According to the International Labor Organization, the ILO, there are 3. 45 billion people in the global workforce. They are people of working age and available to work, and who may or may not be employed.
In 2019, about 2 billion of these people were working informally. Informal work does not generally provide the same social and legal protections as formal work. And it is often synonymous with lower wages as well.
This is a discussion about jobs, but work, as we know, does not only exist when there is a formal or informal job linked to it. House work, for emxample, is also work, even if it is done by you and for yourself or for your family without a hired professional. The contribution of feminism in this regard is very important so we may be able to consider care work and what is called social reproduction when we think of work.
And then there's a video called “R of Social Reproduction” in the channel, by the way. Work is, after all, one of the most important categories in Marxism and also for us to understand exploitation in the world. Capitalism is a system that exploits the workforce of a majority, the majority who creates value, and without them things would not be produced at the scale and speed they are today.
And meanwhile, a minority earns a lot, a lot. People like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, Jorge Paulo Lemann. These people are only billionaires because they can exploit the workforce of many people paying hem less than the value of what is created.
These guys appropriate this gap. Bezos knows this all too well, so much so that he bluntly thanked Amazon workers for contributing to his space travel last year. But, in today's video, on the return of Thesis Eleven on YouTube, on the 5 year channel’s anniversary, I want to touch a little more the surface of how we think about work and go beyond what is already visible.
The question today is: what are the other layers of work that are beyond what we calculate in the working day hours? [Theme music] Subtitles by André Gavasso Let's go. 1 day has 24 hours and 1 week has 168 hours.
Technically, the working week in the job market in Brazil has a workload of 44 hours. So there are still124 remaining hours a week. Between 6 and 8 hours of sleep is recommended per night.
So let's suppose that this person has 7 hours of sleep. From the 124 hours left over the rest of the week, now we're going to subtract 49 hours of sleep. We’re left with 75 hours a week for 1 person on a 44-hour work schedule and adequate sleep.
But this person does not work from home, they have to commute to work. So, they take the public transport, and it takes about 90 minutes in the morning to arrive and 90 minutes at the end of the day to return from work. So even though they work, let's say, 8 hours, 5 days a week, and another 4 hours on Saturday, that's 6 days in total commuting for 3 hours, 3 hours per day to go to work.
So now we're going to subtract 18 hours. And then there are 57 hours left in that person's week. Don't worry, this math will make sense.
So, 57 hours, you can do a lot with this time, right? So, let's see: people need to eat. If this person is responsible for preparing their own food or other people as well, that takes time.
They also need to wash clothes, wash dishes, tidy up the house. A woman who works outside her home usually spends an average of 18. 5 hours doing this per week.
A man, 10. 4 hours. So I'm going to round it up, okay?
So, 19 and 11. So, for women, there are now 38 hours left in the week. For men, 46 hours.
In addition, if caring for children, elderly people and other people who require direct attention is needed, more hours will be spent per week. So, helping your children with their homework, or taking and picking them up from school, this can take 1 to 2 hours a day. There are now about 30 hours a week left for a woman who works outside her home, but who carries out social reproduction tasks herself.
But people also shower, they also go to the supermarket, and there is also the fact that the WHO recommends about 5 hours of physical exercise, at least, weekly. So, I'm thinking that, in fact, there are about 20 hours left in this person's week. Less than 1 full day With what's left, you should enjoy leisure, rest, in addition to just sleeping, have a personal life, access to culture, and, in a way, fit in other types care, like going to the doctor, to the dentist, we're talking about less than 3 hours on average a day to fit in the part that is beyond survival and maintenance of life.
So, it's the part where we try to fit part of actually living. And there lies great part of the problem. Today our life is organized according to the working day.
You know the time you're going to work and plan everything according it. The work, the one that is clearly visible to everyone, is in the center. And all the other work like housework and commuting time revolve around it, and then around that the leisure, rest, culture, health care, relationships part, that all comes later.
And that's why we say that we live to work instead of working to live. And this gets worse because with wages so low and the cost of living so high, Brazil is an example, most people can't even afford to live, most of them actually just survive. That's what they can do.
And so, as Marx said about alienated work in the Paris Manuscripts, quote: "because work, vital activity, productive life, now appear to man only as a means to satisfy a need. That of maintaining his physical existence. " It is hard for people to have time to enjoy happiness in this way.
And it even seems odd talking about it, right, while so many people are in survival mode trying to feed themselves, not be evicted, we’re talking about happiness. There are people who don’t like to talk about happiness and Marxism, but happiness is a very important thing. Unfortunately, it is something very scarce for the working class.
