It wasn’t sup­posed to be like this, accord­ing to John May­nard Keynes. In 1930, the econ­o­mist pre­dict­ed that his grand­chil­dren would be work­ing 15-hour work weeks. Tech­nol­o­gy would have advanced to the point two gen­er­a­tions after his own that work­ers’ aver­age time on the job would be a frac­tion of what it once was. We would all be strug­gling to fig­ure out what to do with so much free time.

The oppo­site has turned out to be true. Instead of being freed from the tyran­ny of the clock, Amer­i­can work­ers are more shack­led to it than ever, work­ing longer hours, being sub­ject­ed to errat­ic sched­ules, fig­ur­ing out how to work more just to make ends meet, and watch­ing an increas­ing amount of con­trol over their lives slip into the boss­es’ hands.

In his new book Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the Amer­i­can Dream (Basic, Sep­tem­ber 2020), Jamie McCal­lum, a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege, exam­ines why and how U.S. work­ers are more tied to the clock than ever, the dam­age this has meant for work­ers’ well-being, and what an agen­da for reclaim that time could look like. We spoke by phone in Sep­tem­ber. This inter­view has been edit­ed for length and clarity. 

Explain the over­all sit­u­a­tion for the Amer­i­can work­er and time on the job.

There are three dimen­sions of it. One, the rise of over­all hours worked since the 1970s. Two, an increase in volatil­i­ty and the unpre­dictable nature of work­ers’ sched­ules. Three, work­ers not hav­ing enough hours to make ends meet. 

That’s a con­tra­dic­to­ry sit­u­a­tion, no? Peo­ple are work­ing too many hours, but also not enough hours. There’s a lack of con­trol of peo­ple’s over­all time both at work and when they’re not at work. Either way, peo­ple are sub­ject­ed to a tyran­ny of the clock.

That’s right. Peo­ple often ask me about this one sta­tis­tic that work time has increased sig­nif­i­cant­ly since the 70s for all wage and salary work­ers, which it has. But if you dig into that, you get a dif­fer­ent pic­ture. Most peo­ple are famil­iar with the idea that tech work­ers and lawyers and cor­po­rate lob­by­ists put in 70-hour weeks. They still work the longest out of every­one. But it’s low-wage work­ers who have increased their work time the most.

So the num­ber of hours that the high­est-paid work­ers work is con­verg­ing with the hours worked by the low­est-paid employ­ees. Is that because the low­est-paid employ­ees, who have been sub­ject to decades’ worth of wage stag­na­tion, are try­ing to make up for that stag­na­tion through work­ing more hours?

Yes. The work­ing rich today tend to pull away from the rest of the peo­ple below them wage-wise through bonus­es, high­er salaries, etc. Peo­ple at the bot­tom do it through work­ing longer hours. 

You talk in the book about this his­to­ry of dis­cus­sions of work time. It’s sim­i­lar to what the late anthro­pol­o­gist David Grae­ber talked about with tech­nol­o­gy—he argued that years ago, we all thought we were going to be liv­ing in this tech­no-utopia, some­thing like The Jet­sons, in which tech­nol­o­gy would pro­vide for many of our needs and make life bet­ter and eas­i­er. Instead, we now live in a pret­ty dystopi­an world. That’s also true of work time. 

Thinkers like John May­nard Keynes used to say that we would soon have more free time than we knew what to do with. Instead, we find our­selves work­ing longer hours than ever, and our work is always expand­ing into every nook and cran­ny of our lives. Instead of arriv­ing at a utopia, we’re in a place where work nev­er ends.

Exact­ly. Keynes thought that we would have a 15-hour work week by some­thing like 2030. And there were good rea­sons to think that. For about a hun­dred years, the num­ber of hours worked declined. The work day declined, the work week declined. But this began to shift in the 70s, when work­ers began return­ing to work­ing longer hours. But Keynes was onto some­thing. I think that he thought increased pro­duc­tion and com­pound inter­est and all the oth­er ris­ing indi­ca­tors of our econ­o­my would lead us to a leisure­ly soci­ety. He was right about the com­pound inter­est part—he was right about the prof­itabil­i­ty. But he was wrong about the time. 

Some­body was col­lect­ing all the wealth dur­ing that time and ben­e­fit­ing off of the advances of the econ­o­my and soci­ety, but it wasn’t work­ers.

