The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
(Zed Books, £16.99)

IN A post-industrial age of low wages, precarity and “graduates without a future,” many will have been struck by the suspicion that something is fundamentally wrong with placing work at the centre of society.

Our jobs make us stressed, depressed and in some cases physically or mentally unwell, while often granting us barely enough money to live on comfortably. For many, work is meaningless, alienating and unrewarding but the collective social and political capacity to challenge these conditions is lacking.

In this book David Frayne consolidates these problems into a comprehensive critique of work and demonstrates why solving them involves not simply an amelioration of working conditions but a social transformation in which work no longer defines our lives.

The Refusal of Work begins by looking at optimistic early-20th century predictions that technological advances would enable a decrease in working hours, allowing workers to engage in creative or productive leisure and cultural activity.

Frayne attributes the non-realisation of this utopia to the rise of consumerist advertising and the continued promotion of work as the most significant and worthwhile aspect of the individual’s character.

Working longer hours is presented as both a moral duty and the only way of acquiring material status, while political discourse strives to appeal to “the hard-working,” demonising those who fail or refuse to hold a job as scroungers and skivers, however hollow such rhetoric may ring in an age of zero-hours contracts and structural unemployment.

This work dogma, as Frayne terms it, fails to reflect an economy and society in which the idea of wage labour as a source of pride, identity and validation is increasingly implausible.

Frayne explores the tentative solutions advanced by individuals who have reduced or quit their jobs, consequently living more fulfilled and less stressful lives with alternative sources of pleasure and validation.

He acknowledges that the ability to refuse work depends largely on economic circumstances and is more readily undertaken by individuals who, beyond some loose social networks, are not collectively organised. In his conclusion, he suggests steps which can be taken by a wider section of society to broaden and progress the debate.

The Refusal of Work provides an easily understood theoretical framework which legitimates the feelings of discomfort, dissatisfaction — or worse — which many encounter in the course of their working life.

While a seasoned socialist will be familiar with the idea of alienated labour and the false consciousness instilled by advertising, a reader less accustomed to analysing their environment according to these concepts may find this book at least sympathetic to their situation and, at most, a revelation.