When you find yourself at a party and a stranger asks, “So what do you do for a living?” Usually our default answer is to describe the paid labor most of us do 9-5, Monday through Friday. But what if we consider the work it takes to buy and prepare food, care for family members, our homes, and communities? Isn’t the day to day work of homemaking and caregiving “making a living” too?

One of the many realizations we came to during our month-long #TheFutureOfWork campaign this past May, is that not only is the standard definition of “work” and how we make a living quite narrow, but that when we expand our definition of work to include the labor that nourishes life, it can trouble our core understandings of family, community, and the kinds of labor we deem valuable. We came to understand that the future of work is more than a 9-5 job; it’s about dissolving the boundaries between paid and unpaid labor, honoring caregiving and life giving labor, and making care freely available to everyone regardless of their family structures or job status. Much of what we grappled with during #TheFutureOfWork was how to shift power in the workplace and within our families, so that we can focus our energy on visionary world-building.

Our Cells to Liberation MCLE and panel discussion reminded us that there is an entire swath of the population — incarcerated people — whose labor is invisibilized and who are forced to labor for the state and private corporations, often for pennies or nothing at all. We learned how empowering prisoners to take ownership of their labor through cooperatives can be a “non-reformist reform” gesturing towards a more positive world building like Abolition — a radical, generative, and communal world building practice that not only envisions a world without prisons, but a world without coercive wage labor as well. 

In our roundtable discussion about how we nurture caregivers under capitalism, we learned how domestic labor became devalued and why it’s revolutionary to imagine this labor breaking out of the confines of gendered roles within the nuclear family. The important work of confronting and unlearning the internalized bosses in our minds became a touchpoint in our fireside chat about how we can all learn the important skill of collective governance. These are just a few of the topics we touched upon!

In case you missed it, here are the recordings, slide decks, and additional resources of all our offerings

[ROUNDTABLE]  Labors of Love & Care Work: How do we nurture caregivers under capitalism?

[MCLE] From Cells to Liberation: Are Cooperatives Controlled by Incarcerated Persons Part of an Abolitionist Strategy?; SLIDE DECK

[FIRESIDE CHAT]:  If We're Not Prepared to Govern, We're Not Prepared to Win

• Sample policies and agreements:
  • Movement Sustainability Commons Covenant and Community Agreements 
  • WSDN Board of Directors Legal Guide (including a Sample Board Resolution a board can pass to support worker self-direction in their organization)
• Resources to support building a shared analysis:
  • The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jo Freeman
  • The Activists Class Cultures Kit
  • Just Transition | Movement Generation
• Descriptions of organizational transitions:
  • If We’re Not Prepared to Govern, We’re Not Prepared to Win, Justice Funders
  • Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN)'s transition
  • RESIST Case Study of becoming a WSDN
  • Want Democratic Leadership at Your Nonprofit? Here Are Some Dos and Don’ts - NPQ
  • Remaking the Economy: Worker Self-Directed Nonprofits in Practice - NPQ
  • Making Economic Democracy Work: How to Practice Shared Leadership - NPQ

Before you watch our offerings, here are a few themes that emerged from our month of learning, discussion, and storytelling during #TheFutureOfWork campaign. We hope the following ideas can continue to shape the evolution of how we think about labor.

Theme #1: The interconnectedness of wage labor, state power, and the family 

In the MCLE panel, we learned about how the logic of Carcerality underpins not just our prison system, but our labor system as well. Law Center Staff Attorney Veryl Pow taught us that it’s an ideology that has permeated and supported the growth of legal apparatuses associated with punishment  — not just within the confines of prisons — but across all sectors of our society. It’s such a fundamental part of our society, it’s often difficult to imagine how things could change. But Veryl taught us that we can expand our imaginations through Abolition — a positive overcoming of our current social, political, economic, and cultural situation; it’s a present tense visioning “an infrastructure in the making”.

Veryl shared the following quote during his presentation: “Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society”. (Moten and Harney). 99% of us do not have the option to not work — it’s how we stay housed, fed, and in good social standing. The logic of carcerality keeps us in toxic work environments or abusive jobs because of fear of hunger, homelessness, and social castigation for being unable to provide for ourselves and our families. This is how we connect the future of work with abolition — we’re dreaming of an entirely new society for all, built upon expansive ideas of collective care where our survival is not dependent upon our labor. 

Lessons in Liberation / Melanie Cervantes

Another imagination-expanding idea we explored was Family Abolition  — an idea we explored by reading M.E. O’Brien’s book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care.  No, not getting rid of families, but building towards a horizon where the work of social reproduction — that is, the labor required to keep ourselves alive and reproduce ourselves from one generation to the next — is collectivized beyond the confines of the private family.

