Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wasn't All, and I'm Tracy Halloway. Tracy, we've obviously done a number of episodes about the so called labor shortage, but as you know, we kind of expressed and it's sort of the case that we almost always hear about this story from the perspective of a frustrated employer having trouble or you know, finding solutions to hiring people.
But usually like we don't get the other side, which is the perspective of frustrated workers and why workers may not be wanting to take jobs that they might have
taken pre pandemic. That's right, So we hear a lot from companies or businesses that are saying, you know, all our workers are resigning and we can't figure out why, and we're giving them higher wages, and we're offering to pay or college tuition, and we're providing flexible working arrangements, and still no one wants to come work for us. And I think in one of our recent episodes you were talking about starting a beige book for the labor market, which might be able to get at some of this
because in some respects. It almost doesn't feel like an economic shift. It kind of feels like a cultural one. Yeah, that's the thing. Like everyone sort of poked around for different theories, and I think they all hold like some validity. You know, there's probably an element of still very significantly the pandemic itself, whether that's affecting childcare arrangement or the desire to go to a work site. I think it's real early retirements maybe due to the wealth effect, could
be a thing, some changing of perspectives. I think a lot of people are burnt out over the last two years, or realizing that they were burnt out previously, and that could be shifting things. So, you know, lots of theories, some supported by data, some supported by anecdotes, but you know, there's not like one, from what I can tell, like one answer to why this is. And I don't think we're ever going to get one answer. No, I think
that's right. But you mentioned anecdotes, and there's one place that has become sort of the go to place to get those anecdotes about the great resignation and about people quitting, and it is of course the sub bredit, the anti work subredit. And if anyone's ever seen those screenshots of people quitting in a really satisfying way. I have to say, you know, responding to bosses who are just being completely jerks. That's where a lot of those get posted. Tracy, you
can I tell you something. Yeah, I want to quitted job in a really satisfying way. Did No? I didn't. What did you do? I was working at a deli making sandwiches and I don't know, my boss annoyed me and I totally overreacted and I just like, that's it. I quit and I threw down my apron and I walked out and it felt really good. And then ten seconds later I was like, oh, I got I just quit my job. I don't have any money, but it
did feel really good. Anyway, I'll tell you the longer story sometime, but anyway, yes, let's get to the point at hand. As you mentioned, the subredit are anti work has been exploding. I think it was a pretty small one at the beginning of the year. Now over a million members, I believe, absolutely surging, sort of capturing this zeitgeist that gets beyond economics of frustration with the labor market from the from the perspective of employers or employees
or would be employees. So I'm very excited we're going to be speaking to Dorene Ford when either original moderators at our anti work Dorene also goes by the pseudonym Dorene Claire online and she was the founder of abolished work dot com. And so I'm very excited about this. We're gonna be learning about what the anti work movement is all about and what brings people to the anti
work subredit. Drene, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, absolutely, man, I I really would have loved to see you throw your apron down on the floor. That that's like out of a like a Hallmark film or something like that. It was really it was really satisfying. It was like I was overreacting a little bit, but I was annoyed. And my boss said something about how you messed something up, and I felt like I was you know, I was a pretty good employer, and it was like I've had
enough of this. Yeah I've had enough of this. Yeah, shocker, I've I've had I've had really frustrating bosses. Never quit though. Surprisingly I'm pretty I'm pretty stubborn, so yeah, no, then, you know, I had to quit anyway, I think I had known that it was. It was a bunch of stuff getting going on anyway, during Thank you so much. You're subreddit and you're one of the earlier you were one of the founders of it, but an early moderator. Why do you just sort of like give us the
basic gist. How small was it at the beginning of the year, how active is it now? And sort of like what is what is it stand for? What does the anti work movement mean? Yeah? So, I mean you say we were small last year, but honestly, I don't know. A hundred eighty thousand isn't too small, I guess not. We are around a hundred eighty thousand in October or November of last year, but that is incredibly small compared to where we are, which is about one point three million.
We call them idlers, but you know, you could say subscribers, followers, users, whatever you want to do. Yeah, I mean it's exploded. We were just featured on the reddit recap of one red. The reddit st stats are apparently that we blew up please pause for effect, two hundred and seventy from where we were last year. I don't think I've ever seen
that statistic in my life. And I'm a big nerd and I've read a lot of political statistics and economic statistics, and you know, I'm not like super big into numbers, but I don't think I've ever literally ever heard anything blow up to two D plus what it was the year before. Um, so yeah, I mean we're big now.
We had nine D ninety thousand users who were active yesterday, probably because of the Kellogg strikes now that I think about it, But yeah, what we stand for so anti work and my abolish work dot com are are overlapping in a lot of ways. My Abolish Work is my personal website, so you know, a lot of that stuff there is gonna represent my personal opinion, not necessarily the opinion of the entire movement, while the anti work subreddit is more about the movement at large. We're a pretty
big tent movement. We have leftists of various kinds, anarchists, communist, social democrats, et cetera. You know, people who are curious, people who are just liberals. Pretty much, anyone's welcome as long as you don't use the rules, abuse the rules. And you know, obviously we're not super friendly towards conservatives or you know, anybody further than that, of course. Yeah, what we stand for is is ideally a reduction of work as much as possible. And what we mean by
work is not effort right. We're not against people going in the backyard breaking up some leaves, putting in bags, whatever. What we're against is this coursive element of work that makes people have to work long chips for jobs they don't like, for that are not paying them enough, and as we've already learned, under jobs that under bosses that don't respect them or annoy them, or whatever may be
the case. So that's that's a lot of of the philosophy is reducing the amount of jobs that just have no use for society, the amount of jobs that don't give respect to their employees. It's not necessarily anti job, because I don't think even in the anti work society, I think people will still have jobs. I just think that they will have jobs that don't have that course
of element. You won't necessarily be worried about oh I can't look, I can't not work, or I can't you know, because I'm disabled, or because I have to take care of my family, or I have to do this or that because you know, I might lose the house, or I might not be able to pay rent, or I might not be able to pay bills. So this is this economic course of element that we're trying to eliminate.