Leisure actu­al­ly is expen­sive. Ben­jamin Kline Hun­ni­cutt wrote a great his­to­ry of this and argues that in the 1940s, peo­ple began desir­ing more leisure. Leisure costs more mon­ey, so they stopped desir­ing short­er hours to work longer, to make more mon­ey to pay for leisure. 

When you say they lose their time, you mean they lose con­trol of their life. They do not have con­trol over the most basic thing upon which every­thing else depends—their time.

Who­ev­er con­trols labor con­trols time. They con­trol when we have week­ends, when we raise our kids, when we eat, when we sleep, when we get up in the morn­ing, when we go to bed at night. There’s a rhythm to it that is very attached to work. When our work time is out of our con­trol, so is our oth­er time. 

To me, that is crim­i­nal. So there was a moral or eth­i­cal polemic that was run­ning through me when I was writ­ing this book. A “time squeeze” is real­ly about peo­ple being pushed around. That is a real­ly dis­mal way to live.

Not to men­tion that you can’t have things like democ­ra­cy with­out hav­ing the time to par­tic­i­pate in civic insti­tu­tions, in polit­i­cal activism, in any­thing out­side of your work.

Prac­tic­ing our free­doms and hav­ing a basic demo­c­ra­t­ic exis­tence requires hav­ing free time. If peo­ple are work­ing 50, 60 hours a week, or they’re des­per­ate­ly try­ing to scrape togeth­er a hodge­podge life, it’s hard to orga­nize. All those things are dis­rupt­ed when we have the kind of work­ing rhythm that we do.

In addi­tion to being unable to par­tic­i­pate in demo­c­ra­t­ic life, the work­place itself is the fur­thest thing from a democracy. It’s a dic­ta­tor­ship, in which your boss is king. And then when you’re home, in your time that you were sup­posed to have to do what­ev­er you want, you’re instead wor­ry­ing about work—the unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic régime of the work­place extends into your home.

Sta­tis­tics cap­ture leisure as time, but what we call leisure is typ­i­cal­ly spent recov­er­ing from work in order to return back to work. And even aside from demo­c­ra­t­ic norms, we need time for hol­i­days or enjoy­ing breaks or the great out­doors. You need space and real dis­tance to actu­al­ly pon­der and con­sid­er your life. And if all you’re doing is think­ing about the job you just came from and prepar­ing to go back to it the next day, you don’t have time to do it.

Talk about the details of this time régime of 21^st-cen­tu­ry work. How is the time régime enforced? What are the mechanisms?

I became inter­est­ed in this project because of the “fair work­week” move­ment, which I think is one of the most vis­i­ble exam­ples today of work­ers orga­niz­ing for the con­trol of time. The move­ment high­lights a lot of low-wage retail, food ser­vice, health­care and trans­porta­tion work­ers whose work lives are dis­rupt­ed by peri­ods of unpre­dictable and volatile breaks. They’re unpre­dictable by design. Their sched­ules are pur­pose­ly removed from their con­trol and often giv­en to either an algo­rithm or a super­vi­sor, both of which will make the sched­ule that is obvi­ous­ly best for that par­tic­u­lar com­pa­ny, not the worker. 

I worked in retail when I was younger, and I’d be sched­uled three weeks in advance. That’s just not the case any­more. I remem­ber doing inter­views on 34^th Street in New York City, a main shop­ping area, and in Burling­ton, Ver­mont. When you talk to sales clerks, they’ll say, “I got my sched­ule three days ago. But I’m being sent home ear­ly today at 3:15 PM.” They’re sent home at the exact moment they’re no longer need­ed. Those sched­ules are based upon a pre­dic­tive algo­rithm that cal­cu­lates the opti­mum amount of sales­peo­ple and sales hours on the floor based upon the weath­er, the time of year, etc. 

So your sched­ule is more like­ly to be cut. Or alter­na­tive­ly, you’re more like­ly to be held over. Work­ers become com­plete­ly exhaust­ed, not just by being over­worked, but by being over­run by the unpredictability.

Talk about the Dunkin’ Donuts work­er you profiled.

Maria Fer­nan­des worked at three dif­fer­ent Dunkin’ Donuts loca­tions in North­ern New Jer­sey. At the time, she was sup­port­ing a part­ner who also had chil­dren. One morn­ing, she got off of one shift around 6:00 AM but was not sched­uled to start her next shift until hours lat­er. She slept in her car overnight to “nap” before work. She nev­er woke up, from gas fumes. She died in her car in her Dunkin’ Donuts outfit. 

