It is raining. You had a difficult day. Your dear colleagues’ robotic VoIP voices have been hurting your ears for hours on end. The office lunch delivery service did not bring you the sandwich you ordered. You wasted hours dealing with layout improvement of a report you have been writing for three month (but that nobody will read, by definition of a report). But before thinking about suicide [about ending it all], you decide to ease your frustration with a comforting delivered dish. Damn, you deserve it. You open your Uber/Deliveroo/Take-away app and you end up choosing a duck ramen. Once it is ordered, the app informs you that Rachid, your personal deliverer, will brave the rain to feed your stomach. Your half-warm half-cold ramen finally arrives at your place on time. As you enjoy your meal, you are thinking: ‘Uber is fantastic. While having a regular job, these delivery boys or taxi drivers can work overtime as much as they want, be self-employed and manage their time as they please while avoiding a boss’ blind authority. Uber has greatly changed employment’s ecosystem. As opposed to regular companies, Uber has no employees but partners. This makes all the difference. Here is society’s new black.’ In this short article, I will argue that this new way of working is not an epiphenomenon. It is a deep mutation of our society, both on its economic and social aspects, which started far before Uber.
Giving more and more economical liberty de jure to individuals is not enough to build a coherent policy and make individuals willing it
To understand this mutation let’s go back to its origins: the eighties. Eighties rhymes with pop bands wearing flashy colors and bling-bling rappers. This fric et chic decade is tightly entangled with a very special economical and political landscape : the fall of socialism(s) (both in Europe with the failure of the first Mitterrand government, and in USSR with the adoption of the Perestroika) and the rise a new kind of liberalism introduced by leaders such as Thatcher and Reagan : the neoliberalism. The latter promotes an absolutely free trade and demonstrates a skepticism against the welfare state and regularization of institutions and markets. Since the eighteens many concrete reforms has been adopted in order to enforce and promote a more liberal society. But giving more and more economical liberty de jure to individuals is not enough to build a coherent policy and make individuals willing it. Indeed, one can promote all economical liberties for an individual (by the way of official speeches or laws), but if individuals does not consider themselves – in their inner nature – free, this liberty is a lure, an artificial and theoretical utopia only possible for rich people. Given this prior skepticism from citizen against neoliberal speech, how the latter arose to settle itself as a coherent and globalized political project ? The key of success was not to force individuals to embrace this neoliberal politics but instead to modify, through speech and companies’ structure, the conception of the social human being itself.
All these seems pretty abstract, isn’t it? Let’s take a daily example. When you are at the supermarket what kind of announcement do you hear? “An employee is needed at the grocery department” or “An associate is needed at the grocery department” ? For sure the associate name is far more used that employee. In many companies nowadays, the employee is now a associate1; he/she doesn’t execute a task, but works on a project; he/she doesn’t receive a warning but a feedback; his/her boss doesn’t fire him/her, but his/her N+1 gives him/her a new opportunity for his/her career… All these lexical transformations inside the company, linked with new management practices, has absolutely changed our perception of work inside a company. This perception is no more vertical (hierarchy, tasks to execute, constrains) but tends to be horizontal (partners, projects, brainstorming, opportunities). According to this new vision, the individual inside the company is like a free electron, a talent who have an absolute liberty of joining projects, joining companies, leaving projects, leaving companies2. As a matter of fact a Uber driver, despite having all disadvantages of self-employment and losing all advantages of an employee status3, is considered as a talent full of liberty and not depending on any boss. This conception of individuals inside company is now absolutely coherent with the macroeconomic injunction of neoliberalism: free markets hence free workers and vice versa.