You know, a lot of people just think like we're lazy, slackers or something like that, And like, I think laziness and slacking off is actually a good thing, especially in an economy where you're asked to work so often and so consistently, especially in jobs that burn you out, even when you do something you love. I work with dogs, and it's so easy to get burnt out on something that you love when you do it too often. But yeah, that's that's a bit of what we're about. I don't
want to go out for too long. So the subpred it itself has been around for a while, I think since early but clearly, as you were laying out, the membership has a number of idlers has absolutely surged. What is it about the past year and a half or so that that you think has made the message of anti work really resonate with a lot more people. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is obviously COVID.
It's realizing that your boss was lying to you, that you didn't need to come up for the show, up for that meeting, that the commute wasn't that that one hour commute there and back wasn't necessary for the job, and that you've been wasting hours of your life listening to podcasts that you're not even sure you wanted to listen to. And I say that as a podcaster, by the way, I think will realize that, yeah, I don't. I don't have to do a lot of this stuff.
And I'm I'm pissed because my employers are taking advantage of me. And it's pretty clear now that they don't care about my health. They care about the wages that i'm that they have to pay me. They're worried about their profits, they're worried about their stockholders. They're not worried about me as an individual. They're worried about me as an individual unit of economy. Because of the pandemic, I think a lot of people woke up to that. You know,
I'm big into video games. There has been a big shift in the video game industry for remote work, and even some companies instigating or implementing excuse me, four day weeks and stuff like that, or at least talking about it. So I think this has been a seismic shift and how people look at work. The other reason, the second reason, I don't have a ton of things to say about this, but people are really going on about the great Resignation. I'm not an economist, and despite what I said earlier,
I'm not a statistician. So I don't know how true it is that people are quitting in droves, but that seems to be the perception at least, and perception few was reality. So a lot of people, you know, are reevaluating their relationships to work. That doesn't mean everyone's quitting, but a lot of people, but at least some people are quitting, I guess, And so that's fueling other people's reactions to like, okay, like this is how I see
myself related to work, and that's also fueling membership. We also, of course blew up because this is the third and final reason probably we had this. We were talking about screenshots earlier. There was a tech based screenshot with a person who told the brass off. I don't know if they threw an apron, but they told the boss off, and they basically blew up. They got to the front page of Reddit, which means we got to the front
page of Reddit. And I mean we were already blowing up, you know, to be honest, at that point, we were getting a lot of really popular posts. There was thousands of people on at a time. But I mean that really took us into the stratosphere. And then of course the media attention started. I mean, we've been we've been covered. I guess this is the fourth reason, but it's really related to the third. We've been covered in Vice like three or four times at this point, the New York Times.
We have been asked to be interviewed by German, Scandinavian and uh a Dutch news outlet. You know, we've been featured on Today, dot Com, Refinery twenty nine, Forbes. So yeah, we we've been all over at this point. Uh And so yeah, I think all that, all that stuff has contributed, and now even the Odd Lots podcast. I want to ask you, so everyone experienced some or not everyone, but a lot of people from a range of sort of socio economic positions experienced some major change to their lifestyle
over the last two years. And some people it just meant, you know, their normal job day to day that they did in office and working from home. But there were obviously a number of people for the first time in those early months especially, we're freed from the connection between having to work and having to sustain themselves, which is
pretty big. And these checks that went out that did a decent job for a lot of uh work, So we got laid off of almost fully replacing their income, and that lasted for several months at the beginning of
the pandemic. These checks expanded unemployment insurance. How formative in your view were those months in this sort of like the experience of can separating income and being able to self sustain from having to go into work In terms of just getting people to sort of like reevaluate their existence and their relationship to employment, I think it was really impactful. I mean, again, I can't track aftery one's individual motives for joining the subreddit or for giving my
site traffic. There's been It's quite a sort of a down a downflow trickle down theory, if you will, of the subreddit getting a ton of attention and therefore my website getting like a modicum of that. I think I get a couple of hundred views if I'm lucky per day, which is great because honestly, I don't really write for it anymore. Moderating has become kind of like what I used to do in terms of writing, and I'm happy for that, honestly, because is all I wanted to do
with the site is have the movement. I'd be like this, So, I mean, in my mind, I've succeeded. The website doesn't really need to even exist, but I just keep it up because you know, some people have told me that their writings have inspired them or or influenced them, uh and and change their mind about things, which is super
flattering and deeply honored about that. But yeah, to get back to your question, Yeah, I mean I can't I can't know everyone's individual motives, but I'd have to say that that would absolutely be something that would that would fetch a lot of people for us, is that they're reevaluating their positions to their income, to their bosses, to
their work. Um, I hope that answers that. So just on that note, I mean, one of the things, well, tell me if you disagree with this, but one of the things that stands out to me from a lot of the screenshots and the conversations with bosses um and those sorts of stories of quitting that end up on the subreddit. It's it mostly seems to be about people getting really really angry at the situation and at their
bosses in particular. And I don't know, you don't see that many complaints about things like wages or long working hours. I mean, it's mostly it seems to be service people who are getting really mad because their boss has asked them to go on a shift that they hadn't agreed to, and it's just assuming that they can kind of control
their employees live. So I don't know, I'm curious if that's your impression and how you sort of weigh those different factors when it comes to this trend of people quitting. There there's a lot of stuff in the background, right that we just don't see and we can never know, like a screenshot can only and I mean this literally figuratively. A screenshot can only capture so much about a given context that people are coming from, and so we don't
know what led up to this moment. We don't know if if wages were a thing beforehand, or if their boss has always been a jerk to them as especially you know, women have to deal with sexual harassment in the workplace and stuff like that. We just don't know if people what their context is. We just know what conversation led to them finally quitting, and so it's a death by a thousand cuts kind of thing, right, It's there. There might have been a million different indignities before that,
