MoMA R&D
Salon 31 Workspheres
Introduction: Paola Antonelli
Palak Shah
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Anand Giridharadas
Angela Dimayuga
Beth Noveck
Video Contribution: Anwar Shaikh
Video Contribution: Prajna Desai
Q&A
In 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes began composing the essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in which he expressed economic optimism and predicted a future of enjoyed leisure. Envisioning a 15-hour work week, Keynes implied we would be able to devote the rest of our time to improving social relations and well-being. Nearly one hundred years later, everyone is still working and wishing for a full 40-hour job. Whether working as a matter of survival, of duty, of identity, or all of the above, most individuals are still defined by their occupation. Fluctuations in employment rates; weakened unions; fears of rising unemployment due to automation; the surge of the gig economy; the adoption of coworking spaces, paralleled by the proliferation of ‘all-inclusive’ company campuses; all these phenomena are both cause and consequences of the fact that the nature of work has shifted. Reflecting on our changing political and social landscape, we will question who works, and what it means to work today.
Some questions we strived to answer: How has the concept of work changed in the past two decades? Who works, and who doesn’t? What does it mean to work today? Does work determine one’s social value? What about personal value? How can we consider class divides and unemployment in this context? Is work a right? Is it a privilege? What is the value of productivity? How do we measure it? What is ‘free time’ and how do we value it? To what extent is work a means for survival versus a sphere for community and even social change? How does technology affect who works? How does it affect the way we work? Are proposals for universal basic income a positive step towards equality, an expedient solution to offset the possible consequences of automation, or a way for top members of society to maintain extreme wealth without pushback? Are there any types of work that will never be perturbed by technological progress? How do we exist without work? In our current political and social landscape, how does the right to work legitimize power? Is work intrinsically a political act?
This salon took place on May 15th, 2019.
Speakers
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Palak Shah
Palak Shah is a social entrepreneur, a leader in the social movement for workers’ rights in the new economy, and a speaker and thought leader on the future of work. As Social Innovations Director of NDWA, she leads national strategy on raising market norms and standards, partnering with the private sector, and building sustainable business ventures. She founded NDWA Labs (formerly known as Fair Care Labs), the innovations arm of NDWA, which experiments with using technology to improve job access and quality for domestic workers, and builds worker-centric technology to ensure an equitable future for workers as labor markets shift online.
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Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Since 1977, when Mierle Laderman Ukeles became the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation—a position she still holds—she has created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that “keeps the city alive,” urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places. Ukeles asks whether we can design modes of survival – for a thriving planet, not an entropic one – that don’t crush our personal and civic freedom and silence the individual’s voice.
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Anand Giridharadas
Anand Giridharadas is a writer, and most recently the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, published by Knopf in 2018. His other books are The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. He is an editor-at-large for TIME, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, having written, most recently, the biweekly “Letter from America.”
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Angela Dimayuga
Angela Dimayuga is the creative director of food and culture for the Standard International hotel group. Formerly, the executive chef of Mission Chinese, she was a key figure in building the restaurant and was subsequently included in Zagat’s “30 Under 30” List in 2015 as an upcoming culinary star and was nominated for a James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year in 2016. At the Standard, she oversees the hotel’s restaurants, as well as leads programming that combines food, music, art, and activism. She is also taking the lead on the opening of a new Standard restaurant in London, and is involved in further expansion projects.
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Beth Noveck
Beth Noveck directs the Governance Lab (GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She is a Professor in Technology, Culture, and Society and affiliated faculty at the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer in 2018. She is also Visiting Senior Faculty Fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.
