Adios productivity
Laetitia@Work #46
Hi everyone,
It’s been much too long since my last Laetitia@Work newsletter (December of last year 😱). But I have a good excuse: I’ve been writing a new book! It’s called En finir avec la productivité. Critique féministe d’une notion phare de l’économie et du travail (which could be translated to “Goodbye productivity. A feminist critique of a key notion in economics and work”) and it comes out on April 13. (The book is only in French for now but if you know of a publisher who could be interested, do let me know!)
Unlike my previous books, I wrote this one in short, intense bursts over three months only. I can’t really say it's easier than spreading the work over 12 months. But I’m so proud to have finished it and to see it published so soon! 😊
👉 For those of you in France, you can pre-order the book here 📚
In this week’s newsletter I’ll share a (loose) translation of the book’s introduction.👇💡
Why we should question productivity
Productivity is a concept that is now used in all sorts of ways, at work and in life. It's the kind of concept that seems simple at first but gets thornier as you get closer. What is really behind this word and its ubiquity? You can speak of both a country’s and an individual’s productivity. It is both an official metric of the national economy and a vague injunction to individual performance, a 'scientific' tool and a hazy goal of personal and professional development.
Productivity was critical in the industrial era but its relevance today and the predominant place it has in the economic system of the 21st century are perplexing. In the automobile industry, the number of cars produced per man-hour or per machine unit could be clearly measured. The ratio of output to factors of production made sense. One could isolate the respective contribution of each factor of production (labour or capital) and its evolution. If one hour of human labour produced more than in the previous year, then labour had become more productive.
It is clear why productivity is so important to economists and politicians: productivity gains mean there’s more value added and ultimately more wealth is created with the same amount of labour and capital. Productivity gains are therefore a direct contributor to the development and economic growth of a country and a company.
More indirectly, productivity gains also contribute to reducing inequalities. It’s true the omnipresence of the concept of productivity has not always gone hand in hand with social justice... but over the course of the 20th century, workers have been able to use its measure to demand a bigger share of the value created. If you're going to be an alienated part of an economic ratio, you might as well ask for money. The unions spoke the same language as the economists and the politicians: they used productivity in collective bargaining.
The subject of productivity, however, becomes more complex and debatable when you move away from factories. In proximity services in particular, dominated by underpaid women, it is a deleterious myth. In the knowledge economy, it is often elusive. And it has invaded our privacy and made our lives miserable: it no longer merely indicates the performance of our working hours but it is now also a tool to judge the value of our entire being. As the industrial part of human productivity (the value produced in factories) has dwindled, the concept has become increasingly pervasive and even toxic.
👉 You can pre-order the book online: En finir avec la productivité 📚
One of these problems, which is not widely discussed in the existing literature, is its sexism. In the old industry, a man's world, it was built on the backs of unpaid women (those who stay at home to cook and look after the children). Outside industry, where productivity is deemed to be 'low' and sluggish, its measurement is used to better exploit women: in care and proximity services where plenty of women work, productivity is said to be 'low', which justifies paying them badly. Finally, where private life and professional life become blurred, it destroys their mental health: it ignores their mental and emotional burdens and causes so many burnouts.
The way it is measured, productivity ignores so many things... An hour of human work is more or less productive depending on essential factors (being well nourished, being in good physical and psychological health), which themselves require work. Just as GDP (gross domestic product) ignores negative externalities such as pollution and exploitation, productivity is a blind indicator that ignores power relations and networks of relationships.
In particular, productivity completely ignores unpaid labour. Yesterday (and still today), it was slave labour that was ignored. One can go so far as to say, as some historians of American slavery have done, that modern productive thought owes something to slavery. When they are not slaves themselves, it is women who provide the bulk of today's free labour, that which reproduces the labour force, feeds and cares for workers and children in the home.
Could it be that the countries with the most productive workers are also the most sexist? In Germany or Japan, for example, an hour's industrial (and corporate) work incorporates more free labour, so its productivity may be artificially higher. Of course, you are more productive when you have no mental or emotional burden and no food to prepare because a good woman takes care of all that at home!
Recently, the pandemic has raised many questions about work, how it is organised and how it is defined. As more and more people work from home, office habits and presenteeism are changing. Depending on the job, either the old methods are (badly) reproduced remotely and work becomes even more alienating, or workers find themselves with more autonomy... and more existential questions about why they work. Some work too much. Others earn too little (guess who?).