but that was the final straw. But on the other hand, yeah, I mean, you're not wrong that a lot of those texts screenshots aren't talking about wages or they aren't talking about better working conditions. They're talking about, hey, I don't want to come in for the shift, or hey I've had enough with this job. You know, they say I've
had enough, they haven't said like specifically what. But like in casual conversation, you're not gonna necessarily get into that because you're kind of You're the whole point is that you're kind of done and you don't want to waste your time on your boss. So it lends itself to a kind of casual conversation that unfortunately doesn't give us a lot of data on why people are quitting or telling their boss to shove it. But I do think that a lot of those things don't help, for sure,
people getting underpaid or people getting overworked. Um, I know when I used to work and a dog, it's not really a kennel, but it was like a doggy daycare. I was overworked the heck it was, you know, and I didn't it wasn't feeling like I got paid well enough for ten bucks an hour and I was doing
the job of probably two people. You know, there's just all these little indignities that I think don't get brought into the context because people, when people have had enough, they're not going to start eloquently going on on about their wages or or anything else like that, because I think they're done. But I still think it's a great I still think it's a great point, um that we largely don't see that. You're right, this is a really interesting thing. You described the feeling of the stress of
having to work two jobs. And we actually we did an episode recently with Stinson Dean and he owned a fleet of one of his businesses involved in logistics, and one of he one of the things that he said that made hiring easier was purposely over hiring so that nobody feels like, oh, they can't take a day off, or they're like, you know, having to pull extra shift
because that's at stress. But it seems like then there's this compounding effect where okay, we think of labor the frustration with the labor market is okay, employers, workers quit, and then bosses are frustrated, and that's probably true, but then that also must must place a lot of extra strain on the workers who are still there, and to the extent that bosses don't recognize that extra strain or don't appreciate the extra lift that those remaining employees are
engaging in, and then that further makes the job undesirable, and that that further probably increases the impulse to quit. I think that there's a large scale pattern of employers under hiring and making sure that their workers feel overwhelmed
and stressed. I know that sounds conspiratorial. I'm not the conspiracy type of person, but like I I've seen like lots of people talking about this, lots of of patterns of abuse of employers just under hiring so that their workers always feel stressed, never feel like they can take a day off, just have to work, work, work, and they do this just because like it's just easier than over hiring. It just makes more logistical sense to them. I guess to just under higher than over higher. That
way they don't spread out, you know. That way, they don't have to pay more people. That way, they don't have to train more people. But there's some logical sense to this, it's just a very twisted logic in my eye. Um, And I think over hiring is a better practice. Absolutely. I think you would have a less stressed out workplace. I think, you know, abolished work. The the anti work movement, I should say, is not just for this sort of long term goal of having an anti work society and
and undermining capitalism and replacing with something else. You know, those are great goals. Those are our long term, I think, core goals. But I don't think we're against shorter term progress either necessarily. Um. I think it would be great if this practice of under hiring employees would be would be cut out. I think that would save a lot of people a lot of straps, especially around the holiday times.
It would give a lot of people more piece of mind. Um. I don't think on the job that I talked about, I almost never took a day off unless I was incredibly sick, or unless I I just couldn't make it, or yeah, I mean that was it. I don't think I ever took a day off, and I ended up getting fired from that job because I basically like slacked off too much. Like, of course, I slacked off too much.
I was incredibly overwhelmed, Like I had to clean room after room and after room, day after day after day, and I had almost no one to back me up. And I had been there at the longest anybody. I think I had even been longer there than the owner. And how is that possible, Well, because they had switched owners in the two years I was there. That's how bad the business was. They were still doing this practice
of like under hiring, and people were burning out. I would see new faces almost every month, if not less. It was terrible. The problem in the pet industry really for me and my experiences that they care way more about the animals than they care about the people to such a degree that I mean, it's just it's just
raises your eyebrow, I am. I want to go back to UM some specifics about the COVID situation, and one of the unusual things about and the way the government actually responded to this health crisis and also economic crisis was that they gave out extra unemployment checks, so people got more money if they lost their jobs. And I'm just curious what your impression is of the role of those,
you know, additional unemployment checks or stimulus payments. Was it you know, people got more money from the government, so they just didn't want to go to work at all and they didn't have to. Or was it more that people got money and they had a sort of bridge that they could build between jobs that they couldn't do before. I think the governant like stimulus packages were like putting a band aid on an open wound kind of the or like a gaping hole, you know. I I think
it was a It helped a lot of people. Don't don't get me wrong, it helped me. Um, I'm I'm not very rich myself, so it's certainly seeing that six hundred, eight hundred whatever that a few times was great. Uh, it was a bit of a shot in the arm to my wallet. But I mean, ultimately it's just not enough. I think for a lot of poor people, being poor
is really expensive. The economy is tailored in such a way to make being poor very expensive, whether you're buying take out, whether you're buying snack food, whether you're trying to engage in some entertainment outside like movie theaters. A lot of things are just really expensive if you're poor. And so unfortunately, although that that was a nice gesture and it helped some people, I just don't think it's
enough to say that it was a bridge. I think uh, And I think it was certainly helpful for people who didn't want to work, and of course, why wouldn't they why would they want to work, and we were in the middle of a pandemic. I could from experience that it didn't really help me too much in the long term. Basically when I tried to file for unemployment because I had been fired. And this is the only time, by the way, in my life of almost ten years working or so, that I had ever been fired, So it's
not like I had a history or anything like that. Yeah, when I filed for it, I said, well, my my roommate is immuno compromise, so I don't think I'm gonna work anytime soon. And they're like, okay, well then you're not getting unemployment. I like but I don't want to kill my like like you know. Things That was still when the pandemic was fairly new. We weren't sure about
how viral the infection was. I knew to wear a mask and stuff like that, but the vaccines hadn't anywhere come anywhere, weren't anywhere close to being come being out at that point. And so in my experience, you know, what really helped me was the college I I went to, because they dispersed some excess funds that I hadn't used for my loans and they gave that back to me. And that is really what coasted me along for the