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Josh Kline
Josh Kline is a New York-based artist, who works primarily in sculpture, video, and installation, to create artworks and exhibitions that consider the ways in which our humanity has been transformed, commodified, and instrumentalized within neoliberal society. Examining the regimes of control to which the human body is increasingly subjected—ranging from governmental and corporate surveillance to the relentless pursuit of youth—Kline addresses the erosion of boundaries between labor and leisure and the incursion of consumer culture into the most literally intimate aspects of life: blood, DNA, neurochemistry. In 2015, Kline began a major cycle of installation-based projects exploring the politics and economics of the 21st Century. Kline’s solo exhibition, Climate Change: Part One, will open at 47 Canal, New York on April 27, 2019. His work will also be included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Video Contributors
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Prajna Desai
Prajna Desai is an art historian, poet, and independent curator. She writes about visual politics, print culture, and built form at the intersection of cultural history and histories of science. She has a Masters in English Literature from the University of Mumbai and a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from Yale University. Currently the Asia Research Fellow in the global research initiative at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, she was previously Visiting Professor at Stern College for Women, New York; College of Staten Island, CUNY, New York; University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications including Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Art India, Guernica, and Open Democracy. She has led self-initiated curatorial projects across various media at Project 88, Mumbai (2013, 2016, 2017); Delfina Foundation London (2014) Dharavi Biennale, Mumbai (2014-15), and Focus Photography Festival (2017).
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Anwar Shaikh
Anwar Shaikh is Professor of Economics at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School University, New York. He is an Associate Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and was a Senior Scholar and member of the Macro Modeling Team at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College from 2000-2005. In 2014 he was awarded the NordSud International Prize for Literature and Science from Italy’s Fondazione Pescarabruzzo. His intellectual biography appears in the most recent edition of the book Eminent Economists II published by Cambridge University Press (2014). His most recent book is Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has written on international trade, finance theory, political economy, econophysics, U.S. macroeconomic policy, the welfare state, growth theory, inflation theory, crisis theory, national and global inequality, and past and current global economic crises.
Reading Resources
MODERN WORK
Aronowitz, Stanley and Cutler, Jonathan, Post-Work, Routledge (1997)
Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 358-373 (1932)
Lichtenstein, Nelson, Assessing 40 Years of Labor Notes, Jacobin (04.07.2019)
Summers, Lawrence H., Economic Possibilities for Our Children: The 2013 Martin Feldstein Lecture, the National Bureau of Economic Research (07.24.2013)
Weeks, Kathi, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press (2011)
Labor History: Tamiment Labor Collections Overview, New York University Libraries (2019)
DOES WORK HAVE A MEANING?
Kline Hunnicutt, Benjamin, Why Do Republicans Want Us to Work All the Time?, Politico (02.07.2014)
Shell, Ellen Ruppel, Should We Expect Work to Be Meaningful?, The Atlantic (01.17.2012)
Thompson, Derek, Workism Is Making Americans Miserable, The Atlantic (02.24.2019)
Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Routledge Classics (2001)
VALUING LABOR / VALUING LIFE
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (2nd Edition), University of Chicago Press (1998)