When thinking about the poorest and richest in Brazil, FGV Social reports a difference of 25. 5% in levels of happiness. The more difficulties people go through, the more unhappy they become It's kind of obvious what I'm talking about, but it's still necessary to say: we live under extreme inequalities.
And we have economic inequality, inequality in access to resources and services, inequality in the impact of the ecological crisis, here's the video on environmental racism, and inequality even in being able to be happy. This gives us the extremely important task to defend happiness. Right?
Of course. But it's like that question attributed to Bertolt Brecht: "what are these times when we have to defend the obvious? " But the capitalist system also presents itself as an advocate for happiness, and so how?
In the shape of things. Or as I like to say from time to time: in the shape of junk. As it is a system based on the idea of infinite growth and accumulation, two things that can only place us nearest to the risk of planetary collapse, in fact, this system needs to keep selling things to us.
Junk, junk, junk. "So you don't have time to hang out with your friends. Here, take this earring.
"' "So I don’t care if your boss is horrible, and you want to cry every night when you get home from work Oh, better get some retail therapy and come back home with a bunch of new clothes. " "Then, if everything goes wrong because you don't even have time to cook, don't worry, just order a delivery. " "Didn't that app send you a coupon yesterday for that fast food chain, right?
So how fast, huh? " And that's how we find out about a huge contradiction. Because you may have noticed that, considering our mathematical exercise about the work week, everything has to do with time.
It's about our time, it's other people's time, who's buying time, who's selling time, and for how much? The reality is that, in these exchanges of time, a lot goes unnoticed, especially when we are consuming someone else's time in an indirect way, instead of selling our own. These official time estimates leave a lot of things out.
And then it is our task to pay attention to what is left out. I'll give you three examples for you. One of them is about knowledge and content creation, the other is about care work, and the last one is about food delivery.
The relationship with money is different in all of them, but do you know what is the same? The result of the work involved often seems like magic, because the time behind its production is not accounted for or not even acknowledged. So I'm going to start with the first example because that's what I work with.
There is research and there is Thesis Eleven, of course they complement each other because Thesis Eleven is a political education project based on the dissemination of research, but I have very different tasks in that sense. So, when someone reads my book, Morbid Symptoms, which is a book with almost 400 pages, and very small print, it’s a book with a lot of theory and field research, this person may take several weeks to read it. People read in their spare time, so we already know that there aren't many weeks o do it.
But to do the research for this book, it took me about 4 years of work, about 35 hours a week. And then there was the writing. I used part of my thesis to do it, translating it, adapting it, and the rest original material.
And so there's the review. And so there are the changes. And then for this book to reach you with the content it has, it's about 9,000 hours of work just on my part.
Not to mention the work of proofreaders, editors, graphic designers, cover artists, logistics personnel, bookstore salespeople, and so on. These are the working hours of many people, which are so condensed in it. And their payment varies, because it may happen that the worker is being paid for each service provided, for example, to make the cover.
Or it could happen that a salary is paid as part of a broad service, of a person who, for example, works in a bookstore selling several books, and not just this one. Or it could happen that the person is paid copyrights, right, because I worked 9,000 hours. It turns out that it takes time before the book becomes reality.
Research work is very time-consuming. It's frustrating. It goes back and forth, there are creative blocks, difficulties in developing arguments, so you have to talk to people.
So, before we get to the final product and the research, there are several final products. Especially if we also get involved in this broad dissemination of results, showing you the content a little earlier. And that’s when the work of getting your ass on the chair and reviewing the bibliography, or scheduling interviews, or reading a bunch of articles comes in, and not even 20% of what you read will be useful in the end.
All this tends to go unnoticed when you see the book in the shelf. It seems, perhaps, that the only work contained in it is the writing because those are the words that you are actually seeing. And it's the same in the channel’s videos.
Right now I'm recording it, you can see the recording work. But there are many hours of research preparation as well. There's a script review because I don't come up with the videos out of nowhere and just sit here to record it, there's my and Vitor's editing work, there's Gilberth studying the material, so he can record the Brazilian Sign Language translation.
There's Ioná organizing the workflow for the video to come out on the agreed date. There's Negra doing the social media content, which is based on the design crated by Estudio Caxa. There's Rojú and Gavasso subtitling it to ensure accessibility.
There's me checking everything later. And then checking the comments and replying them. There's Mapeo ensuring that the site is in order for Ioná to upload the references list that I always prepare for you.
There's Mirela who takes care of the accounting, so we may pay the staff properly, right, considering all their rights. There is the work of the staff at apoia. se maintainming the platform, and that’s where you can contribute to our project.
