned for their poor working conditions and hiring processes. And they have been known for that for around a decade, now.
If this is an expected occurrence in high-quality work in fields where the job market is firmly on the worker's side, why are these guys trying to fool everyone into believing that abusive workplaces are completely unheard of in other less fortunate sectors?
Regardless of class of work (white vs blue collar), a bad manager is going to destroy any job satisfaction that might have been derived. Contemporary workforce management is a skillset that doesnt get taught in school, and in all of these low skilled jobs that are posted to /antiwork, people are being managed by probably equally low skilled managers.
Throughout my career, every job I have left is largely because I didnt like how I was being managed. That has always been the impetus to go out and apply for a new role.
The best manager I've ever had was in warehousing temp job, and I'd go back to him in a heartbeat if I wanted a break from corporate drudgery.
Managers generally have very little latitude-- they're given X many resources to do a task in Y amount of time, and that has been chosen for them.
I am not defending bad managers-- but, they are there precisely to deliver to you the bad work environment that the CEO would rather not have blamed on him.
If I am being asked to go above and beyond in a role, but the same is not being asked of my coworkers, or I see HR policy against staff being enforced selectively, this is the classic 'bad management' that immediately gets me offside and I am no longer as interested in work.
Restaurant management is more like "Four necessary people didn't show up today, so you get to juggle bussing tables and doing dishes while you argue with the ones who did turn up about the extra work they'll have to do."
Anyway why do you care so much about what your coworkers are doing or how policies are being applied to them? You don't know what's going on with them, why not just focus on your work.
Muley: You mean get off of my own land?
Agent: Now don't go to blamin' me! It ain't my fault.
Muley's son: Who's fault is it?
Agent: You know who owns the land. The Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
Muley: And who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company?
Agent: It ain't nobody. It's a company.
Muley's son: They got a President, ain't they? They got somebody who knows what a shotgun's for, ain't they?
Agent: Oh son, it ain't his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
Muley's son: All right, where's the bank?
Agent: Tulsa. What's the use of pickin' on him? He ain't nothin' but the manager. And he's half-crazy hisself tryin' to keep up with his orders from the East.
Muley: Then who do we shoot?
Agent: Brother, I don't know. If I did, I'd tell ya. I just don't know who's to blame.
So you are saying the buck stops at the heads of the rich class? Sounds like Marxism is back on the menu for the 21st century, we can all be the "investors" if the means of production don't belong to the old investors.
Most of us in the tech world have the benefit of huge salaries, amazing benefits, and a lot of control over our working conditions. And yet many, if not most, of us still experience a significant amount of work-related stress.
Why should anyone accept this as the status quo?
Your concept of tech world must be very narrow.
Now it’s been taken over by more radical takes, going from “screw my boss”, “we should get more vacation time” to straightforward Marxist talking points and desires to abolish work. There’s a place for those discussions and they’re interesting to have, but it’s ruined the sub
The generation after millenials has seen how the millenial hard work essentially ruined their health (some of us got out lucky, like myself), with 0 reward besides deference to some boomers. So I think we're going to see quite a revolution in our lifetime, the new generation doesn't feel like fealty and recognizes that capitalism is really just crony capitalism. The explosion of information on the internet makes it easy to see how corruption and nepotism is 90% of everything, with 10% getting lucky + hardworking.
Who knows what will happen, I just hope we end up with healthier lives for all.
Is this referring to a specific trend or statistic?
I would argue that capitalism is just modernized/liberal feudalism. Money and land and other legal monopoloes are still driving forces of power and they are being abused in the same way.
Honestly, let them all be damned. In capitalism everyone wants to become the rentier, including me. What's my motivation? I want to protect myself from all the other rentiers.
I've been following /r/antiwork for a while and I never stumbled upon anything remotely similar to the story you've made up. Practically all comments are in the line of "good for you for quitting", "you should have done it sooner", "why even put a two weeks notice?", "You should talk to a lawyer to not get screwed over". But feel free to link to posts that support your personal assertion.
Also: how is “more vacation time” a bad thing? US working culture is so toxic people think workers don’t deserve more leisure time. No wonder people start looking for alternatives to capitalism
Seriously? snapshot from jul 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190703081543/https://old.reddi...
looks like it was always like that. Looking at the sidebar:
>Links
>Bob Black - The Abolition of Work
>Abolish Work - An Exposition of Philosophical Ergophobia
>Related Subreddits
>r/marxism_101
https://web.archive.org/web/20190430233904/https://old.reddi...
A classic economist would say that the 1st example proves that its the same as cash and thus nothing much should change, but behaviourally there is endowment bias etc. I wouldn't be surprised if paying people in savings/investments and then letting them liquidate would result in a much higher saving/investment rate than giving them cash and expecting them to invest.
Btw religions forbid interest for very good reasons.
By preventing anyone but rich people to have access to capital, while at the same time sounding like a policy that most people would support?
As an economist, I still think consumer lending (excluding consumer lending that is actually funding investment like mortgages and vehicle financing) in 2022 is pretty questionable and only economically logical in a minority of cases, and that it would make sense to restrict/regulate some of it more heavily.
My current success rate with the above two things on this day within a 30 mile radius is 0%
It's going to work, everyone will blame them, and Covid keeps getting ignored.
I must have missed the memo about the hoards of workers being disabled by long covid. Can you link me to it?