For a while, she became a sym­bol of the low-wage, over­worked Amer­i­can work­er. And for a while, there were calls from union lead­ers and activists to make leg­isla­tive changes in response—there was even a law pro­posed in her name. 

It is an incred­i­bly sad sto­ry. And there are plen­ty of peo­ple who are still work­ing those jobs and who are still sub­ject­ed to those same sched­ules who may have suf­fered sim­i­lar tragedies, but we don’t know their names.

You also write a lot about the new tech­nolo­gies that are used—not just algo­rith­mi­cal­ly defined sched­ul­ing, but all kinds of wild tech­nolo­gies used to hyper-Tay­lorize work in places like Ama­zon. You talk about a socio­met­ric badge that some MIT sci­en­tists cre­at­ed that was put around employ­ees’ necks that records all inter­per­son­al inter­ac­tions through an embed­ded micro­phone and mea­sures how often you talk to mem­bers of anoth­er gen­der. Does your voice con­vey con­fi­dence or anx­i­ety, are you wait­ing your turn to speak or con­stant­ly inter­rupt­ing oth­ers? The com­pa­ny is called “Humanyze.”

It sounds like Black Mir­ror. Humanyze actu­al­ly has stopped using the badges. I inter­viewed the guy who invent­ed those badges, he actu­al­ly seems thought­ful about what they’re doing com­pared to a lot of com­pa­nies who are just like, “look, man­agers need greater con­trol.” Oth­er soft­ware can access your web­cam and take ran­dom screen­shots of your work­space from wher­ev­er you are at ran­dom times through­out the day.

Work­ers have always hat­ed this kind of sur­veil­lance. Ever since Fred­er­ick Winslow Tay­lor walked into a fac­to­ry with a stop­watch and a slide rule in the 1890s, work­ers have hat­ed man­agers look­ing over their shoul­ders. Today we see the evo­lu­tion of that idea. It’s less through a fore­man and more through computers.

The impor­tant part to remem­ber about this stuff is not that it’s Orwellian or what­ev­er, but that it is the result of a dis­or­ga­nized work­ing class. As unions began to decline, man­agers gained more con­trol over their work­ers. As sub­con­tract­ing became a pop­u­lar way to save costs, and work­places couldn’t bar­gain over the use of sub­con­tract­ed labor, man­agers began increas­ing­ly using elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance tech­nol­o­gy to mon­i­tor them from afar. This paved the way until today where it is a com­mon prac­tice among in-house work­ers too. Though work­ers rou­tine­ly report they don’t like it, they’ve been vir­tu­al­ly unable to resist it. It’s actu­al­ly increased dur­ing the pandemic. 

You wrote the book large­ly before the pan­dem­ic, but I can only imag­ine that just as com­pa­nies like Zoom are hav­ing a field day because we bad­ly need their tech­nol­o­gy under quar­an­tine, the tools that you’ve described, like the one where your boss can take over your web­cam and watch you while you work at home, are also being used more against workers.

Right. We’ve known a lot about this in the con­sumer realm for a long time. It’s real­ly about data col­lec­tion. This is also the main point of Shoshana Zuboff’s writ­ing about “sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism”— it’s a new régime of col­lect­ing data. For a long time, com­pa­nies like Google and Face­book did not know what to do with that data. Now they do, and they can use it against you. They can use it in per­for­mance eval­u­a­tions, they can do it when it comes to wages, rais­es or bonus­es. They can dis­ci­pline you or fire you based upon your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. But they would not be able to do it as well or eas­i­ly if work­ers had more pow­er to resist those things.

That issue of work­er pow­er is why we don’t have the fly­ing cars and 15-hour work weeks, right? Those ideas were advanced at a time when union den­si­ty was at its high­est. When work­ers don’t have that con­trol, tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment con­tin­ues apace, but is wield­ed against work­ers rather than for them.

There is a clear need for us to fig­ure out ways to have tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion in a way that decreas­es our over­all work and elim­i­nates the most ardu­ous jobs. That inno­va­tion can’t come at the expense of peo­ple’s liveli­hoods, it should make people’s lives bet­ter. In the 50s and 60s as work­place automa­tion arrived at indus­tri­al fac­to­ries, there’s some evi­dence that work­ers and their unions, which were much denser and stronger, were able to trans­late that automa­tion into free time or high­er wages. Today we don’t have that same ability.