My first angle tackles economics. The second angle is individual and cultural. Self-help publications on the 'secrets' of productivity have become a genre in their own right. Morning routines, evening routines and all sorts of recipes for filling up the day make us believe every day that with a little more effort and ingenuity we could get a lot more done in 24 hours. I have come to understand that this is a mirage that feeds my feeling of never doing enough.
In short, productivity is either biased and ignores what is important, or it is deleterious and destroys what matters most. By isolating factors, it denies the critical role of interactions between individuals, power games, externalities on the environment and the distribution of wealth. Productivity isn’t ecological, in the etymological sense of the term, since it ignores both the interactions of living beings with their environment and those of individuals with each other in the said environment.
Moreover, is productivity really economic? Perhaps it is because economics was constituted as an intellectual discipline in the industrial age, and therefore without women, that it has become so focused on the question of productivity? It would now need a good dose of feminism to become more intelligent and more humane - and to give our world the capacity to survive the environmental crisis. With this feminist critique of a concept that dominates economics and politics, I would like to invite readers to take another look at work and its economy.
👉 If you’re in Paris, come to my book launch on April 13 at Maria Schools 🍾
⛰️🚀 Together with my future of work buddy and documentary maker Samuel Durand we’re planning a unique two-day event called RANDO BOULOT DODO, which will include hiking trips, workshops, talks about the future of work, exchanges with craftspeople and more. It’ll be near Annecy on May 26-27 🇫🇷
👉 Join us on this exciting RANDO BOULOT DODO!! We’d love to discuss the future of work (and go hiking) with you ❤️
🎥 Samuel Durand released his new documentary, Why do we even work? (in English) a few weeks ago. I’m so proud to be one of the guest speakers featured in it! Watch the trailer here.
📺 This short clip was published on Youtube: A story about why we work with Laetitia Vitaud. Welcome to the Garden of Eden! 🍏
🚀 Nicolas and I have recorded new Nouveau Départ podcasts (in 🇫🇷): Grande démission et avenir du travail, L’effet Snowball… 🎧 Sign in on Substack.
👩💻 Check out the dozens of new Welcome to the Jungle pieces on my profile: in 🇬🇧 and in 🇫🇷. Among those in English is an interview of Alison Taylor about business ethics and a review of Jenny Odell’s fantastic book How to do nothing…
🎧 I’ve recently recorded two podcasts in English:
an episode of Toni Cowan-Brown & Sorcha Rochford’s Unapologetic Women podcast: The lottery of being a woman 🇬🇧 🇺🇸
an episode of Nigel Rawlins’s Wisepreneurs podcast: Laetitia Vitaud on The Future of Work from a feminist perspective (my very first Australian podcast 🇦🇺!)
Miscellaneous
🩺 Women Are Calling Out ‘Medical Gaslighting’, Melinda Wenner Moyer, The New York Times, March 2022: “Studies have shown that compared with men, women face longer waits to be diagnosed with cancer and heart disease, are treated less aggressively for traumatic brain injury, and are less likely to be offered pain medications. People of color often receive poorer quality care, too; and doctors are more likely to describe Black patients as uncooperative or non-compliant, which research suggests can affect treatment quality.”
💰 Why aren’t VCs funding more startups focused on menopause?, Connie Loizos, Techcrunch, March 2022: “The numbers suggest opportunity. Indeed, according to recent United Nations data, the number of older people in the total population is increasing rapidly. In 2020, there were 727 million persons aged 65 years or over in the world; by 2050, that number is expected to double to 1.5 billion people. It’s why we’re beginning to see a greater range of companies catering to an older demographic, from reverse-mortgage type lending companies to senior home care services startups. Yet menopause — which is clearly an enormous market — continues to attract a trickling of investment dollars.”
🎞️ Study Finds Women Represent a Third of Onscreen Population in Film, Rebecca Sun, The Hollywood Reporter, March 2022: “Women may represent half of the global population in real life, but fictional film worlds get by with just a third. The latest It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World report from San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film has found that men outnumbered women onscreen by a factor of 2 to 1 in 2021. This proportion held steady across the shares of lone protagonists (31 percent), major characters (35 percent) and all speaking characters (34 percent).”
I hope you all have a lovely (not too productive) weekend!
