I feel like the mad hatter, not because I don’t like to waste time – who would want to offend that guy – time I mean. Also not because I have too many hats in a literal sense – only have two – the proper ones: fedoras – but because I have to wear too many of them at the same time. Well, I choose it to a certain extent. I am a caregiver – a household man -, a writer, a thinker and a consultant – a craftsman – plus an employee – a salaryman. I wear three hats and yet none at all. The household hat often disappears like the Cheshire Cat, grinning me down with dirty socks and another meal to prep. The craftsman hat is never quite sure if he needs to be good or be paid — or if he even exists. And the salary hat is the maddest of all. He was made to earn a living but gets tossed around by an unpredictable weather system in which he is constantly changing colors. And all of this is just work. 

The Board Room Version: Work has developed over 700’000 years — and with it who we are. From hunter/gatherer to farmer to craftsman to factory worker to salary man: Work was gradually separated from life and became a biography. Keynes’ 15-hours-week has not become reality — not because it would not have been possible, but because we need work as moral duty and as an identity. Today we have multiple work identities — Gig Work, part-time, changing jobs every three years — the identity dissolves. The deal between company and employee has been broken. What remains when work does not give us identity anymore?

Doesn’t matter if you think of work as abstractly as the use of energy with a purpose or closer to us as socially organized human activity. All is work. We feel it when we do it. We recognize it when we see it. Or do we?

A small group of humans are moving through the landscape. They are small and old, tall and young, female and male. When they are hungry, they look for food, gathering and hunting. When they need shelter, they build it, they cook and clean. They care for the small ones and teach the young. They have households without houses. They are equal and everybody contributes. What they do is live. If I would tell them that I write about the history of work, they would not understand. Because it’s life for them, there is no separation. 

One day – nobody knows exactly why – they stop moving. Probably they just find nice plants to eat. They make the land their own and the land provides them food. They plant more, but have to wait until the plants have grown. So they need to plan ahead and store food. Time becomes tangible. Households become a farm, then a village.

They become more. And they own, then own more. Small villages become small cities. They become so many that they start to do different things. And since they don’t know each other, they need to know, who does what. I’m making pots, I’m a potter, I make swords, I’m a blacksmith. The profession becomes a standing in the group. Once there are enough of one kind, they form groups themselves called guilds to protect the quality. The individual becomes legible through a craft.

Cities become bigger, more craftsman need to produce more and therefor new entities form. The factory becomes the place of work. So many working people need to be organized. Work gets counted and recorded. Time becomes a clock. Seasons become days then hours. Work and the household get separated for the first time. A man leaves. A woman stays. She becomes invisible because she has no factory and no clock.

The factory worker becomes the office worker becomes the salaryman. Work becomes a sequence, a title and a story to tell, not a product you make. Factories and offices multiply into enterprises. Payment, status, stories replace the physical. The worker is an idea, a biography tied to an enterprise. 

Then the company fires him.

 Cute story, isn’t it? And it’s essentially how work has developed in the last 700’000 years. Just not quite as neat. 350 words cannot give justice to all that time. Jan Lucassen’s 200’000 words in “The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind” does a better job. Besides being much more accurate and less touchy-feely, he manages to cure some of my misconceptions. I – being brought up in an old-fashioned social democratic household – always believed that industrialization was the big evil turning point for the people, the worker. You know, early industry-fed capitalist villains hijacking the poor worker from the homestead, jailing him in the factory, cutting all ties to the man’s family and his home. Inventing the whip of the factory whistle. For me it was like the smoke filled, human flattening factory in Dickens “Hard Times” – don’t be scared to read it, it’s a really short novel. 

But as often when you look at historical development on a large scale, villains lose their faces and events become development. Control, discipline and hierarchy were no inventions of the industrialist. They were caused by the focus on time and surplus. When farming gradually replaced hunting and gathering the perception of work and life changed as well. And gradual here means 10’000 years and more in some regions. Just imagine that, that sounds more like evolution, less like history.

See, humans did not just stop working one day – hunting food – for today’s hunger and started planning for tomorrow’s – or better next year’s – harvest – farming, it was a long transition. You gathered some berries, ate them and at the same time planted some wheat that you could eat next year. Work slowly became something that was perceived as time bound. In addition – probably because planning was more demanding – the future harvest mattered more than today’s berries. With that development the need for surplus was created. You had to bridge the time between two harvests — your family has to eat daily, not just seasonally.

Surplus creates a resource. A stock of food. The person who cut the wheat does not have to be the same person who stores it. Somebody can control the wheat. The wheat that many harvested. That opens the door to inequality. Humans are no longer equal. 

The city is just the next natural step: more stock, more people. This enables specialization. First someone harvests the wheat – the farmer -, someone grinds it – the miller -, someone bakes the bread – the baker. But it goes further — not everyone needs to produce food anymore, there is a stock of it. So someone only makes pots – the potter -, someone only forges tools – the blacksmith. In the cities people who do the same form groups: the guilds. They organize the work, create a standard.

As there are more and more people doing the same things, they need bigger places. The household workplace becomes the workshop, becomes the factory. Factories need owners, factories need supervision, more control. That is where my union inherited heart starts to bleed. The worker is away from home, under control, working not for himself, but for others. And all of this before industrialization really took off.