rest of the year. Uh was I was able to not have a job for most of and of course, again my my roommate was immuno compromise. I didn't want to have a job anyway because I didn't want to risk killing her. And of course now we have vaccines, we have the booster shots, we know proper mass protocol. Things are a lot different. Um and I have have a couple of part time jobs and at work and I'm at school full time. I don't really think it
helps people. Uh in my experience, of course, I can only speak for myself, not for all of America, but my general impression is that, yeah, like I said at the beginning, it was like putting a band aid on a gaping hole, like it's a it's a nice gesture, but it's not much more. I'm curious you mentioned to kill Ogg strike as being a very, uh, sort of big moment in terms of bringing a lot of attention
back to your site. I talk to us a little bit about how you see the labor movement and strikes, and we have seen a lot of strikes in more this year than recently. We have seen a seemingly pick up an interest in the idea of unionization. What's what's the relationship sort of in your mind between sort of your broader goals, the abolished work goals, and what the
labor movement unionization can do for workers into here and now. Yeah. Absolutely, Um again, Uh, that's a great question, and I again want to reiterate that the the anti work movement is absolutely for short term benefits for the workers and stuff like that. You know, I would be I would be happy if better wages, better working conditions, less boss interference, and workers you know, more cooperatives, worker cooperatives that is were formed. Yeah, I'm a big proponent of unions. I
think they're great. We did a Reddit talk. Unfortunately we couldn't record it because Reddit doesn't have that kind of functionality yet, but it will very soon, so when we do the next one, uh it'll have we'll be able to record it. But we had a Reddit talk, which is basically like a live podcast, and a lot of
the moderators came on to answer the community's questions. And in the second hour we had a couple of people come on, and we had a user come on who was a union member and talked about out just very passionately for about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. We probably let him go on a little too long, but we were we were new to the whole thing, but very passionately about how unions have helped him, how they helped his wages, how they gave him more benefits. Just a very basic union.
It's not like, you know, a radical union like Industrial Workers of the World or i w W. It's not like, you know, he's looking for like completely radical things like the abolition of capitalism or something. Yeah, I think labor strikes and unions both have very much to do with the anti work movement. I think strikes and unions and direct action, which is basically like protests or you know, activism that doesn't require like a leader or doesn't require
a central head of authority to uh instigate. So I'm not really talking about like voting or anything like that, but direct action in general, I think is the way to go. I think direct action gets the goods, as the I w W used to say and still do say. And so yeah, I think strikes and unions have a very big place. Yesterday I was in a convenience store and I was getting some cereal. I looked around and I was like, oh my god, Like almost everything is Kellogg's.
I bought like a different brand, but like it was like one of the few brands that was in Kellogg's. Like the monopoly they have on cereal is wild. It's so imperceptible because we're just so used to it. But I think if you really like look and like be mindful of it, look, I think you'll you'll notice, like how much of a monopoly they have on Siria's ridiculous. So yeah, all my best to the workers who are striking. We are considering pinning a thread or two about the strike.
We just haven't come to a consensus on what yet, but definitely we support all the workers. Yeah. So you have been influential when it comes to supporting some of these movements and one of the ones that you were supporting was the blackout Black Friday initiative. How did that go? Yeah, so that was a bit of a mixed affair. I think we really jumped the gun on that. We wanted
to make a big impression. We wanted to do a big action, but unfortunately it kind of we kind of pinned the user's idea that was talking about a ten day strike, and that was not our original proposition. It was about a one day or three day strike at most. And someone started talking about ten day strikes. Someone's like, you know, let's strike year round, etcetera, etcetera. You know, we're a big movement, but we are not big in
the way that people think we are. We have one point three million people, but it's not like we all live in Arkansas. It's not like we all live in one given state. I just picked Arkansas, Rana, by the way. It's not like we all live in one state, one country, one city. You know, it's we're all dispersed across the world, so that one point three million, it's smaller than you think.
I'm not I'm not like diminishing the the achievments that we've we've reached, but I also want us to be careful about not getting ahead of ourselves, because one point three million is awesome, it's terrific, but it's spread out across the globe. And yes, most of our audience, if you've seen a recent survey we did, is from the
United States by and large. But even among the United States, you know, I'm sure as everyone here knows, pretty big country and and there's a lot of farmland and country land that's not even being used on top of that. So we're a big movement, but we're also an online movement, and I think we kind of forgot about that and got carried away and wanted to, like, like I said,
make a big impression. So what we did instead was we lad we lend ourselves to the make Amazon Pay campaign over the over the Friday Black Friday weekend, and basically it was just boycotting Amazon, pretty mild action, honestly, boycotting you know, their services and stuff as much as possible. Obviously, it's very difficult. Amazon's very entrenched in the whole Internet superstructure as it is because they use this they use this like framework called AWS or something like that. It's
basically based in everything. So it's very difficult to get away from Amazon. But we did the best we could with what we had, so we had to back off from the blackout, and I think a lot of people were upset about that. They felt we were going back on the movement. So many people call this corporate chills
or that we were selling out the movement. But I think and that's the that that's the rest of you run in a radical leftist movement, right, is that anybody who doesn't agree with you can sometimes be labeled, uh you know such. I mean, I don't think it's like super widespread, but the Internet definitely brings out that corner of like your your movement that's going to do that. Let me ask you a question if you don't mind,
I'm curious. You know, like when people think historically about labor activism or unions, I think, you know, people have this idea of people in hard hats holding their fist of the air, standing in a picket line outside of a plant or a factory with signs, etcetera. And of course that's still a very real phenomenon those images that
people historically have of unions. But on the other hand, your movement and a lot of what sort of like the interest in labor market activism strikes me as being a little more decentralized, a little more um, you know, as you put it, you're not you're it's an online movement, a little more ad hoc maybe direct actions that protests that aren't a result of like some union vote with a local union leader, etcetera. And I'm curious whether you think like ultimately, uh, you know, people you know, I'm
just sort of in your crystal ball. Do people like and they and they fantasize or they hope for a resurgence of a labor movement or union movement in this country. Is it going to look different in your view than what it historically has or could it be this sort of like big on the ground, uh, centralized unions, Like what's the future in your view? What does it look like? More like what you do are more like what they do.