Let’s talk about robots and gig work and the gen­er­al ero­sion of work in the Unit­ed States and through­out the wealthy world. Your dis­cus­sion of this in the book is one of the most nuanced that I’ve read, because on the one hand, breath­less dis­course along the lines of “the robots are going to take all our jobs” is com­mon. On the oth­er hand, you have some peo­ple who say this rhetoric is overblown—that there’s actu­al­ly lit­tle evi­dence that robo­t­i­za­tion and gig work are much more preva­lent than they always have been. This is just what cap­i­tal­ism looks like: insta­bil­i­ty, peo­ple not hav­ing con­trol of their jobs and of their lives. You take from both of those arguments.

It’s dif­fi­cult to assess it clear­ly. I agree with you that there are sort of breath­less and Pollyan­naish takes on both sides. The most recent and cel­e­brat­ed one was pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Andrew Yang: his cam­paign was all about the fear of automation. 

There’s cer­tain­ly evi­dence that robots are get­ting much cheap­er and much eas­i­er to put into work­places. I pro­filed a com­pa­ny that basi­cal­ly rents robots; if you have a prob­lem, the com­pa­ny devel­ops a robot for it, and you can rent it for how­ev­er long you want it for. When you’re done with it, they take it back. That great­ly low­ers the bar­ri­ers to entry to bring­ing automa­tion on to a par­tic­u­lar kind of assem­bly line or a par­tic­u­lar kind of pro­duc­tion process.

But I was inter­est­ed in the way we talk about robots. I uncov­ered stuff from pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions where peo­ple were very fear­ful of the poten­tial monot­o­ny of a life where we are just adjuncts of machines at work, or where machines do all of our work for us. Isaac Asi­mov once said we’re all going to become machine ten­ders. Today, fear of robots isn’t about bore­dom or malaise, it’s about los­ing a liveli­hood. I think that has some­thing to say about the dif­fer­ent kinds of regimes that peo­ple were work­ing under those dif­fer­ent times. 

There’s a clear his­to­ry of peo­ple embrac­ing tech­nolo­gies that lim­it ardu­ous work. I think peo­ple would wel­come that kind of tech­nol­o­gy today. The prob­lem is that we don’t have the con­trol to do it. Instead, we get a lot of fear and scape­goat­ing. When we don’t have con­trol over tech­nol­o­gy, we either blame tech­nol­o­gy or blame oth­er peo­ple, rather than the peo­ple who are actu­al­ly in con­trol of this technology.

Work­ers and unions need to think care­ful­ly about hav­ing these kinds of issues in their bar­gain­ing con­tracts. There’s actu­al­ly a recent increase of peo­ple talk­ing about app use in con­tract nego­ti­a­tions. Ways that work­ers can exer­cise some degree of con­trol or lever­age over how tech­nol­o­gy is used are crucial.

What about gig work? You pro­file gig work­ers and talk about what their work lives and non-work lives are like. But there’s a sim­i­lar way that gig work is talked about: that we’re all going to be gig work­ers soon. How much truth is there to that assertion?

I’m that per­son who strikes up an oafish con­ver­sa­tion with the Lyft dri­ver. You get real­ly dif­fer­ent reflec­tions: some peo­ple real­ly do see their job as a side hus­tle and enjoy some of the free­doms that come with it. And some peo­ple see those free­doms very differently. 

I pro­file peo­ple who dri­ve for Uber Eats. They can work when­ev­er they want, right? Wrong. They can’t work when peo­ple don’t want food. And they have to work when peo­ple want food that costs the most amount of mon­ey and they’ll get the largest amount of tips. So they’re actu­al­ly seri­ous­ly con­strained. I inter­viewed a woman who spent time dri­ving around each night from 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM, often with her six-year-old daugh­ter in the back­seat, deliv­er­ing meals. She didn’t feel she was free to work whenever. 

App work­ers are work­ers and should be rec­og­nized as such. They should have rights and lib­er­ties and ben­e­fits that come with being a work­er. The inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor sta­tus has been such a lie, and a way to exert so much more con­trol over that workforce. 

Which is some­thing under dis­cus­sion right now, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Cal­i­for­nia.

I have a strange sense of opti­mism that they will win. There’s a lot of orga­niz­ing going on in the gig econ­o­my by dri­vers and deliv­ery work­ers. Even since the pan­dem­ic start­ed, there were maybe half a dozen work stop­pages at a num­ber of impor­tant gig employ­ers. That activ­i­ty will lead somewhere. 