Conte, Kari (ed.), Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets, Sternberg Press (2015)
Cotter, Holland, An Artist Redefines Power. With Sanitation Equipment., The New York Times (09.15.2016)
Graeber, David, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant, Strike Magazine (08.2013)
Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Holt Paperbacks (2001)
Magdoff, Fred and Magdoff, Harry, Disposable Workers: Today’s Reserve Army of Labor, Monthly Review (04.2004)
McGarry, Kevin, An Art Show That Addresses the Economic Collapse Head-On, The New York Times (04.06.2016)
Terkel, Studs, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, The New Press (1974)
HUSTLE CULTURE
Jamieson, David, The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp: What the future of low-wage work really looks like, Highline: Huffington Post (2019)
Kolbert, Elizabeth, No Time: How did we get so busy?, The New York Times (05.19.2014)
Peterson, Anne Helen, How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, BuzzFeed News (01.05.2019)
Pinsker, Joe, The Cozy, Overcrowded, Keg-Filled Future of Work, The Atlantic (09.27.2017)
Thompson, Derek, The Myth That Americans Are Busier Than Ever, The New York Times (05.21.2014)
Qiqing, Lin and Zhong, Raymond, ‘996’ Is China’s Version of Hustle Culture. Tech Workers Are Sick of It, The New York Times (04.29.2019)
IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS – A WORLD WITHOUT WORK
Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Free Time,’ from The Culture Industry, Routledge (2001)
Carter, Pippa and Jackson, Normand, In Praise of Boredom: Work, play and boredom, Ephemera: theory & politics in organization (2011)
Elliot, Larry, Economics: Whatever happened to Keynes’ 15-hour working week?, The Guardian (08.31.2008)
Russell, Bertrand, ‘In Praise of Idleness,’ Harper’s Magazine, (10.1932)
Shell, Ellen Ruppel, In Praise of Downtime, The Atlantic (07.30.2012)
Thompson, Derek, A World Without Work, The Atlantic (07/08.2015)
FUTURE STRATEGIES
Beckett, Andy, Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs, The Guardian (01.19.2018)
Cain Miller, Claire, How to Make Work Better, The New York Times (2019)
Chapman, Ben, What happened when Sweden tried six-hour working days, The Independent (02.10.2017)
Graham-Mclay, Charlotte, A 4-Day Workweek? A Test Run Shows a Surprising Result, The New York Times (07.19.2018)
Sandbu, Martin, The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Financial Times (04.29.2019)
Selingo, Jeffrey, The Third Education Revolution, The Atlantic (03.22.2018)
The Agenda to Raise America’s Pay, Economic Policy Institute (12.06.2016)
Future of Work(ers), The Ford Foundation (2019)
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
Guppta, Kavi, Basic Income Might Be The Answer To Society’s Productivity Crisis, Forbes (09.22.2016)
Jauhiainen, Antti and Mäkinen, Joona-Hermanni, Universal Basic Income Didn’t Fail in Finland. Finland Failed It., The New York Times (05.02.2018)
Pranab Bardhan, Pranab, Yes, Universal Basic Income. No, Targeted Income Schemes, Bloomberg Quint (01.30.2019)
Wheeler, David R., What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?, The Atlantic (05.18.2015)
INVISIBLE WORKERS AND EXPLOITATION
Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton, The Atlantic (12.12.2014)
Costa, Daniel, The True Cost of Low Prices is Exploited Workers, Economic Policy Institute (06.16.2015)
Finkelpearl, Tom, “Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles on Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” in Dialogues in Public Art, MIT Press, 295-322 (2000)
Guilbert, Kieran, Migrant workers prey to modern slavery in UK construction industry, Reuters (04.09.2018)
Scheiber, Noam, Labor Dept. Says Workers at a Gig Company Are Contractors, The New York Times (04.29.19)
Strassel, Annemarie, Work It! The New Face of Labor in Fashion, Dissent (Spring 2014)
Forced Labor, International Labor Rights Forum (2019)
