On Work

Over the last few years, all of us have been expected to, if not while keeping calm, carry on. We’ve labored beneath a treacherous pall that the coronavirus pandemic and recession cast over our lives, lives that in so many cases have been wracked with illness, loss, and precarity like never before. We have felt grief, fear, and pain on a massive scale, and undergone rapid changes as these years’ indelible impact continues to reverberate throughout the world. From mass protests of police brutality to bills trying to curtail Critical Race Theory; from mounting anti-trans legislation to the curbing of reproductive rights; from the writers’ strike and staggering unionization to the waves of layoffs in media and tech; from heightening symptoms of climate change to the affordable housing crisis; from resumed student loan repayments to the swarm of generative AI razing creative fields. From over one hundred days ago, when the genocidal campaign in Gaza began, to now…this “unprecedented time” continually out-performs its latest precedents. 

Through it all, I haven’t stopped thinking about work — its conditions, its cruelty. Its “culture.” How absurd it is that in the face of all of that, we still have to go to work…

As I (fleetingly) sidestepped the service industry and toiled at my dumb email job last year, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much easier its tasks were to accomplish, how there was no toil. (It maddened me to learn what so much of so-called “skilled,” higher-paid work entails.) 

Whenever I can’t stop thinking about something, I know I should write about it. And I tried! To write — at first about work, the goal simplifying later to at all. Over a decade of low-paying, high-demand / -intensity jobs only just behind me, I was burned out, with long COVID, outrage fatigue, or both fogging my brain. It took over a year for me to produce one coherent essay on the subject, which turned into part of a panel presentation on trans* poetics and labor, which eventually transformed into the submissions call for this anthology.

I sought pieces that both refract light on this moment and on employment precarity, especially as experienced by people whose race or ethnicity, class, gender identity, sexuality, chronic health condition(s), disability, immigration status, or even particular industry complicates their ability to find sustainable work. I had no idea what to expect, even from the three contributors whom I solicited before opening up the call to others. 

This is what I got: 

An elegant, elegiac suite of poems honoring the labor and legacy of a theater electrician. A story about a “hot trans girl” and her “ugly trans guy” amassing debt to “The Company” that replaced world institutions so she can get a womb. A satire that teases out and about the performative “wokeness” and cognitive dissonance one faces as a DEI coordinator. Excerpts of poems and autocritique that puzzle over the question: “why is it that the more transsexual I get, the more employable I feel?” A social commentary-meets-screed about working a job that determines whether someone is sufficiently unable to work a job in order to receive disability benefits. A group of poems philosophizing about — among other things — whether a boss can be “good,” whether jobs produce suffering on par with Job’s biblical suffering, and the internal contradictions of union work. A story about a PA saddled with “bull-sitting” while the “environmentally minded” TV show’s producer who employs her faces trial for animal cruelty. And finally, an essay pondering the “minion-god” dialectic of laboring as a “student-teacher” in grad school and the moral, social, and legal implications of “employing”/training/traveling with (service) animals.

Sarah Madges, Editor-in-Chief of “On Work”