I think it's gonna be I'm gonna be boring here, and I said, and I think it's gonna be a mix. The look the genies out of the bottle. We can't put the Internet back, God help us. I kind of wish we could sometimes, but like, we can't put the Internet back. We can't put technology back where it was, you know, really messed up. Stuff would have to happen for that to happen, and I don't want it to happen.
I like a lot of things about the Internet, even though I don't like a lot of things about the indreet To my boring answer is, I think it's gonna be a mixed I think there's gonna be the the on the ground, boots on the ground kind of kind of union organizing, holding the line, picket picket lines, protesting outside given workshop, where places, factories, whatever. But I also think, yeah, there's gonna be a lot of quote unquote sell activism.
There's gonna be a lot of online organizing organizing. There's gonna be a lot of like like mutual aid from online sources, you know, using go fund means or using India go go or whatever. There's there's gonna be all of these online ways that we've developed over the past twenty years, you know, Twitter and Facebook and all the social media to organize that. I just don't think it's
ever gonna go away. And and if you look at it, honestly, all of that union organizing that we're talking about, the boots on the ground, the Kellogg stuff, the John Deer stuff, I mean, like you said, there's been a lot of strikes this year, all that stuff has used online organizing as well. It hasn't just been boots on the ground, it's also been online. So I really think that speaks to my point about it being both. I think the future of union organizing is on the ground, but I
also think it's up in the air. It's up in the air, it's it's online. Mike crystal Ball is is on the fritz right now. But if I could give my best guests, I mean, that's that's what I think. I think we're going to continue to see more decentralized, affiliating unions, which is kind of what I want to see, you know, I want more and more unions. I want
unionization to come back. Um, it's so rare in the private sector and it's only barely a thing in the in the public sector, and even in the public sector. There are some aspects of it that are not good. There's you know, I'm not uncritically pro union. There are some bad unions out there that have union leaders that are not good or that just protect people that shouldn't
be protected. I'm not gonna get the specifics, but I mean, I'm sure some of the listeners can think about who I'm talking about here, Like I said, Crystal Hall in the Fritz, but I think it's going to be a mixed So you brought up pros and cons of the Internet, and I wondered if I could maybe ask you a
personal question related to that. But I imagine being moderator of an enormously successful sub breddit takes up a lot of your time, and I guess they're some irony there in the sense that you are providing a very valuable service and presumably doing a lot of work and not necessarily getting paid or compensated for it in a traditional way. How do you how do you sort of think about that and how you divide up and dedicate your own
time to these different causes. So my my answer to that is partly what I said the beginning, right, anti work is not anti effort. I I'm totally fine with putting a lot of effort into things that I care about, and I happen to care about the movement, So there's no contradiction. There A lot of people seem to think there is, but there isn't. Please please please go tell everyone that I'm not getting paid for this, because some people are definitely under the misapprehension that I get paid
for this, and I assure you I do not. I don't. I have like a perfect answer like no, it's not stressful at all, and it never gets all my nerves and I'm all but happy to submit my time to the movement. No, it sucks sometimes, you know. Some people are jerks. Some people troll us, some people flame us. Some people aid us, basically coming in from one subred to another where they shouldn't be and like spamming us.
I help run the discord and I help run the subredit, so I don't just run the subreddit, you know, not not to correct you, but just as specify you know. Yeah, it's it's time consuming, but that's why it's a collective effort. That's why it's not just me, it's it's a whole team of moderators on the subreddit. We're looking to expand
even more moderators, five to ten more moderators. And it's not just me, it's a whole host of people who are really good at this, who invest a lot of their time so that this community community can thrive, so people can feel safe, so people can feel comfortable. Is that unpaid? Yeah? But is it meaningful? Like, yeah, of course it is. I think also part of this, one of my fellow moderators pointed out, is people proving you don't need the profit motive to do things that are
that are worthwhile, that are valuable to other people. Like you said, we're providing a service to other people by giving them this platform to talk about their problems with work. You know. Is there some superficial, surface level irony. Of course there is, But we've got to work within the context of capitalism. It's it's like Nom Chomsky said, right, I'm not going to complain when my book is put in Barnes and Noble. I gotta work with what I got.
I'm paraphrasing, obviously he said it much better than that. Yeah, I think we've got to work with what we have, and what we have is unfortunately an incredibly flawed and broken system, or maybe it's working exactly how it's supposed to, but either way, it's not good. So we but we've got to work with it because we don't have the
alternative in place yet. But I'm hoping down the line we will, and I'm hoping that the subreddit and the discord and anything else is a good platform for people to organize uh and to subvert capitalism and to basically like find a different way, find a better way out of this life that demands us to subvert all of our needs to work. Let me ask you another question, and this is about sort of the difference between sort of personal activism and personal behavioral changes versus policy changes.
So boycotting Kellogg is a personal choice, or not buying anything on Black Friday as a personal choice, or simply refusing to show up and doing whatever possible to not work is like a personal choice. Then there's like policy choices. There could be a change to rules around minimum wages and so forth, And we see this dichotomy play out.