There are also those who work on YouTube and make sure it all works here. And then we can extrapolate, there is the work of people who made your cell phone, who delivered your computer, and so on. So, to watch a half-hour video on YouTube, you may be interacting with thousands of hours of work from a hundred people.
And, because of that, I even take the opportunity to remind you to comment, like and share, ok? It turns out that, in an era where everything is instantaneous, we tend to keep things on the surface. We see only what is right in front of us, and then we oversimplify the time relationship.
Most of the work is invisible. This is a constant in care work for log time. "How great the children smelling good, with their clean and ironed uniform, attending school.
" It's easy to notice this. But what about the mother or grandmother who woke up earlier to take the child’s uniform off the clothesline, to iron and fold it, to make breakfast, to wake the kids up, to make the them shower, brush their teeth, make sure they ate properly for later drop them at school. Care work is highly organized in society based on gender as well as race.
More women do unpaid care work at home, or on a paid basis in other people’s homes, than men. And more black women too. In the case of countries in the Global North, there is even a whole industry based on bringing migrant and racialized women to do this work, for example, in the United States or Europe.
And they do it so that American or European women may be able to work outside the home. Meanwhile, the question that remains, for example, of who takes care of the Filipino children whose mothers now take care of French children? The layers of invisible work can have international contours as well.
And there's that part of the care work that's practically impossible to quantify. It's the mental load. There is a video that Andressa Reis posted on her Instagram a while ago, that perfectly exemplifies this.
It's called "Nice to meet you, I’m mental load". And I'll leave its link for you here. But, basically, in the video, she is lying on the couch with her partner, and they are watching TV.
And then you hear what she's thinking instead of enjoying her TV time. So, she’s thinking about cooking rice with broccoli, buying gouache paint, the birthday of her friends' daughter, having forgotten the clothes in the washing machine, etc. Her mind can’t just rest, because care work is not just about the execution part.
It also involves a lot of planning. And, of course, concerns. Concerns that should traditionally belong to women.
And that's why I really like it when in German they talk about care work using the term "Sorgearbeit", because it's a term that can be translated as care work, but it can also be translated as concern work. Concerns can live in the very deep layers of planning, of the emotional involvement people have in care work as well, and in the act of internalization that most women go through, right, within very sexist socialization in a society where there is an expectation of gender about what is each gender’s responsibility. So, it is not a coincidence that if a child sits in the middle of a supermarket and start screaming desperately, people tend to ask themselves "where is this child's mother?
" And not "where is this child's father? ". That's the tendency.
Since, in a society in which care is democratized, and I’m talking about the democracy of care work, people would tend to ask themselves where the guardians of this child are, those responsible for them, and how they could help in that situation. And now we'll get to today's last example of the layers of invisible work and other people’s time, which is delivery services. In the pandemic, the habit of buying things on the internet has increased even more.
But in addition to the work behind the internet service, the website, uploading the products on it, producing the products, well, there's also the delivering work, right? Things don't get to your house out of nowhere, as true as it may look. Some time ago when we temporarily had a Thesis Eleven store, which we no longer have, Ioná was responsible for product shipping.
So, for our calendar to get to people, the delivery part meant that she would look at the orders, pick up the products, she would pack them, would put the person’s address, and then would personally go to the post office to send them one by one. As we also used to sell mugs, sometimes that meant she would take a cart full of boxes there, so our sales volume was very modest, obviously, so it would not justify a contract in which a worker would pick it all up at her house. So, she would go on foot.
That's why we set a shipping deadline of several days, to let the orders pile up a little so she wouldn’t have to go to the post office so often because that meant she would have to commute. That meant spending time. So luckily most people understood that.
We couldn't deliver products Amazon-style, but the truth is that even Amazon shouldn't deliver Amazon-style. The superfast deliver option that we have seen on Amazon, or on Mercado Livre, is not a simple result of companies' technological advances and availability of ready-to-delivery stock in more warehouses. There's the factor of the people responsible for picking up products from the gigantic warehouses, packing it, and sending it in shorter and shorter shipping deadlines.
Sometimes the delivery of 1 book in the Prime option, in 1 or 2 days because you didn't plan ahead to buy the book, or because a specific demand came up at the last minute, means that logistics workers need to be much, much quicker in doing exhausting tasks. Physical and mental exhaustion. And that's how productivity increases.
And that allows for more deliveries, faster deliveries, more sales, and more customers. But worker’s salary is still the same. So, the principle of surplus value is very plain to see.
And that’s how Jeff Bezos earns funds for his trip to space. And there's still the risk of accidents at work, the kind of things that we can't even imagine. So, in one of Amazon's gigantic warehouses in New York, employees made a petition asking to consolidate two breaks of 15 minutes, and one break of only 30 minutes, and do you know why?
