S2E2 – Labour & Productivity

How has the pandemic shed light on the way we work, how we’re productive, and the value of our labour? Margrit & Eileen chat about how we view labour and productivity in a capitalist society and how our value as human beings is often linked to how productive we are. The flip side, isn’t true, though. Artists, athletes, and people from marginalized communities are regularly expected to work without compensation or recognition. This has been so obviously highlighted by the lack of material support given to frontline workers during the pandemic. 

Recommendation of the Episode: Margrit has been reading Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. Salesses is an international adoptee, born in Korea and raised by a white family in the US. He writes about many accepted storytelling conventions are grounded in Western imperialism and ideas. Whereas, Asian and African stories that follow different storytelling structures are often dismissed as not worthy of publications. 

Question of the Episode: How do you measure productivity? How do you value labour? 

Join the conversation on Twitter at @World_ofStories or email us directly at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com. 

Transcript

Eileen 0:16
Welcome to World of Stories, a podcast about how stories shapes our lives. I’m Eileen, my pronoun is she.

Margrit 0:23
I’m Margrit, and my pronoun is they.

Eileen 0:38
Hi, Margrit.

Margrit 0:39
Hi, Eileen.

Eileen 0:41
How’s it going?

Margrit 0:42
Oh, well, I hope everyone listening to us as well, too. Eileen, do you wanna tell us a little bit about your awesome new project?

Eileen 0:49
Sure. So I’ve started a new project called Queer of Colour. And it’s a safe space for queer people of colour, such as myself, to tell our stories on our own terms. And you can go to queerofcolour.ca, that’s colour with a u, with a Canadian spelling, to check out some of the amazing stories of queer people of colour doing really cool things. And, yeah, there’s also social media accounts you can follow too. You can find all of that information on queerofcolour.ca.

Margrit 1:28
That’s amazing. How did you find working on a new project during the pandemic?

Eileen 1:33
Well, you know, it was both easy and hard. Easy, because like I mentioned in our last episode, I quit my day job. So I have a lot more time to do my own thing. But it’s also hard because with the pandemic and the lockdown, it’s been really hard to meet up with the people that I want to interview.

And that’s kind of what we wanted to talk about today too. You know, what does it look like to labour and be productive in a pandemic? So as we were thinking about this topic, I was reflecting that, for me, ever since I started working after undergrad, I’ve always worked the nine to five in an office setting. And so there was always a very clear distinction between when I was at work, and when I was off work. And as long as I spent, you know, X number of hours in the office, I supposedly was productive, or at least I felt like I was being productive. And then I had permission to then not work when I left the office.

Margrit 2:38
And do you find that it’s changed now that you don’t give yourself permission to stop working?

Eileen 2:42
I don’t at all. I’m working for myself and working from home. So there’s no clear boundary between what is work and what is not work. And I find that I’m actually getting really anxious that I’m not working enough. Because these days, I, you know, take more breaks from my computer, I’m running errands in the middle of the workday, or I have meetings at night. And I’m finding that it’s very hard to track how many hours I’m working. That’s, you know, that obviously, that’s assuming that number of hours is a good or healthy or appropriate measure for how much work I’m doing.

But you know, the thing is, I’ve read studies that office workers are really only productive for like three hours out of the eight that they spend in the office. And so when I say I’ve worked in the office for eight hours, that’s not actually true, right? I’ve definitely spent the entire day in the office sitting at my desk doing absolutely nothing but online shopping and surfing the internet. And so I wasn’t productive for those eight hours, I was wasting time. But you know, now that I’m working for myself, suddenly I expect myself to be productive and actually doing work for a full eight hours. And so I’m thinking, you know, maybe that’s not very fair to myself to hold myself to that kind of standard, because I was never that productive before.

Margrit 4:14
Right. And that makes a lot of sense to me, actually. Because I’ve always set my own schedule. And, for example, as a graduate student doing research, I had to manage my time and my huge research project and find ways to achieve my goals by breaking them down. And so, you know, when you think of it, a dissertation is a huge thing, when you look at it as a whole, but I had a strategy where I sent out proposals to conferences, which would mean that I had to draft a paper to present and then I had to rework it into a chapter. So I kind of started by tricking myself and then I learned how to manage my own deadlines and not waste all my time procrastinating. I still feel like I’m a procrastinator, but at least I managed to do things along the way too. And, and I think that’s very, it’s very clear that those studies are true, that we can’t just work nonstop for for any given time.

But now during the pandemic with its intensified virtual connections, it makes me feel like I’m under surveillance a lot more, in a very sort of Ford factory way, where sometimes I have to keep track of my hours, which is impossible since, you know, most of my work takes place in my head, while I’m doing other stuff like walking or cooking, I’m asking myself, how do I teach that? Or do I want to teach the other thing? Or how do I write that, and so on and so forth?

Eileen 5:32
Yeah, I find this idea of tracking really interesting because right now you are being asked to track hours because that’s so ingrained in our capitalist society, right, to measure work by the number of hours. And that’s kind of what I was just talking about earlier. Because with my day job and the number of hours I’m spending in the office, and so for me, this raises the question of, is there another way to measure work or productivity.

