Other Duties as Assigned (Part IV)

Some thoughts about "unemployment" and anti-labor sentiment.

This is Part IV in a series. Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part III is here.

The labor of love, in short, is a con.

-Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back

According to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the US unemployment rate is currently 3.8%. BLS defines this rate as “the percentage of the labor force that is unemployed—receive wide coverage in the media”.

The word “employment” contains an implicit value judgment. To employ means to put to use, to utilize. An employee, in this framing, is a useful tool; to be unemployed is to be neglected or possibly rejected from use, to be unused or useless.

And to be employed is a passive-voice construction, with who or what is employing you (and for what purpose) left unstated. The fact that BLS and other official government sources use and formally define the term unemployment suggests that our society has a set of powerful preconceptions about the nature of work, one that implicitly makes workers the object and those who p…