Let’s talk about the ide­o­log­i­cal aspects of this time cri­sis. That was one of the most inter­est­ing parts of your book: you talk about what the ide­o­log­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the time régime—the “do what you love” ethos, the idea that you need to not just work a job to pay the bills but find a job that you find ful­fill­ing on a deep per­son­al and exis­ten­tial lev­el. This is just an ide­o­log­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for shit­ty work at longer hours. 

It’s one thing to under­stand how and why low-wage work­ers end up hav­ing to put in more time. But rel­a­tive­ly well-off people’s work-time grow­ing is some­thing dif­fer­ent. Cul­ture is clear­ly part of this, but there’s also a mate­r­i­al basis. This is one of the things that peo­ple don’t appre­ci­ate enough about the “mean­ing­ful work” dis­course. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the cyn­i­cal recu­per­a­tion by man­agers and gurus about doing what you love, blah. But we actu­al­ly all want mean­ing­ful jobs. We deserve them. If we have to work to sur­vive, at the very least, we should be able to like what we’re doing for eight-plus hours a day. 

I’ve always found it strange that some peo­ple are will­ing to write off the idea of mean­ing­ful work alto­geth­er as if it’s a cap­i­tal­ist plot. The prob­lem is not that peo­ple are encour­aged to find mean­ing­ful work. You write in the book that that is a right that we all should have. The prob­lem is when that con­cept is used to paper over work­ing con­di­tions and pay that are get­ting worse and worse.

It’s no sur­prise that the “do what you love ethos” explod­ed at the very same time that con­di­tions for work­ers began to stag­nate. It’s not some elite con­spir­a­cy—there was a gen­uine desire to leave monot­o­nous, tire­some, gru­el­ing fac­to­ry labor behind. And there was just as much a real desire to burn down your cubi­cle like they did in Office Space. But those desires were eas­i­ly recu­per­at­ed and re-enlist­ed in a cam­paign to say, “if work is mean­ing­ful and work is ful­fill­ing and work is good for my soul, then more work must be better.”

The Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board had to rule against a pro­pos­al by T-Mobile that work­ers had to main­tain a pos­i­tive work envi­ron­ment. The NLRB ruled that no, you can’t do that. You can’t force peo­ple to like their job. When I talked to dancers at the old Lusty Lady strip club in San Fran­cis­co, they explained that man­age­ment includ­ed a “fun clause” in their con­tract that insist­ed their work was fun. The dancers said, “maybe it is, maybe it’s not, but that’s not your deci­sion. That’s up to us.” 

Speak­ing of San Fran­cis­co, you also were in the Bay Area to talk to tech work­ers. You have a fun­ny scene where you get on a Google bus and are kicked off for ask­ing tech work­ers about their jobs. Sep­a­rate­ly, you go to this swanky Sil­i­con Val­ley bar where… I don’t know, deals get made, I guess. And a guy who works at Google tells you, “Every­where you look, you hear peo­ple talk­ing about ‘mean­ing.’ They aren’t philoso­phers. … They sell ban­ner ads. What do they know about meaning?” 

There have been numer­ous books writ­ten on the mar­riage of the coun­ter­cul­ture and the com­put­er age. It’s such an inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal switch. Peo­ple were inter­est­ed in a “let’s destroy the office, let’s have ful­fill­ing work­days, let’s have free­dom to exper­i­ment with new kinds of employ­ment rela­tion­ships.” And now they’re lead­ers of a move­ment to keep peo­ple at work longer and longer through a cou­ple of perks.

You argue in the end of the book for a time agen­da that work­ers could unite around, around this shared expe­ri­ence of not hav­ing con­trol of their work lives. What should the 21^st-cen­tu­ry time agen­da look like? What should it include? What should be on the ban­ners of the move­ments in the street demand­ing their time back?

The old ban­ners used to say basi­cal­ly “few­er hours for more mon­ey.” For a long time, the labor move­ment was suc­cess­ful at win­ning exact­ly that. Dur­ing a cri­sis, espe­cial­ly like the one right now, it often seems tone deaf to talk about few­er hours when peo­ple are unem­ployed, when peo­ple aren’t get­ting CARES Act fund­ing and unem­ploy­ment insur­ance is run­ning out. But there’s a his­tor­i­cal prece­dent here. Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, the gov­ern­ment used work-shar­ing ben­e­fits. They spread the work around to avoid lay­ing peo­ple off, reduc­ing hours and using gov­ern­ment pro­grams to sub­si­dize you at your pre­vi­ous wage. We should be doing more of that.