And what I’ve actually started doing is, I am calling it a Things that I Did Today tracker in my calendar. And it’s just a note where I list everything I’ve done that day, work things, meetings, calls with friends, cooking meals, errands, even like laundry. And it’s a way of demonstrating to myself that, yes, I am being productive. Even if I’m sitting in my PJs in bed all day. It helps me feel a little bit less guilty. Because you know, my default mode is “Eileen, you’re being unproductive and unmotivated, and you’re lazy.” When I look at a list of all the things that I’ve done in a day, it helps myself to disabuse myself of those like negative and self-deprecating thoughts.

Margrit 6:59
Right. And I love this things I did today approach. And, you know, it’s funny how we laugh at your puritanical approach to work where you’re supposed to work all the time. And when you’re not working, then you’re lazy. But I do use a similar thing where I keep track of my to do list daily and weekly. So every day in my journal, I have what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, because I’ve always got like umpteen books on the run. And what I need to do, and I mostly started it because I love the feeling of putting down the checkmark at the end of the day. But you’re right, that side effect is that putting down stuff on paper takes it out of our heads, which then gives me space in my brain to tackle the actual doing of things.

Eileen 7:40
Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s so true in so many areas of life is when you write things down, then it’s like it physically leaves your body almost right.

And you know, the thing about capitalism, and I’m really, really starting to hate capitalism. But like one, the one thing it does is that it tells us that our value is tied directly to how productive we are. Right? That’s the whole idea behind this, like, being a productive member of society concept. And it’s like, an indication of what type of person you are. So someone who is productive is considered a good person who has their act together. And they’re living a life that’s according to a standard that we’re supposed to admire. But that type of thinking means that we have to constantly produce in order to have value as human beings. That means that our value isn’t inherent, that it can increase or decrease based on our work and our productivity. So simply being a human is not enough. You have to like do stuff to earn your value.

But the problem with that is, if for whatever reason, you’re not able to work because of disability, or mental health, or age, or discrimination or inequality, what have you, then suddenly you don’t have value, right, and society considers you worthless.

And I think as an aside, I was thinking about this. And I think that’s one reason why society so often looks down upon the homeless and low income communities because they’re not earning enough money to be valuable. They’re not being productive enough to be valuable, right.

Margrit 9:28
Absolutely. And it’s so, I was going to say f-ed up. But it is, it is, and it’s absolutely true that we have this ingrained value judgments on people. And it’s directly tied to their productivity. But unfortunately, the flip side is not true. Work is valuable. And people shouldn’t be compensated for the work they do. But it’s compensation, right? It’s an exchange, right? It’s a transaction. It’s not a reflection of their worth as a human being. Right.

So I think this is most clearly illustrated by artists who are expected to work for free. So you know, it kind of irks me all the time. And I’m always sort of thinking about how, how bad this idea of talent is because it obscures the amount of labour and the huge period of time that it takes to make an artist or an athlete. People whom we revere as a society, because they’re talented, quote, unquote, have worked tirelessly for this their entire lives. You know, think of a classical pianist or a violinist who start their instrument before most of the world starts kindergarten. I remember, as a kid in Romania, I wanted to start gymnastics when I was in grade one, because gymnastics was huge in Romania, but it was way too late. Like kids start gymnastics at three or four. And that’s how they, you know, that’s how actually very few of them end up being, you know, the champions. And so when you say that, that’s because they’re talented, it dismisses all that work, all the life of work that they’ve put into it. And because nobody is gifted from birth with nimble fingers, and that’s what makes them play the piano so well. Or nobody is gifted with amazing gross motor coordination, and that’s why they skate so beautifully and to say that, to say, oh, that’s such talent, is to erase their lifetime of work and, and to dismiss their labour at the same time. And dismissing the labour absolves society of the need to compensate it accordingly.

Eileen 11:38
Yeah, it’s this idea that the passion or the enjoyment that we get out of the work should be compensation enough.

Margrit 11:46
Absolutely. The dichotomy of love or money only shows how society thinks that if someone loves what they do, or they’re talented at it, their actual labour is its own reward. And we have such narratives in our society that starving artists produce the best work or that you need to be depressed in order to create timeless art. And we embrace these toxic narratives because they absolve us as a society of both the responsibility and the courage it takes to embrace a life is such tremendous labour without any guarantees of an actual livelihood.

And what’s more, the toxic seepage from this narrative has corroded our social imaginary of education. How many times have we heard that going into studying music or art or literature or history or any other humanities subject basically, dooms you to penury? Or how we laugh at the perpetual scarecrow of the barista with a master’s degree where, while we turn our backs to, you know, foreign trained doctors who drive taxis?