During our roundtable discussion on how to nurture caregivers under capitalism, Staff Attorney Jay Cumberland highlighted how the family can actually restrict revolutionary movements. Jay cited The Oaxaca Commune of 2006, which was an urban insurrection that formed after police responded violently to a strike involving the local teachers' trade union. The police opened fire on non-violent protests, and the community responded by taking to the streets to help defend the strikers and the space they had seized in the local plaza. The commune grew into a broad-based movement where women were out of their private homes, creating self-governing collective space to defend the commune. Jay reminded us that “the family was a reactionary force [to the Oaxaca Commune], suppressing that revolutionary energy.” When the women of the commune abandoned their duties within their private families in favor of socialized reproductive care work within the commune, their husbands became angry and wanted them to come home. In this way, family structures acted to reinforce existing systems of state power and capitalism.

During the roundtable, Jay said, “To change society, to make it better, we have to address the state, wages, and the family. It can become a counter-revolutionary force. We have to talk about the family as part of our work and part of changing society. It demands new conversations and learnings about how to talk about gender, sexuality, queerness, and family. It seems critical to our work. It feels like it’s given a framework to relate our work as a whole.”

We were left with the question: How can we collectivize social reproduction through ourselves, without the state or private entities having to mediate for us? 

Theme #2: Ritualized community care

Care work has become privatized at an alarming rate here in the United States. This is largely due to the fact that we all have to work so much to survive. If we have children, we pay someone to care for them so we can work. Our commute is long, so we order takeout via an app that delivers it right to our front step. No time or capacity to care for aging loved ones, so we pay for them to live full-time in assisted living. 

Director of Communications and Strategic Storytelling, Mwende Hinojosa, shared in our roundtable on nurturing caregivers under capitalism: “As care work has been privatized, we’ve lost the skill to simply recognize opportunities to care for one another — especially outside of our immediate families. Opportunities that require no exchange of money.” 

How do we resist the privatization of care and remember how to care for each other without defaulting to privatized services?

We need more opportunities to practice non-extractive labor and non-monetary exchanges of care and connection. The workplace — in the form of cooperatives and worker self-directed organizations — is a good place to learn and practice these skills. 

Theme #3: Internalized bosses: Unlearning Old Patterns and Dynamics

Building towards a world where cooperation and liberation are embedded in the workplace requires us to rethink how our workplaces are governed, because as organizer Harsha Walia says, “Our journeys toward liberation must also be liberating…”. In the Cells to Liberation MCLE and panel, Director of Economic Democracy Ricardo Nuñez shared the work of Elinor Ostrom; an American political economist who analyzed "economic governance, especially the commons,” and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009. She offers us a different way to think about organization management without the need for hierarchy. She came up with eight Design principles which she found were used by successful self-organized and self-governing communities. (If some of these principles look familiar, it’s because they can be seen in the cultural values across many BIPOC communities).

These ideas are practical and can be revolutionary when successfully applied. But as we heard in the fireside chat discussion, unlearning hierarchy, building trust within an organization, and practicing collective governance requires ongoing commitment to unlearning the internalized hierarchy and conflict avoidance society has taught us — a task that many on the panel agreed is a lifelong process and not a skillset acquired in a few trainings.

During the fireside chat, Network Director of Nonprofit Democracy Network Nicole Wires gleaned some key points on how to collectively unlearn hierarchy from the panelists discussion: 

• Normalizing feedback within your organization as well as requesting and receiving feedback from your constituents or clients
• Naming what’s happening when someone dominates or hierarchy thinking comes in
• Normalizing conflict, practicing conflict engagement

Theme #4: The Illusion of Safety

In our learnings, we came to understand that in American culture, we’ve confused Privacy for Safety. The ability to close ourselves inside our private homes, away from the possibility of random violence or crime, is the basis for our definition of safety. We also connected the idea that locking away folks accused of crimes keeps us safe; when in reality, it reinforces carceral logic, the police state, and the violence they reproduce within marginalized communities.

The pandemic shattered our socially held definition of safety. We learned we’re only as safe as our neighbors are safe. The most marginalized communities have always understood: I’m only well-fed if my neighbor is well-fed. I’m only safe if my neighbor is safe — a logic we all lived during the height of the pandemic. This is a communitarian-centered definition of safety. But with that orientation come some sacrifices to the individual. Privacy — the ability to close ourselves off to society into our private homes — is highly prioritized in American culture.  

But living in isolated and separated homes prevents others from witnessing family dynamics. Writer M.E. O’Brien teaches us that within the privacy of the home, gender roles are often hierarchical — with an uneven distribution of household labor falling on women — which often teaches children that heterosexual relationships are the primary “organizing logic of social life". 

During our roundtable discussion, we came to realize how unsafe it is to have our financial and romantic partnerships intertwined. Jay shared: “Who you have sex with, who you love, shouldn’t mean so much for your economics and safety.” For so many people, losing a job might mean their romantic partner could become violent towards them or leave them, forcing them to survive without the means to pay rent or provide for dependents. The ability to live and care for our loved ones should be a social good, regardless of job or relationship status. 

What themes from #TheFutureOfWork had a lasting impact on your understanding of work and labor? Do you have ideas or resources to share on these topics? Email us at communications [at] theselc.org and let us know! A special thank you to the panelists, presenters, and community members who contributed to these discussions!