Because the place is so big, they would waste 15 minutes just getting to and coming back from the break room. So, just their displacement took up all their break time. And, of course, this displacement was deducted from their break, not from work time.
In the world of food delivery, this is getting worse and worse. Sandra Guimarães and I were discussing this recently in a visit I paid to her, and later she sent me a photo of a delivery service advertisement on the subway. I will show it here.
Thank you, Victor. “Your espresso in a few minutes. ” So just imagine.
You went to the supermarket and forgot to buy coffee. No problem, you can order it in a delivery app and a mysterious hand will deliver it you. In Brazil, this mysterious hand is usually peripheral, racialized, and there are even cases of elderly people doing this type of service, which is very difficult.
And they're doing it because life is hard right now. In places like Paris, this hand is made of immigrants, refugees, racialized people, people who can't get a job at all, and often share a house with several other colleagues because not even with 10 hours of daily delivery work, rain or shine, in cold or hot weather, these people are able to pay rent. So, it is necessary for you to understand that when you don't cook because you don't have time, or you don't feel like it, or you never learned to cook, and you order a delivery, you're exchanging time.
It's the time of those who cooked in the restaurant you ordered while you showered, or worked overtime in your remote job, and it's also the time of those who are delivering your food, who are often cycling in dangerous areas, getting icy cold air in their faces and having to do it within a very specific expectation, because that's how the system works. We've already seen Galo and other delivery workers talking a lot about this, but delivery apps continue to structure this type of job in a extremely precarious way. And I already made a video about it too.
There are a lot of fair and delicious reasons to eat out like trying something different, coping with the day-to-day mess, or "wow, you're sick" and so you order a food delivery because your not felling good in that day. But the truth is that delivery apps take advantage to build a business model that doesn’t just exist to offer options and connect restaurants and consumers, which technically wouldn't be a problem, but it exists to impose methods and unrealistic expectations, which only work because there are people in it being extremely exploited, and that, depending on the system, you don't even notice their existence. And then they throw it in our faces to generate more demand because it's very convenient.
These days there's a kind of contactless delivery that has increased in the pandemic, that means you can order a sandwich and 45 minutes later it just pops out on the floor at your doorstep. Someone rings your doorbell, you don't even see who it was. In an extremely complex world like ours, of course no one will produce everything they need or want, there is a division of labor, that makes perfect sense, but the problem lies in the division of labor within the capitalist system, which is a very unequal division where some people's time ends up having more worth than others, it is where pay varies a lot too.
But recognition and visibility also vary. It also generates overspecialization, and then you don't have the opportunity learn other tasks. One of the central points of Marx's discussion is that capitalism presses for worker productivity to increase all the time.
So, there are jobs out there in which you can't even go to the bathroom during working hours, just on your break, notice the level of absurdity. Capitalists wants to extract as much as they can from the workers but within the limits necessary for them to return the next day and also continue to be consumers in the system. This is also why Marx explained that the pressure for wage increases was insufficient to really shake the system.
With the rising of cost of living, salary increase is also important. there is a video about salary here, but it is also essential to discuss the reduction of working hours in Brazil and in the world. Reduction of working hours, but maintaining the salary range or preferably increasing it because the cost of living no longer meets the minimum and average wages.
This issue needs to be central in unions because understanding the role of time in the exploitation system also helps us to perceive how capitalism works and it contributes to class consciousness as well. So, a reduction of working hours to 40 hours, to 28 hours, to 30 hours, for example, already helps a lot to reorganize society because it would change consumption, socialization, division of care work patterns, this would impact on health and a lot more. And this is a discussion that, for example, Sofia Manzano is having in Brazil, it is a discussion that is being made by Chile’s administration as well.
And the point is that every time a socialist talks about it, in terms of reducing it by more than 10 hours, or even less than that, there are those who are scared, who think it's impossible. But, in the old days, when the standard worker would face a 12 hours workday, people also thought that an 8 hours workday was impossible. And it may happen that a large part of society is not ready for this conversation, but we need to foster it so that it becomes a reality soon because reducing the hours of the working day is also an ecological demand, did you know?
Work is a matter of time and in many areas, it takes a lot more time than it seems, this has to do with the logic of production as well. And if we are to really understand how things and services are produced, how resources are invested on that, and try to think of a different, fairer, more sustainable world, we have to assess the time involved in all this. And so we will understand that one of the reasons for the fear of reducing the workday hours is that with more free time there is also more time to organize.
And so by organizing we can change even more. That's why they're afraid, right? Tell me in the comments a little bit of your experience with work, time and visibility, and I'll finish it here.
And I’ll see you soon.
