Robert Bruno and What Work Is---How do we think about work and workers?

From an essay by Robert Bruno on the Labor & Working-Class History Association website:

In my book, What Work Is, I assert that work has an enormous contradictory impact on the workers and society they build. Anthropologist Herbert Applebaum draws on a biological metaphor to centralize the importance of work to the individual and society. Work, he notes, “is like the spine which structures the way people live, how they make contact with material and social reality, and how they achieve status and self-esteem.”[1] There’s much that makes us human, but work—fully understood—is critical to our individual and social development. Society itself emanates from how we make, distribute, and use the products of our collective labor. Karl Marx stated it as an immutable law that “Labor … is the condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” It is an “eternal and natural necessity which mediates … life itself.”[2]

As the United States struggles with an unchartered and unprecedented change in how people will work and think about work, my book recommends a “future of work” that listens to what workers say, “work is.” The thesis of the book is that as we formulate new work structures, we should draw from what workers have appropriated from their work experiences. My intention is that we first learn from what workers can tell us about their present work to know how to design a future of what work should be.

The voices of workers should be prioritized in developing public policies and workplace practices that endeavor to make work more respectful of human life and harmonious with the natural and social world. What workers tell us about “what work is” should inform how leaders of political, business, labor, educational, media and cultural institutions think about the ubiquitous act of working for a living. The reality of work won’t be changed unless we recognize what a complicated, contradictory, glorious, and poetic experience work is. To change what our society does with work and to workers requires first understanding how workers experience their labor. Listening to voices from the point of production is the beginning of thinking differently about work.

Read the entire essay here.