We see it in, for example, um the debate about climate change, how much climate change people should make personal choices, say not eating meat versus how much the pursuit should be on the policy front, whether it's a hard cap on carbon emissions or some sort of policies that reduce funding for major emitters, stuff like that. And so I'm curious like your view, like, how do you think about the two and which do you think is more powerful?
Is it the organic? Like we're just gonna keep growing the subreddit and growing the awareness about what you see is the unfairness of capitalism or are there like policy changes that you would hope to see eventually put into place they would meaningfully change how the economy is structure. Yeah, okay, great questions. So first off, I think when it comes to any kind of major issue, collective collective action is
the thing we need to do. My individual protesting Kelloggs yesterday by not buying apple jacks, I really wanted those apple jacks. It's not gonna affect Kellogg's. No uh, employees gonna get a better wage, No stockholder is gonna sweat, no boss is going to you know, chatter their teeth like, nobody's gonna care that. I didn't decide to do it. So that is really a personal choice, and I don't think it has a big effect on on the collective economy.
I mean, you know, I'm talking about the entire United States, and honestly, Kelloggs is a as a multinational corporation, so I'm not even talking about the United States. So yeah, I think collective action is where it's at, unionizing, striking, protesting, cards on the table. I'm an anarchist. I don't really think voting works. I only speak for myself. Not everyone in the anti work movement is an anarchist. Not everyone
agrees with me on that. There's been plenty of debate about how impactful voting is and how much we should vote for policies or politicians. Is the minimum wage and animating issue for you? I wouldn't say it's an animating issue, but I I certainly, like I said earlier, would welcome workers getting better wages. It's not a crucial focus point for me, but absolutely I care about what workers are making.
But honestly, the minimum wage, being what often people are fighting for is fifteen dollars is not even enough if you followed inflation over the years, at least from what I've heard. Again, non economists, not a statician, but from what I've heard, it seems like it would be much closer to twenty or twenty five an hour, which is wild to think about, but if you follow in inflation because wages have stagnated over the years, that's where it would be. So yeah, I would I welcome better wages,
of course I would. I'm not against that and I wouldn't fight against it. But I also don't think it's the anti works main drive. We're not just the reformist liberal movement that is trying to vaguely make capitalism nicer, right. I think I think it's great to make economic systems work for the people who structurally uphold it, like workers do. But I don't think that's the main point of our movement.
So yeah, you know, speaking just again, I gotta I have to emphasize because I don't want people to think, oh, well everyone's pie in the sky and they don't care about politicians or whatever. Like No, that's not the point. Like again, we have We're a big tent movement. We have people who are democratic socialists who really like Bernie or AOC. We have communists who think to some extent that voting might be useful. We even have some anarchists
who think that some some policies are better. I even just said the minimum wage would be at least be some kind of improvement and could be a short term gain for workers. Um But ultimately I think what we need to do is undermine and subvert capitalism by creating alternative economies, by creating all current alternative structures, by subverting the current structures that are in place, through unionizing, education, organizing, etcetera.
And that's that's really where I am. I I do think collective effort matters, but I just I think that it comes in the form of direct action. I don't think it comes in the form of policymaking or voting for politicians. But again that's that's me. So speaking of capitalism and alternative economies, I wanted to ask you about another sub credit, which in some respects kind of mirrors the the action or the development that we've seen in
the anti work subredit. But this is of course Wall Street Bets, which has absolutely exploded over the past year and a half. Lots of people stuck at home given the COVID situation, and lots of people decided to take up trading and you know, yolo their money on GameStop options or whatever, and Joe and I have been kind of curious about whether or not this is creating a wealth effect, So people might be making more money from trading crypto or meme stocks or whatever, and whether or
not that's a factor in people quitting as well. Is that something that you've observed or do you think there's much overlap between anti work and Wall Street Bets. There's some minor overlap, but I don't want to overstate it. Wall Street Bets is as a sub credit that is trying to have its members get rich off of capitalism. We are trying to fundamentally undermine and subvert capitalism. So yeah,
I think that there's some minor overlap. And it's not like people from Wall Street Bets are not uh not welcome, but I think we have very different goals in mind. Now, some people who want to get rich off capitalism through stocks and trade and stuff like that might be anti work or might want to be lazy with their money, but I don't really think that's the way to be anti work. Anti work is a collective, solidarity based community where you know, we share the wealth, we share with
each other. We you know, if I if I ever got rich, and I hope I don't ever because I don't really want that. But if I ever got rich rich, I would like to get to the point where I don't have to worry about money. But I don't want to be like rich, you know what I mean. If I ever got to that point, like that money is probably not going to me. It's probably going to other people, or it's going to organization, or it's going to charity, or it's going to somewhere besides me, because no, thank you.
But you know a lot of the people in Wall Street Pats are there for themselves, you know. And I'm not saying like, oh, I'm a perfect angel, or I've never made a mistake, or I've never or I would never I've never been selfish before, right, But I genuinely think that a lot of that movement is to just benefit individuals. It's not to it's not to create a better world, it's not to undermine capitalism, and it's not
to propagate an anti work ethos. Well, you know, it's funny when Tracy said, oh, I want to ask you about another subredit, I actually thought she was going to go to somewhere else that we've talked about and that is like the Fire movement and the idea of like retiring early, and that's obviously very different too, because those are people like I'm gonna try to make like two million dollars by the time I made thirty and then if I spend those those people I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Those people want to work themselves to death and then get out of their jobs. And I just yeah, I I just want to say, We've been dealing with the Fire movement for years, uh, and they and people have always been like, oh, this seems like the perfect place for fire, and I'm like, no, it's it's really not, because like we have very different goals. Yeah, that's that's
basically what I figured. But one thing though, I'm curious, Like in the movement, I mean like they're all about like sharing strategies so that like once they quit working, they can live as long as possible with you know, how to how to stretch their dollars as long as possible. Is there a sort of like self help or like collective tips in your world that's sort of like how do basically how to outwork that you got like sharing
strategies of work avoidance? Yeah, I used to do that. Uh, and then I'm sure it happens on anti work every day, people sharing strategies and tips. I will also say that if people want to book that I absolutely officially endorsed or whatever not as not speaking for the sub right, just from myself. But it's been prominently featured before and people have loved it. But it's called Laziness Does Not Exist. It's a great book. I recommend you have the author
on if you ever want. But they are an awesome, awesome writer. They have a lot of tips about how to take care of your mental health, about how to respect yourself and and and basically like make sure that you're not working as much. Talks about the myth of laziness. I really recommend that book I have. I've done an audio reading of the article version on medium dot com on my YouTube channel. It's a great book, it's a great article. It's called Laziness Does Not Exist. I think
that's a great place to go for sharing tips. But it just casually happens every day, you know. I I don't really keep track of it because most of the things I do is moderating, is keeping track of the people who are not doing that who are being jerks, who are being trolls. So I can't, like, on hand, off hand, tell you that, but I can tell you more more so on the discord that plenty of people like are sharing resources with each other all the time.