Protests around health­care, or to expand the purview of care in gen­er­al in an econ­o­my, are sig­nif­i­cant, too. We could cut and paste pro­grams from some peer nations in West­ern Europe. We work about 400 hours per year more than the Ger­mans, 250 hours more than French work­ers. They’re not starv­ing—they’re doing fine. State pro­vi­sions are impor­tant not only because they’re good for peo­ple’s health­care, but because it allows peo­ple to step back from work. But half of Amer­i­cans get their health insur­ance through a job, and min­i­mum-hour require­ments and eli­gi­bil­i­ty statutes require that peo­ple con­tin­ue work­ing, often longer than they want, just to main­tain their health­care. It’s trag­ic and it’s criminal. 

When I inter­viewed work­ers from Ohio from a laid-off auto plant out­side Day­ton, Ohio, they said, “Health­care should be tak­en off the union bar­gain­ing agen­da. It’s a dri­ver of lock­outs, it’s a dri­ver of dis­rup­tions, and most impor­tant­ly, we spend so much time argu­ing about health­care that we can’t talk about high­er wages and hours.” So uni­ver­sal health­care, Medicare for All, is an impor­tant goal of any­one think­ing about short­er hours.

You also talk about the upsurge in the labor move­ment around teachers. 

We think of teach­ers hav­ing the sum­mers off, right? I am the son of a teacher myself, and remem­ber our kitchen table piled high with books for the entire sum­mer, because that’s when you plan lessons and do a lot of oth­er impor­tant work ahead of the school year. Recent­ly, we’ve seen teach­ers get­ting not only sum­mer jobs to sup­ple­ment their income, but night jobs after school. 

But teach­ers have tak­en so much lead­er­ship in reori­ent­ing their work­places through strikes, and strikes that do more than just talk about teach­ers’ work issues. They talk about race and racism, immi­gra­tion, hous­ing, access to food. There’s no rea­son why work­ers can’t also talk about reduc­tion of work­ing hours. 

When it comes to con­tract nego­ti­a­tions, this is what peo­ple call “bar­gain­ing for the com­mon good.” Free time should be a pub­lic good. And we should use our moments of nego­ti­a­tions with employ­ers to think about win­ning soci­ety-wide agree­ments to decrease work time.

Let’s imag­ine this pan­dem­ic is over. What’s num­ber one on the “Jamie McCal­lum Agen­da for Free Time?” 

Oh, wow. [Long pause] I’m stalling just think­ing about it…

Our work-time régime has made you unable to even con­sid­er this ques­tion because it feels so far out­side of the realm of possibility.

It real­ly does. I’ll say two things. My the­sis advi­sor in grad­u­ate school was Stan­ley Aronowitz, one of the great labor schol­ars of the last half cen­tu­ry. I wrote him in June and said, “I’d like to meet with you.” He wrote back, “there are three rea­sons to become a pro­fes­sor: June, July, and August. Come to me in Sep­tem­ber.” I was like, man, I want that guy’s job and the free­dom that comes with it. One of the most reward­ing things about hav­ing the free­dom to write this book was the free­dom I had to go around the coun­try and meet peo­ple, talk to work­ers and hear what they’re deal­ing with. I want to be able to do more of that.

The oth­er thing is, any­one right now in Amer­i­ca with a small child is just going absolute­ly insane dur­ing this pan­dem­ic. So I want more schools, day­care camps, play­grounds, what­ev­er, to be open 24–7. I would like that to change not only for my son’s ben­e­fit, but just for the gen­er­al men­tal and emo­tion­al san­i­ty of the society. 

This blog originally appeared at In These Times on September 23, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Micah Uetricht is the deputy edi­tor of Jacobin mag­a­zine and host of its pod­cast The Vast Major­i­ty. He is a con­tribut­ing edi­tor and for­mer asso­ciate edi­tor at In These Times. He is the author of Strike for Amer­i­ca: Chica­go Teach­ers Against Aus­ter­i­ty (Ver­so 2014), coau­thor of Big­ger Than Bernie: How We Go From the Sanders Cam­paign to Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ism (Ver­so 2020), and is cur­rent­ly at work on a book on New Left­ists who “indus­tri­al­ized.” He pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a labor orga­niz­er. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @micahuetricht.