Eileen 12:46
Yeah, you’re so right. And it reminds me of an email that I got recently sent by a person of colour entrepreneur. And she was talking about how she’d been contacted by somebody who asked her to provide services for free, services that she normally charges for. So when she informed this someone of her fees, the response she got was, oh, I didn’t know, I didn’t realize you charge and that’s too expensive for me, is there any other way you can do this for free? And it’s this idea that, you know, it’s not just the artists and athletes but people of colour and immigrants and queer people and marginalized people in general are often expected to work with little or no compensation at all.

Margrit 13:34
Yeah, exactly. And the pandemic’s made the so clear. People who are trained in the humanities will tell you that there’s an inextricable link between the social view of talent or vocation and the fact that our provincial government does not want to give health care workers or other frontline employees extra paid sick days. When you put all your efforts in the pageantry around how much we value our frontline workers who are keeping things going, while we white collar workers sit safely at home, putting up support posters on our windows or banging our pans and pots at 7pm every night. All this noise of the performativity hides the fact that our frontline workers are overworked and emotionally exhausted, and that they should be paid better and given the paid leaves they deserve, instead of us thinking that they do their jobs because they love the job so much, that the job itself is its own compensation.

Eileen 14:23
Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh, I hate that so much. So much. Anyway, let’s move on to our recommendation of the episode. Margrit, you’ve been reading a really interesting book on craft, right?

Margrit 14:39
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for stopping my rant. And, and stopping me from going overboard. Yeah, so I have been reading a book on craft because we have, all of us, so many of us, have had to reckon with how we work in this new situation. And so luckily, both my endeavors, like teaching and writing, are prone to constant learning and interrogations of how we do things. So I read a lot of articles and books on how to teach and how to write. And my recommendation of the episode is a different kind of craft book, Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World takes on the entrenched western understandings of what writerly craft is in order to advocate and make room for marginalized ways of telling stories. So it’s definitely up our alley here at World of Stories.

So, Salesses, was born in South Korea and adopted into a white American family at two, talks about the history of the much lionized Iowa Writers Workshop which was established in the 1930s with the clear mandate of spreading American style individualism through storytelling against a backdrop of you know, the communist threat. So he argues that all the well known rules about writing can be traced back to the Iowa Writers Workshop, things like write what you know and show don’t tell and the story structure. So Salesses says, and I quote here that “to make craft accessible and inclusive, we must pull back the curtain on what craft is and does. We must reject the mystification and mythification of creative writing.”

Eileen 16:13
Okay, okay. I can see where he’s going with this. Does he talk about how we pull back the curtain?

Margrit 16:20
Yeah, he proceeds to demystify craft by showing how the very particular style of writing upheld and taught by the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has its roots in Aristotle’s poetics and Joseph Campbell’s the hero’s journey, has for so long masqueraded as universal. When in fact, it’s always been the story of a white straight cis abled man. Things like, you know, as I mentioned, you know, the character arc, focused on the individual protagonist or the three act structure, are all inventions particular to western craft that have gained hegemony over all publishing and are used to silence any other kind of writing.

So here’s Salesses again and I quote, “In contrast to the three act structure, Chinese, Korean and Japanese stories have developed a four act rather than a three or five act structure. In Japanese it’s called kishotenketsu (ki introduction sho for development; ten for twist; and ketsu for reconciliation). So whereas the western fiction style relies on conflict, East Asian fiction uses surprise. Salesses offers some perspective on how the dominance of western craft has led to Asian and African stories to be deemed as plotless or undramatic by western critics and therefore silenced by non publication. Right? Because you have to go through certain standards, quote, unquote, in order to get published. And this is simply one example out of the whole book, which for me, was quite the page turner. His robust writing and argumentation style kept me enthralled. I’m one of the choir he’s preaching to. Right? So but I do hope people in publishing and education not only read this book, but also take his message to heart so that we can enjoy truly diverse stories in content and structure.

Eileen 18:10
Mm hmm. Yeah, that book sounds amazing. And I’ve been very curious about other types of story structures that are not grounded in western storytelling. So I’m definitely interested in this book. Thank you for the recommendation.

Margrit 18:29
For sure.

Eileen 18:30
So that is all for this episode. And if you would like to join the conversation, we would love for you to comment on our question of the episode, which is, how do you measure productivity? And alternatively, how do you put value on labour?

Margrit 18:48
And again, you can let us know on Twitter at @World_ofStories, or you can email us directly at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com. If you like our show, please share the podcast with your friends. You can rate and review World of Stories on Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcasts. The more reviews we get, the easier it will be for new listeners to find us.

Eileen 19:11
And lastly, we have a new development for World of Stories we now have a Ko-fi! Or cof-fee? Or Ko-fi? I don’t know.

Margrit 19:20
Or coffee.

Eileen 19:24
If you’d like to partner with us, in our work and labour in producing the podcast, we’d appreciate every contribution, no matter how big or small. You can donate to World of Stories at k- co-. See, this is the problem. I don’t know how to say this word: ko-fi.com/WorldOfStories. That’s ko-fi.com/WorldOfStories, which is all in one word. Thank you so much for listening.

Until next time, stay safe.

Margrit 20:00
And keep on humaning.