We have a support channel. We have heavier support channel for like you know, bigger topics and stuff, personal stuff. We have an ideology channel. We have a lot of channels on that discord that are about people supporting each other. So yeah, it absolutely happens every single day. Maybe, UM, to sum up a lot of the issues that were brought up in this conversation, could you give us your impression of what you think workers and employers actually owe
each other in terms of the worker employee relationship. Oh, I'm tempted to go all anarchists or anarchost cynicalists here and say the workers, oh, the boss is nothing. You know, I'm very moved by Buddhist philosophy these days, and I think that at the end of the day, we're all human beings, you know, even even even even the boss,
even the boss, even the boss. I'm saying it's more from like an anarchist perspective, because this is hard for some anarchists to hear, but even even bosses, at the end of the day, are people, and they have incentives from capitalism that I think are very distorted and very misaligned with being good and compassionate towards other people. And I think we have to be respectful and mindful of that.
That doesn't mean that we have to respect it, or that we have to go along with it, or that we can't subvert it, but I think it helps to understand it. You know, I've been friends with a manager before. You know, one of my best friends a few years ago Wasn't was my manager, and I had a very kind of strained friendship in some ways ideologically because I didn't agree with she was. She was my coworker previously,
so she had gotten promoted. I had kind of like an inside look at like the kind of distorted conflicts that she had about like, oh, you know, I don't want to say this to you, but I have to because it's coming from the higher up. And you know, if I could get in trouble, or I could lose my job, or you know, you could get in trouble, and I don't want that to happen. On some level,
I get it, you know. But on the other hand, it's a messed up system, and I don't although no one part is and truly and crucially responsible for the harm that comes out of it, workers have to rebel against it regardless. And unfortunately that is going to disrupt people's wages, that is going to disrupt boss operations, that is going to disrupt corporations. But I think that has
that's the way it has to be. Um. I think it is an oppositional relationship, and I think that employers own employees a lot more than the other way around.
I think in the economy we have, it's often seen as the other way around, that employees should fel thankful to employers, but really employees are the ones who are holding up the system, and employers are the ones who should feel grateful that workers are still going to work, especially during a pandemic, especially during uh stagnating wages, especially during a very hamstrong economy that just went through a recession ten years ago and probably still hasn't fully recovered.
So yeah, I really want to emphasize here that, Yeah, like I I think at the end of the day, everyone's a human being and they were deserved respect but at the also at the end of the day, capitalism is a very disrespectful system, does not treat people with compassion, uh, and we need to rebel against it. So there needs to be some balancing of like, my boss is human being, but also this system is inhumane and I need to figure away in my personal life to balance that. And
that's really important. I mean, I think that's a that itself is a very good encapsulation of what you've been saying. But you know, look, if you if you talk to managers and bosses or business owners, and we've certainly talked to a lot on the on the podcast, you know they're talking about like, oh, we're raising wages and in many cases we're lowering hours, and we're giving signing bonuses,
or we're offering free training, free education, free college. We hear that from big companies in particular, but not just big companies, all kinds of things, and you know, trying to come up with ways to make the work site a more appealing place for workers because they feel this frustration. What don't they get What is it that you know?
