![]() 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. 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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