Uzbekistan’s cotton industry relies on state-orchestrated forced labor of children and adults. International Labor Rights Forum (2019)
WAGE INEQUALITY
Carlo Mandapat, John and García, Emma, Teacher Shortages How do we know that low pay is a factor in the teacher shortage?, Economic Policy Institute (05.09.2019)
Escamilla, Felipe; Putnam, Julie; Stock, Stephen, California’s Wage Theft Problem, NBC Bay Area (02.13.2015)
Florida, Richard, Wage Inequality and America’s Most Successful Cities, CityLab (10.07.2015)
Harris, Malcolm, Doing More, Getting Less: The unmaking of American work., The Nation (03.07.2019)
POLITICS OF WORKING: COLLECTIVISM, RESISTANCE, AND POWER
Chen, Michelle; Jaffee, Sarah; Levinson, Mark, Dissent: Labor’s Comeback, Dissent (Spring 2014)
Lee, Wendy, Thousands of security officers unionize in Silicon Valley, San Francisco Chronicle (01.28.2017)
Mauk, Ben, The Ludlow Massacre Still Matters, The New Yorker (04.18.2014)
Philips, Patricia, C. (ed.), Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, Prestel (2016)
Scott, Andrea K., Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the Art of Work, The New Yorker (10.28.2016)
What Makes a Worker, The Atlantic (2019)
Invisible no longer: Google’s shadow workforce speaks up, Medium (12.05.2018)
Open letter to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors, Medium (04.10.2019)
‘NON-WORK’ WORKERS: CARETAKERS AND WOMEN AS WORKERS
Cain Miller, Claire, Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy.,’ The New York Times (04.26.2019)
Erickson, Rebecca J., Why Emotion Work Matters: Sex, Gender, and the Division of Household Labor, The Journal of Marriage and Family, 67:2, 337-351 (05.2005)
Harris, Kamalah; Jayapal, Pramila; Poo, Ai-jen, Change begins at home – and on the floor of Congress, CNN (11.29.2018)
Kasriel, Stephane and Horowitz, Sara, 55 Million Americans Freelance. So Why Don’t Politicians Talk About Them?, HuffPost (10.06.2016)
Lepore, Jill, Are Robots Competing for Your Job?, The New Yorker (02.25.2019)
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, The Atlantic (07/08,2012)
Caregiver Statistics: Demographics, Family Caregiver Alliance: National Center on Caregiving (04.17.2019)
CREATIVE WORK AND CULTURAL INTERVENTIONS
Deamer, Peggy, The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, Bloomsbury Academic (2015)
Gill, Rosalind and Pratt, Andy, [Precarity and Cultural Work in the Social Factory? Immaterial Labor, Precariousness and Cultural Work(http://www.e-flux.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Precarity_cultural.pdf), E-flux (2013)
Moeller, Robert, Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann Arrive at Work, Hyperallergic (11.14.2014)
Paulson, Michael, Landmark Broadway Deal Gives Actors a Piece of the Profits, The New York Times (02.08.2019)
Petrossiants, Andreas and Wallace, Brett, Rethinking artistic production to build cooperation and new models to reclaim dignity in work, The Brooklyn Rail (04.2019)
Sigler, Friederike (ed.), Work, MIT Press (2017)
Saunders, Matt, The Evolution Of The Creative Class, Forbes (05.04.2017)
Sholette, Gregory, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Pluto Press (2011)
The Evolution Of The Creative Class, Tata Communications (2019)
MANAGING AND DESIGNING WORK HABITS
Aiello, John and Kolb, Kathryn, Electronic performance monitoring: A risk factor for workplace stress, in S. L. Sauter & L. R. Murphy (Eds.), Organizational risk factors for job stress, American Psychological Association (1995) (pp. 163-179)
Antonelli, Paola (ed.), Workspheres: design and contemporary work styles, The Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams (2001)
Doll, Jen, Your Boss Is On to Your Little ‘Work From Home’ Scheme, The Atlantic (07.11.2012)
Mateescu, Alexandra and Nguyen, Aiha, Explainer: Workplace Monitoring & Surveillance, Data & Society (02.06.2019)
Shell, Ellen Ruppel, The Employer-Surveillance State, The Atlantic (10.15.2018)
2018-19 NBA Referees by The Numbers, NBA Official (10.15.2018)
TECHNOLOGY AND WORK, A HISTORY AND NEW SOLUTIONS
Andrews, Evan, Who were the Luddites?, History (08.29.2018)