And I've seen some of this on on the subredit, which is that you know something is like, oh, there's an offer of a signing bone this, but then you know it's still like the devils in the details, or maybe it's hard to get or it screws over existing workers who don't get it. What do you think companies are still missing right now in terms of what it is that makes it hard for them to hire and why people are sort of like frustrated and don't find
many of these offers appealing. So, yeah, this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I think kind of what you were saying there speaks to what they're missing. Capitalism is the systemic inequality between capitalists and and employees, I mean, the bosses and workers. I think the hint is in the name right capitalism. You know, it's a system that centrally values employers over employees all the time. Systematically, that's the whole point of capitalism, and
they just don't get that. Small little fixes like signing bonuses, which as you point out, sometimes screwed over other workers, you know, are just not enough. It's not enough to undo all of the systemic inequality that is built up over the past hundred year. That's why we've seen all the union organizing in the thirties and forties. That's why we saw Occupy Wall Street. That's why we're seeing in the growth of the anti work movement. That's why you know,
so many, so many strikes have been happening. That's why all this is happening because capitalism is systemically opposed to workers getting their fair share, to getting their fair to when it comes to work, you know, And ultimately I do want to abolish work, but I want work to
be replaced by effort that's actually rewarded cooperatively collectively. Uh. You know, again, I'm an anarchist, so I'm speaking for myself here, but you know, without bosses, without corporations, without even the government, and so you know, worker cooperatives and worker collectives are the mainstay of that kind of economy. And people working for themselves too is something I'm not
opposed to. I think bosses just missed the fact. And even if you're not an anarchist, I think that what the bosses are missing there is if this is not a problem that could be taped up. You can't put bandages on on a gaping hole. You've got to like see like what is causing that? Again? Going back to Buddhism, like you've out of look at the causes and originations of like what's going on here? Like you can't just like mindlessly apply band aid after band aid, Like that's
just not going to work. Uh, the signing bonuses are just not enough. What you really need to do is what I think ideally should happen. Of course, I don't think any boss will ever do this, because capitalism doesn't give them incentives. But step away is let the workers do it, because the workers are the ones who have
the decentralized knowledge. Funnily enough, Friedrich Kayak, who is a fairly conservative economist on some levels, has a great theory about like why workers are the best suited to do that, Like they have the best decentralized knowledge to make decisions on the floor. You know, I spent I spent almost ten years in retail, and almost always the workers knew
what was going on more than the bosses did. There were some points when that wasn't true, but usually that was just stuff that was coming from up top, or hey, the boss of my boss is going to be here today, or some some background stuff that doesn't really matter to the customer or doesn't really matter to the community member or the worker. I really think that they miss out that the systemic issue, and you're not going to solve it with buying bonuses. So I just want to ask
you one more question. And I feel like i'd kind of be remiss not to ask it. But you said you worked, or you said you work part time jobs. You have to support yourself in some way. And I'm sure there's someone who's listening to this and they're thinking to themselves, how does she support herself. Does she's some kind of trust fund person or something, And how do you fit working and the need to support yourself to
need to gain income with your anti work ideology. Funnily enough, I have to support myself under capitalism, So I do part time work. I work with dogs. Um So, first off, it's a lot better than most of my previous jobs. I'm a dog walker by trade, question mark, if that's the right expression there. I spent a lot of time on my feet, a lot of time walking, but it's one of the best jobs I've ever had. It's pretty easy.
I get to don't tell my bosses, but I get to listen to a lot of podcasts, you know, I I love dogs, love taking care of them. So this job is a bit of a passion job for me. Now, I still feel burnt out. Sometimes there are times where the dogs want to play with each other and I'm just like, oh my god, it can't be bothered. This is just so much effort just to get you guys outside, let alone, like stop you from playing once you're on a walk. But um, I love what I do a
lot more than what I did previously. That doesn't mean I don't have bad days. That doesn't mean that I love my boss or or the owner or anything like that, but like it's much better than what I used to have now. Of course, does that make me some hypocrite on some way? Sure, whatever, I don't think hypocrisy if that is that interesting of an ideological conundrum. We're all hypocrites under capitalism, right, we all have to buy products
we don't fully support. We all have to give our tax money to a government that is still waging war all across the world. I mean, that's what Henry David Throau went to jail for, right, So yeah, I I we're all hypocrites on some level. I don't really think that's an interesting observation about me, you know. And yeah, I'm also a student, you know, a full time student, um in Boston. I'm I'm studying so that I could
become a professor. That's a lot of effort too, But again, you know, third time, not against effort and not against jobs. So I don't it's not really for me anyway. It's not hypocrisy on a big level. But yeah, sure, it's definitely hypocrisy on some level. I'm not working for myself for the most part, I do I I do have.
I am a pet sitter as well, so I also do some work for myself that is not done through a company or a boss, I should say, but it is still done through a company, is still done through a corporation based out like Seattle or whatever. You know. I have to meet too with what I got. Yeah, I support myself by basically two part time jobs and then sometimes school gives me some kickbacks if my loans
are overpaid or something, and that's about it. Then I also I also live with my partner, and so she and I will sometimes, um you know what will we usually split like food and rent and stuff like that, utilities, uh and bills and stuff so that makes it a lot easier to because living in Boston is not easy. Well that was great during Thank you so much for coming out. Yeah, absolutely, I love doing these. Thanks so much,
Orn Tracy. I thought that was really interesting. I mean I think, like, you know, obviously, there's like a lot there. There's sort of there's the anarchist philosophy, there's the feelings of frustration that people are just realizing, even if they're
not anarchists, with the way work works right now. And I think like this sort of idea of like digital organizing and sort of like luciffiliated online communities that push for some goal or that push for some impulse is just getting out more and more important, and we're going to be more and more powerful. Yeah, I think that's right. And also I thought what Dorene was saying about treating each other like humans seems to be an overriding theme and a lot of these discussions and a lot of
the posts um on the actual sub credit. So again to the question that I asked, like, often people don't seem to be complaining that much about specific work hours or specific wages, specific grievances, but it's usually you know, some sort of argument with their boss where the boss just assumes that these people are you know, able to work at at their back and call. Basically that kind
of is the tipping point for someone quitting. And I wonder, I sometimes wonder how much of the tension between workers and employers could be alleviated if people like were a just nicer and be if they were able to set expectations and actually stick to them. Yeah, I mean that is that's a really good point, and that's really good question. And this idea that like bosses don't have a sort
of restraint about these assumptions. And I think, you know, a lot of like what gets called a labor shortage really is a labor shortage at the standards that people were expecting two years ago. And the problem with that is, like why is that the standard? Like that there was a set of economic conditions that existed in twenty nine, but that was a set of conditions that it was
different than two thousand nine and nine. And there's this sort of like at any given moment, okay, certain economic conditions could support X or y, but the idea that things aren't normal or that there is a shortage just because oh, companies can't hire the way they did at a certain time is like this, like very weird like framing that I think is unjustified. Absolutely. Um. Now, speaking of anti work, it is eleven p m in Hong Kong. So shall we leave it there? Yeah, let's leave it there.
All right, let's create some boundaries. Okay, this has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Wi isn't Thal You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart and check out dury And She is a moderator or one of the moderators of the anti work subreddit go check it out extremely interesting and the founder of the abolished work dot com website. Follow
our producer Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesco Levi at Francesca Today, and check out all of our podcasts on Twitter unto the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening. Year