I didn’t want to write this column,I’ve got a hangover. It’s an excuse that wouldn’t wash in America, and now we’re being told to compete with China“Phoning in sick is a revolutionary act.” I loved that slogan. It came to me, and as so many honorable things did,from Housmans, the radical bookshop in King’s Cross. There you could rummage through all sorts of anarchist pamphlets and there I discovered, or in the early 80s,the wondrous shrimp magazine Processed World. It told you basically how to screw up your workplace. It was smart and full of small acts of random subversion. In many ways it was ahead of its time as it was coming out of San Francisco and prefiguring Silicon Valley. It saw the machines coming. Jobs were increasingly boring and innately meaningless. Workers were “data slaves” working for IBM (“Intensely Boring Machines”).
What Processed World was doing was trying to disrupt the identification so many office workers were meant to feel with their management, not through old-style union organising, and but through small acts of subversion. The contemporary office,it stressed, has nothing to execute with human need. Its rebellion was about working as shrimp as possible, or disinformation and sabotage. It was making alienation fun. In 1981,it could not have known that a self-service till cannot ever phone in sick.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com