The second big misconception I illogically always believed in is that some activities simply died out. We don’t have hunter/gatherers anymore, the subsistence farmer has been killed by big corporations, there are no guild members in today’s society. But history is not as clear-cut. Lucassen shows that all forms of work survive in one form or the other. Again I thought too much in sudden change. All of these developments were slow and gradual and mixed with the old remaining. We still have guilds today. We have builders, mechanics, carpenters, electricians. They have licenses and have standards. The subsistence farmer is found in many forms, from remote location farming to families planting in their gardens to this day. And the hunter/gatherer household? What happened to that? It still exists in our modern household. The preparation of food, the providing of shelter, the care for young and old ones. That is all still here and it is still one of the largest groups of workers. She – yes, still is mostly a woman – used to be so visible that she was the center of the life-work-household. In today’s work we simply don’t see her, because we don’t count her activities. 

Counting had become important. Large surpluses needed to be counted and recorded. More people in cities made counting and recording more important. Ownership cannot exist without record, otherwise it is just possession – shout out to my private law professor. The factory needed to pay wages and order resources. All needed to be counted. But see, what happened with all that counting, we mistook the count for the whole picture. We counted only what needed to be counted, not all there is. There was no need to count household activities, so we stopped seeing them. But that work still existed, still does to this day.

This has a connection with how we define work and what work has become after industrialization. Before we were mainly creating with our hands and later with the help of machines. That is where value was created. The result was what defined us. Then the thing we produced wasn’t our own anymore. The act of making, the production became the value. We identified with the working, not the result. We became the worker. With that we also became part of production. We were as much a resource as a machine was. But work started to move to the office, away from production. Because someone needs to plan, coordinate, file, schedule, invoice, sell, ensure, analyze, control and manage. We were no longer producing, but still belonged to the larger system. We were no longer part of production but still part of the system, part of the company. The company has departments and positions and titles. Gradually these replace the void of non-production. We are not what we create, nor how we do it, but where we are in an organization. The organizations become larger and we changed positions within them. There is a path, a narrative, a progression. First intern, then office worker, then manager. It becomes our biography.

The biographical identity —work as a story told — was never for all. It was only for the ones that left production behind. The craftsman still had an anchor in his craft. It was the salaryman’s journey. 

The company had signed off on this, not because anybody wanted to do harm, but because it was the natural next step. There is no villain here. Work had fully become our identity and we could not let go of it, not just the office worker, also not the company, at least in the beginning.

The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 that technological progress would eventually reduce work to a three-hour shift or a fifteen-hour week to satisfy our needs. Sounds wonderful. And yet there is a strange feeling reading it. Can you pin it down? But Keynes’ prediction never materialized. He was not wrong because it would not have been economically possible. There were productivity gains, there was technological advance. He was right to a certain extent. What he didn’t see at the time is what we can see today. James Suzman described this in his “Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time” in 2021. The productivity gains of the last 90 years were not shared equally. Capital has gained disproportionately compared to what workers were paid. We all know that, no secret there. Wants were expanded in that time, we expect more of life than in the 1930s. Organizations function because they organize work, need the attention and commitment of the worker. If they have the worker for less time, they cannot achieve that. But there are outer restraints. The most damning reason is probably that the worker himself needs the work to define himself. On one hand they need to write their biography, their career in order to have an identity. This takes time, sometimes a lifetime, certainly not a 15-hours week. On the other hand because of the moral obligation we have towards society and ourselves, we feel that we have to work, that we should not be lazy. Max Weber gave it a name, but most of us can feel it without footnotes. Just observe what your reaction was when you read Keynes’ prediction. The prediction feels wrong, not because it’s impossible, or even because it wouldn’t be a nice thing to have. It feels wrong because it threatens something we didn’t even know we were protecting. Our identity. Our biography. Our answer to the moral test. Are we good humans?

Well, we are not at the end of the story. One last shift is happening and we are still in the middle of it. We have become what we work for, what we produce, where we do it and eventually what our job title says we are. But what happens if all this changes? What if you are suddenly expected to change your identity every three years? Refreshing? Or is it unstable and maddening? This is where we are today. The exact number of career changes doesn’t matter – three, five, a dozen depending on the last advice on LinkedIn. And that is not always in sequence. Involuntary low-wage part-time jobs, gig work, on-call work, dependent self-employment, labour leasing have created simultaneous multiple work biographies. The worker has become a human with multiple personalities. Suddenly we do not just feel like a mad hatter, we have become one.

Mad and homeless. What has happened is not just that we have several identities. We have none. Or worse. The household had become invisible, the fruit of labour had moved ownership, the craft dissolved into a deal with a company for title and standing, for identity. Now, as work diversifies, even that identity is disappearing. That deal has been broken. The system has broken it. The actual systemic error is that companies still need what only an intact identity produces. They split the workforce but still need the engagement. They removed the conditions for identity but still need the effort. The hatter is not just mad, he has also lost his hats. What has he left?

I guess there is more to explore.  

How many hats do you wear? – LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

Jan Lucassen, The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, 2021

James Suzman, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, 2021

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, 1930

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854