Autor, David and Salomons, Anna, Is Automation Labor Share–Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share, Brooking Paper on Economic Activity (spring 2018)
Brodsky Schur, Joan, Eli Whitney’s Patent for the Cotton Gin, National Archives (09.23.2016)
Kingrea, Eric, How Your Career Can Survive the Next Wave of Automation, Vice (03.07.2018)
Manyika, James, Technology, jobs, and the future of work, McKinsey Global Institute (04.2017)
Porter, Eduardo, Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two, The New York Times (02.04.2019)
Wallace, Brett, Op-Ed: Preparing For Work In The Age Of Automation, New Inc. (09.03.2018)
AI AND WORK
Lohr, Steven, ‘The Beginning of a Wave’: A.I. Tiptoes Into the Workplace, The New York Times (08.05.2018)
Artificial intelligence will create new kinds of work, The Economist (08.26.2017)
Labor & Automation, AI Institute Now (2019)
CHANGING HOW WE WORK: SKILLS, JOBS, ARRANGEMENTS
Autor, David, Work of the Past, Work of the Future, MIT (02.27.2019)
Badger, Emily and Bui, Quoctrung, What if Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?,The New York Times (01.11.2019)
Batra, Parul; Bughin, Jacques; Chui, Michael; Ko, Ryan; Lund, Susan; Manyika, James; Sanghvi, Saurabh; Woetzel, Jonathan, Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages, McKinsey Global Institute (11.2017)
Dimon, Jamie and Seltzer, Marlene, Closing the Skills Gap, Politico (01.05.2014)
García, Emma and Weiss, Elaine, U.S. Schools Struggle to Hire and Retain Teachers, Economic Policy Institute (04.16.2019)
Katz, Lawrence F. and Krueger, Alan B., The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015, Princeton University and NBER (03.29.2016)
Krugman, Paul, Jobs and Skills and Zombies, The New York TImes (03.30.2014)
Sherman, Erik, The Gig Economy Never Really Happened, Say the Economists Who Predicted It, Fortune (01.07.2019)
Thompson, Derek, The Silent Crisis of Retail Employment, The Atlantic (04.18.2017)
LABOR TRANSFORMING SOCIETY
Badger, Emily, A Detailed Map of the Net Migration Flows for Every U.S. County, CityLab (02.06.14)
Berger, Thor; Chen, Chinchih; Frey, Carl Benedikt, Political machinery: did robots swing the 2016 US presidential election?, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 34: 3, 418–442, (07.02.2018)
Herschthal, Eric, The Fabric of Our Lives, Slate (12.02.2014)
Hooper, Kate, Spain’s Labor Migration Policies in the Aftermath of Economic Crisis, Migration Policy Institute (04.2019)
Pinsker, Joe, How 14,000 Workers Managed to Slow Down the Entire Economy, CityLab (04.24.2015)
Somerville, Will and Sumption, Madeleine, Immigration and the Labour Market: Theory, Evidence and Policy, Migration Policy Institute (03.2009)
Zellen, Jody, The Unemployed at Los Angeles International Airport, Jody Zellen (2019)
Eurofound and International Labour Organization, Working conditions in a global perspective, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, and International Labour Organization, Geneva (2019)
LISTEN
‘Working’ Then And Now: Studs Terkel’s Book Interviews Resurface As Audio, NPR (09.25.2016)
672: No Fair!, This American Life, (04.05.2019)
WATCH
Ehmann, Antje, Labour in a Single Shot (2011-2013)
Miller, Michelle, Workers rights in the age of surveillance capitalism, Ford Foundation (10.18.2018)
Moore, Michael, Roger & Me (1989)
Richard Baldwin: Globalization, Robots, and the Future of Work, World Affairs (02.14.2019)
The Future of Work: A VICE Special Report, Vice News (03.29.2019)
The Future of Work in America, The Atlantic (06.22.2015)
[The Future of Work Summit],(https://www.theatlantic.com/live/events/future-of-work-summit/2016/) The Atlantic (10.26.2016)
The History and Future of Work with futurist Marina Gorbis, re:Work (10.21.2014)
The Way We Work Series, TED (2019)
Unravelling the Thread | The Story of Fairtrade Cotton, Fairtrade Foundation (04.18.2018)
Work Smarter Series, TED (2010)
Why the U.S. Should Provide Universal Basic Income, The Atlantic (04.16.2018)
55, unemployed and faking normal: One woman’s story of barely scraping by, PBS News Hour (01.19.2017)