Nibbling and cribbling at our one precious life

How an industrious revolution contributes to feeling broken (a reasonable response to an equally broken university system). New research out this week.

A a kid I tried to make my easter egg keep its shape by taking no more than a nibble. Which naturally led to another little nibble. And another. When the egg finally broke I felt the kind of utter devastation that only a child can feel for the poor quality chocolate that was somehow made magical by being egg shaped.

The Factory Inspector reports that were Marx’s key primary source for Capital, reported the “petty pilferings of minutes” that bosses took, “nibbling and cribbling at meal-times.”

Nibbling and cribbling at academic time - the substance that constitutes our one precious lives - has been going on for so long that, a bit like my childish easter eggs, it can no longer hold its shape. A colleague this week describe themselves feeling ‘broken’ by this semester: ‘there’s just nothing left’. In Capital Marx said:

The use of my labour-power and the spoliation of it are quite different things.

Yes, quite.

Broken, is also the title of a forthcoming book by Graeme Turner, describing both the feeling of scholars working in universities and the current state of these precious institutions. On his blog this week, Graeme pointed to the management practices that are exacerbating scholarly stress, pushing them to what feels well beyond breaking point:

First, you reduce the involvement of academic staff in strategic decision-making. Then you tell them as little as possible about what you plan to do, or even what you have done already.

On this side of the world, job cuts loom - and keep looming and keep looming so that the uncertainty is breaking people whose work means they are already too busy. On the other side of the world, government interference is making it impossible to do the work that is urgently needed. Everyone working in this system deserves so much better.

And it is not only scholars. Medicine, healthcare work, school teaching, law - in a 2023 paper, I wrote that ‘a relentless increase in service-sector productivity … is worn on professional bodies’. This highlighted a problem that was not quite captured in the 8-hour movement or other class conflict over the length of the working day: industriousness.

This week a special issue of History Australia focuses on industriousness in twentieth century history. I convened a symposium on this with Ellie Shermer and then edited the special issue with Matthew Bailey. Matt and I wrote in our Introduction:

work discipline came to be internalised not only as a matter of a Weberian interpretation of the Protestant work ethic, but also as a matter of internalised human capital accumulation embodied as a relentless anxiety to do more and be better.¹

Carolyn Collins and Paul Sendziuk in ‘The Power of Suggestion: Engagement, Industriousness and General Motors–Holden’s Suggestion Plan’ describe the ways that welfare capitalism sought to enable workers to be industrious in their souls, rather than by coercion. The suggestion box was an established management tool of long standing that came into its own in the post-war period. Seeking to combat ‘irresponsible absenteeism’ by workers objecting to the dirty, dangerous work GM expected them to perform to make Australia’s first Holden cars, when combined with a range of other welfare-focused initiatives, the suggestion box was a managerial success, at least on the surface.

In ‘Precious Energy in the Slums of Our Cities: On Industriousness and Housing in Post-War Australia’, James Watson shows a growing connection between productive labour and urban planning, which began with anti-slum activism earlier in the twentieth century but culminated in housing policy as part of post-war reconstruction. By the end of the Second World War, arguably won on a combination of technological innovation and productivity growth, the policy of full employment sought to simultaneously end joblessness but also to stimulate worker industriousness, impeding, as did Puritans of earlier centuries, the devil’s influence on idle hands by keeping the working class busy.

In an attempt to reconsider the disciplining effects of schooling in the manufacture of compliant workers, members of the Education Reform Association established an alternative school in Melbourne, which ran between 1971 and 1987. As Jessica Gerrard and Helen Proctor recount, the desire to free children from the constraints of traditional education required considerable industriousness itself, from teachers and the community. Encountering tensions and contradictions in the application of freedom to the pursuit of learning, the school took so much voluntary effort to run that its supporters risked burnout. It also meant that overworked teachers had no recourse to industrial action, since there were no bosses. The moral economy of the community-run alternative school, it turned out, might be less ‘exploitative’, but demanded as a moral duty and social obligation an unsustainable level of authentic and passionate work. Industriousness, Gerrard and Proctor argue, was so embedded in the idea and practice of schooling that, despite (and in fact because of) all efforts to produce an alternative, just by being a school (of any kind), industriousness remained an inescapable measure of educational success.

Although there were many vectors by which workers might internalise Protestant work habits, in his contribution to this special issue Joshua Black shows that during the 1990s recession Australians were encouraged to develop a new productivity consciousness. In the aftermath of Labor’s 1980s reforms, ending the 1990s recession, economists and political leaders believed, would require a massive surge in productivity. Much of this was achieved by mass entry of women into the labour force but it also relied on workers (including those women, who were increasingly populating the white-collar professions that the ‘new’ economy demanded) internalising productivity consciousness in ways that would purposefully boost their industriousness.

The length of the working day was the site of longstanding negotiation in retail, which by the late twentieth century came to be dominated by women. Matthew Bailey and Robert Crawford show that there is a strong relationship between retail opening hours and growing consumption needs in households – both forces pushing work hours longer, making work time less uniform and more precarious and reducing both desire and opportunity to contribute unpaid labour to the household economy. The transfer of effort from household labour to paid work, also boosting consumption, is a key shift that enabled economic growth and changed family relations in Australia.

Ana Stevenson simultaneously explores both the production and representation of industriousness in Australia’s parliament house. The sexualisation of parliament as a high-octane workplace, including notorious cases of sexual violence, is just one of the consequences of the pressure and workload. Drawing on political satire, Stevenson demonstrates the ways political humour was able to capture feminist concerns about the combination of industriousness and sex, including sexual harassment in advance of serious journalistic exposés and legal cases. In so doing, Stevenson helps show that industriousness is not only a discourse frequently internalised as evidence of success, but also a coercive and patriarchal system.

By historicising industriousness in this way, this collection of research reveals structures that coerce workers beyond our traditional focus on the length of the working day. Ways of encouraging workers to internalise innovation, discipline and productivity as elements of selfhood expose the flexible techniques that capitalism has deployed beyond its initial claim to worker time, into the twentieth century and up to the present.

I am particularly proud that this special issue also demonstrates the growing agility among Australian historians in crossing boundaries of business, cultural and labour history to reconsider capitalism and its consequences for the present.

1. I am smarting a little from a comradely review of Virtue Capitalists who criticised my ‘embrace’ of human capital theory. Searching my heart for unrequited adoration of the theory that I didn’t think I had embraced, I was happy to find a mild clarification in this article: Forsyth, Hannah. "Education as economic stimulus in the human capital century." History of Education Review 52, no. 1 (2023): 1-13.
Human capital is a problematic category. It not only fails to capture what we hope for human beings, but also, deploying this category aids in the commodification of human work in ways that reduce the political possibilities embedded in labour. Nevertheless, it is important to use it here, not to prop up the ideologies that it underpins, but rather to help us see the ways this investment in human capital shaped 20th century capitalism more broadly.

It is our job to understand these logics, which does not mean we embrace them.