Of course this paradigm makes workers more free than before offering them all possibilities for blossom them deeply in their job. Worker can be considered as, what Nietzsche called in German, Ubermensch4(superhuman in English), a pure creature of willingness with no determinism due to its social background, with hands capable of changing its live by the force of its mind. All this sounds pretty optimistic. But this ode à la liberté has his dark consequences. If we take for granted the previous, then everything is under our control for the best and the worst : if you are happy in you job, it is because you successfully created the opportunity in order to be so; but if you cannot be happy in your job, it is your fault, you did the bad choices. All companies give you the liberty – and, even more, the opportunity – of being happy and if you are not, it is because you wasted it. As a consequence, nowadays, some workers in leading companies feel hunted by the culpability of not being happy in their job despite all babyfoot parties and expansive team buildings they are generously offered. Are they majoritarian or only exceptions ? I don’t have the the answer. Nevertheless one can doubt that workers are happier now than before. There has never been so many Happiness Officers5 in companies and has never been so many burnouts. We have never spent so much money in masseurs to distress the stressed workers instead of changing profoundly the management to make it less stressful. I don’t believe birthday celebration cakes, free all-you-can-eat breakfast and casual Fridays will make workers profoundly happier. Maybe the problem is somewhere else. One may argue that working conditions are far more comfortable now than during the industrial revolution. That is true. But this position ignores the power of the discourse, especially on its performative aspects. Namely the worker’s mindset is radically different now from a century ago or even forty years ago. Not only work regulations change our daily relationship to work, but the surrounding narratives impregnating our lives as well. Due their highly symbolic content, these narratives creates representations and underlying injunctions (for instance being happy at work). I do believe that the problem of unhappiness at work depicted before lies more in these neoliberal implicit injunctions than in legal and objective working conditions.
Finally, this paradigmatic change in work organization has somewhat impacted new forms of entertainment: the rise in the eighties of self-development books pretending to make the reader happy in 40 days and in 40 chapters. One can criticize or not the efficiency of such practices. Nevertheless, they all promote the vision of an individual strong and capable of changing his happiness mindset just by himself, without taking into account the (sometimes) strong external social injunctions. A vision defending a hyper individualization of the individual, just in phase with neoliberal theory. It doesn’t mean that these books promote some kind of capitalistic posture. Most of them don’t. Nevertheless, the axiology of these works (and their success) relies on exactly the same background as neoliberalism (in its philosophical perspective at least).
So, what to do now ? One may consider this article as fatalist, as negating every once of liberty and free will in the individual or as promoting a deeply deterministic human nature. However stating that the human is (partially or totally) determined by external factors doesn’t imply a defeatist fatalist posture. In philosophical terms : metaphysical determinism doesn’t imply moral fatalism. In lay terms : being aware of the existence of external factors we cannot change and trying to deconstruct (or, at least, being aware of) neoliberal narratives doesn’t imply that everything is fucked up, pointless, vain and hopeless, and that there is no way to change it. It just states that we cannot blame exclusively ourselves about our fail of being happy at work. Our happiness mindset depends on external social factors we can’t all control. Perhaps accepting them will lower the weight over our shoulder and open new perspectives.
Uber is just a tiny example among many others of the radical change we have been facing for forty years in our society, both on its economical and individual aspects. For now we are all Uber-mensch finding some solace in duck ramens after a difficult day doing brainstorming, iteration meeting and touch bases. But at least we know it. And this makes all the difference.
1 If you are not convinced, just have a look on the carrer page of leading companies websites and assess the vocabulary used. As a bonus, please enjoy holliday message to associates (!) of Walmart : https://one.walmart.com/content/usone/en_us/company/news/top-stories/associate-holiday-video.html?cid=1wmrep
2According to this paradigm, we live in a job market which is like a supermarket: we can choose whatever we want, nobody forces you.
3 For instance, Uber workers do not benefit from unemployement benefits as equaly as regular employees, they are forced to pay back a certain percentage of their rides to Uber but they have niether control either negociation on this percentage and are prone to an arbitrary rise of it.
4 Yeah, you got the title of this paper !
5 Happiness Officer is a very strange new specie of job consiting of making people happy at work or at least making their work hours less depressing.