>Bunker estimates that roughly 20% of Covid cases in the U.S. turn into long Covid, and that at least half of that slice isn’t able to work. Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, that’s 4.6 million people.
So 153% of people out of the workforce have long covid? That seems a bit high.
Naturally they'd align with a competitor system, most likely the most prominent one
Tbh, though, from my brief reading of the subreddit in question, I don't think it is particularly politically charged or cohesive. Sounds more like a lot of people with aligned complaints gathering to, well, complain
Curious to see whether this will extrapolate from the US to other places, too
While the growth of the subreddit has somewhat polluted the term on the Internet, "antiwork" referred for years before the subreddit to a particular line of socialist thought that often rejects labor outright.
Texts like The Right to be Lazy (1883), Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), and Willing Slaves of Capital (2014) are all decidedly Marxist and indicate that this line of thinking has a pretty long lineage in socialist circles.
Wtf is going on? Social media seems to be a common vector and facilitator but is this just the start of the human race eating it's own tail, or is this being done to us?
Given the scenes a year ago, finding out what's happening feels important. Combatting it without also limiting social reach also seems impossible.
I wouldn’t be surprised though, if there’s a lot of karma farming, some of it even automated.
I suspect these were driven by bot votes.
Any "funny" picture with a well known brand obviously placed in it? Definitely.
By contrast thes (the current top 2 posts) seem pretty organic to me though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s07qh6/presented_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s07uk4/i_work_at_...
source?
>By contrast thes (the current top 2 posts) seem pretty organic to me though:
what makes these more organic than the ones in "general topic forums"? Is it just because "well obviously most people would be pro-minimum wage, therefore any comment that's for minimum wage is organic and any that's against is bots"
Millions of Americans demand government relief from crushing poverty!
I don't know if they try and add these things to their portfolio, but it definitely makes a perverse sense, ie 'look my writing even fooled X people on reddit!'
Honestly I believe nothing anymore without some digging, and really it's something that's gotten worse as every year I feel like we are living in a world of lies- politics, ads, fucking everything.
Now, I do honestly believe there are many people that are legitimately unhappy and venting in that sub- I know more than a few people in real life living out some of those stories.
Just...use critical thinking skills. And try not to let it kill you inside. I am become jaded and cynical, but because I'm a realist.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/s0auu4/apartme...
If these repeated posts about the same tedious things are grist for creative writing classes there are some really realistic sounding, terrible writers out there.
It sounds like you might be extrapolating from one or two pieces of spurious anecdata.
So what exactly seems inauthentic about the top story on the forum? Who would make that up and why?
"It's the internet lol everything is made up" is, frankly, a bit edgelord as a rationale.
If you want made up look at the vote counts for any picture with a coke bottle or a UPS truck in it.
Coz Im struggling to see how you could believe that the 99% of overwhelmingly mundane stories about e.g. giving notice or how to deal with health and safety issues at work would become grist for creative writing.
It makes zero sense.
Yes, the boring posts are probably real and I never claimed otherwise. But the posts people remember and engage with are not the boring posts and have a much more mixed track record. There have been cases both of "someone creates updates with an impossible resolution/schedule", "post describing the opposite point of view of a recently popular post comes up" and "post touching on hot-button internet arguments". You can argue that only the first category must be a fake, but the rest pop up with a suspicious frequency.
Similarly, you could see a big jump in the number of legal issues relating to whatever excited bestoflegaladvice recently. It doesn't seem likely that there's a sudden uptick in the number of people who have neighbors cut down their trees, or who have a landlocked property.
Reddit opinions/posts tend to be predictable enough and most users don't notice the repetitive comments, or just don't care.
source?
Sorry, just excercising a safe amount of scepticism with regards to social media.
What a stupid post. If your first reaction to someone questioning a broad social movement in 2022 as a conspiracy theory is to go directly into a deeper conspiracy theory then it's pretty likely you've already made up your mind about the underlying topic and aren't approaching the discussion in good faith anymore.
Edit: this is especially true after watching 4 years of the federal government waging an internal war between two factions about how much "influence" a foreign power had over our social media and elections.
I don't think someone who puts this in their bio is qualified to make that comment:
> One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.
You're lucky that not many people will tell you exactly what they think of that, thanks to HN guidelines.
shalmanese 1 hour ago | undown | parent | flag | favorite | on: Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without he...
One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.
Then I'd do the same Luigi-like low key messing with them for a while. My favorite was when a friend had a VNC server running on their machine with control capabilities. I would sit next to them and subtly jerk the mouse pointer right before they were about to click on something and it drove them mad for a good 20 minutes before I couldn't hold onto the giggles anymore.
edit: To add a bit of context, this was in the Windows 98 era, before the age of social media where we started putting all of our secrets onto our machines. And it was among a group of friends where everyone was trying to hack everyone else and pretty much anything was considered fair game. All of us were high school kids so there wasn't some super serious reputation we had to protect.
From where I'm standing, the stupidity that stands out is how some people are desperately trying to gaslight themselves and everyone around them by trying to depict people chatting about workplace abuse as being something outlandish and utterly inconceivable.
I happen to stumble upon posts from /r/antiwork and I have to say that personally I had the misfortune of experiencing far worse than what's reported there on any random day, and in western European countries where workers rights actually exist and are enforced.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29867733.