This current state of simultaneous under- and overwork is the calm before the storm into which Rihanna’s and Fifth Harmony’s respective hits have arrived.
What will our world look like once this condition is amplified tenfold? We have already seen how the disappearance of industrial jobs has fueled vicious backlashes to immigration, the gutting of the middle class, and mass incarceration. “What the next two decades portend,” they write, “is a future in which the global economy is increasingly unable to produce enough jobs (let alone good jobs), yet where we remain dependent upon jobs for our living.” Work isn’t working, in other words, and without a drastic upheaval of our current economic system, it may very well be what inaugurates humanity’s demise. Srnicek and Williams estimate that worldwide the surplus population now “significantly outnumbers” employed individuals, and will only continue to grow as a result of further jobless recoveries, automation, and deindustrialization. Currently, over 15% of the workforce performs temporary, contract, or otherwise precarious labor. Globally, this includes such groups as displaced subsistence farmers in rural China, who migrate thousands of miles in attempts to find starvation-wage factory work, and other would-be workers in the global south, where crippling poverty and lack of sustainable employment have birthed slums and favelas in which these surplus laborers cobble together makeshift shadow economies through begging, selling black market goods, and other informal work.īut there are also burgeoning surplus populations in wealthy countries like the U.S., where the aftereffects of the Great Recession have meant that more and more part-time workers are still unable to secure full-time work. In their book Inventing the Future, authors Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams trace the rapid growth of a surplus population, or people who are shut out of the formal labor market with few other means of survival.
Yet, for the average American worker, wages have not kept up with this increase in productivity, which means that people will be forced to delay retirement until later and later in life, if they can even afford to retire at all.Īt the same time, as a society, we paradoxically also suffer from a shortage of work.
#FIFTH HARMONY WORK FROM HOME SONG FREE#
And in addition to the vast amounts of time that we spend at work proper, the political theorist Kathi Weeks has observed that even much of our free time goes toward preparing for, commuting to, and recovering from work. At the other end of the economic spectrum, service sector workers eking by on minimum wage often must work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet, especially in metropolitan areas where rents continue to skyrocket. In elite, white-collar professions, including medicine, law, and tech, employees are regularly expected to be available 24/7, answering emails or calls on weekends, nights, and holidays. and elsewhere have clocked an increasing number of hours at work. On one hand, we collectively have too much of it: over the last several decades, workers in the U.S. The post-recession 21st century has been a strange and critical time for work. But these two hits, in which the insistent reminder of work, work, work, work, work permeates even ostensible realms of leisure, summon one of the gloomiest anxieties of our current moment. Rihanna sings “Work” in a liquid patois that makes much of the song outside of the titular line difficult for the casual non-Bajan listener to parse, and spends her double-video dancing, by herself in the mirror, with a group at a restaurant party, and on Drake in an abandoned mall. In “Work From Home,” Fifth Harmony uses work as a euphemism for sexual seduction, rolling out one job-related double entendre after another ( no getting off early, you’re always on that night shift) that turn especially cartoonish in the video, which finds the group members cavorting around a crew of sweaty, muscular construction workers who jackhammer, fill holes, and tend to gushing cement mixers. For songs structured around pulsing recurrences of “work,” neither stands as a straightforward paean to hard labor the way that “Work Bitch,” or even parts of Beyoncé’s “Formation,” do.
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