paired with “Puerto Rican Obituary”

Inviting students to question the largely positive perception of productivity, the “pre-write” and “gather ideas” portions of this activity could be used as an in-class exploration and discussion, while the “write” portion could extend to writing outside of class.

Introduction

ET: Work constitutes a significant portion of most adults’ daily lives, but our relationship with work is one we’re socialized and encultured into. And so, like other beliefs and ideologies defined by the collective and internalized by the individual, it can be very difficult to question or undermine ideas with which we pin some sense of value. Faculty on our campus teach a full load of 4 courses per semester and most of our students work at least one job to pay for their tuition and fees as full-time students. Venerating hustle culture can feel like the positive spin on an overwhelming workload even if it makes us complicit to a work culture that benefits from each of us tying our self-worth to our work performance.

One of the challenges of teaching Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” is that students often overlook its role as a poem of protest against a toxic work culture that aims to ask you about the agency you have in your own work, of who defines your worth to society, of who benefits from your work and why that may not be you. We hope that these texts and activities will help you and your students question and critique work culture by redefining “good work” as what empowers and supports the well-being of workers. Efficiency and productivity aren’t necessarily bad, but who benefits from and who pays for those efficiencies and productivity?

Guide

Pre-write: Going Against the Productivity Maxim

Pick one of the below quotes and spend a couple of minutes writing on why this productivity maxim could be misguided, toxic, or lack nuance. What are the ideological assumptions that underlie the quote you chose? What do those beliefs teach you to be ashamed of?

• “Sometimes, things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night.” – Michael Jordan
• “Reflect on what you do in a day. You may have never realized how some simple, harmless activities rob you of precious time.” – Vivek Naik
• “Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.” – Paul Gauguin
• “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary

If you are already enamored by productivity and see no issue with these quotes, try skimming Nancy Driver’s “Let’s Talk About Toxic Productivity.”

Gather Ideas: The Dark Side of Work

In many ways, the myth of one’s productivity being proof of one’s goodness infiltrates American work culture. It can be an especially pernicious and stubborn myth to unseat. While there is value in a job well done, one’s agency over one’s time and the goals one’s work serves define that more than productivity at large.

Read or watch one of the following sources and take note of the three most compelling ideas that challenge or deepen your thinking on your relationship to work.

• BBC Radio’s “Max Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic,” published on their YouTube channel in 2016, provides a brief overview of Weber’s premise of his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which tied salvation with one’s work ethic.
• George Woodcock’s “The Tyranny of the Clock,” an anarchist essay published in 1944, charts how the development of the mechanical clock changed humans’ relationship to time and work.
• Elle Hunt’s “Japan’s karoshi culture was a warning. We didn’t listen,” published in Wired UK in February of 2021, discusses how working to death, once a seeming oddity of Japanese work culture, has spread globally and employer and government practices are not doing enough to curtail the health risks the World Health Organization identifies as directly connected to overwork.
• Maya Vinokour’s “Work won’t set you free,” published in the Boston Globe in August 2023, draws parallels between American conservatives’ take on the “work ethic” lessons slaves learned on the plantation and the narratives of productivity Jews fell victim to heading up to and during the Holocaust. You might also want to read about the “Arbeit macht frei” from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
• Matthew Desmond’s “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation,” published in the New York Times in August of 2019, connects the surveillance and productivity models modern corporations use to the accounting and “labor management” practices developed on slave plantations. This article is long, so if you’re short on time, read the section that begins “Perhaps you’re reading this at work” or the following section that begins with “Today modern technology has facilitated unremitting workplace supervision.”

Write: Critique Labor Practices

Through the “Pre-Write” and “Gather Ideas” activities, you’ve spent time considering other ways to look at the value and meaning of work that doesn’t venerate productivity for its own sake or the sake of your own self-worth. Now it is time to consider how you judge the work culture around you. A few approaches you might consider for a short cultural critique on work culture include:

• Notice how your co-workers and boss talk about and create a culture around what work should be. Consider how those cultural choices, rule or incentive systems, or attitudes affirm and hurt your well being. Use one of five elements of the Framework on Workplace Well-Being Developed by the U.S. Surgeon General to help ground your critique.
• Read the syllabi you received from professors this semester and mark elements that humanize and dehumanize your work as a student. Read the feedback your professors give you on your work and note how they talk to and about students. How do they cast your role and theirs in the learning process? How does it encourage and discourage you?
• Consider the back-handed compliment that ultimately demeans and shames its recipient. For instance, you could watch the music video to Stromae’s “Santé.” Is it a celebration of the worker? Does it mock and belittle the worker? Put that video in conversation with another pop culture representation of work life to identify ways we perpetuate an empty rhetoric around caring for the humanity of others.