Work has never been neutral | Corinne Murray
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Why looking back is how we move forward
I knew what my second writing project was going to be even before I started The Workplace Strategist, and Sara and I began writing WORK then PLACE.
For those who know me, it’s not a total shock to know that my *big idea* sits so far down on the ocean floor that I need to first throw myself into a separate body of work that primes readers for that one.
To call WORK then PLACE a “primer”, though, is laughable. We’ve had readers call it a textbook (non-derogatory), a field guide, and “THE future of work book”…it’s a tome, and one we’re both ridiculously proud of. Together, we defined how modern work functions and what companies and leaders can do to improve it, and we’ll continue to carry out our mission of making work suck less. Now, my *big idea* will examine the multifaceted history behind why work sucks so much in the first place and what we need to do about it today.
The Workplace Strategist was always going to zoom out further—much further—from the workplace and future of work I’ve written about thus far. But with the dramatic increase of state violence playing out on a daily basis in the United States and its implications, my timeline has accelerated. The private lines of inquiry that span more than half my life and have helped me grow, challenge my assumptions, and deepen my awareness of our reality needs to be a conversation for more of us now.
We cannot underestimate the impact our traditions, economic structures, and ideologies have on our everyday lives. We need to understand how these systems of extraction, individualization, and growth-at-all-costs don’t just affect some of us some of the time, but all of us all the time. And we need to do it now.
To me, this exploration is not just about how we work, but why we believe what we believe about work and worth at all. Even the most mundane habits and assumptions require our attention and examination. Our reliance on work for survival is not an accident of modern life—it is an engineered outcome that ties access to housing, healthcare, food, and security to participation in the labor market.
We cannot step into the future of work that I believe is possible without reconciling history, ritual, and belief first. We have to understand how these influences have shaped society and culture throughout time, and how it shows up in our current relationship to work.
The tagline of The Workplace Strategist reads: rallying cries and practical steps to help us rethink work and business for the 21st century. I do believe that we need to rally, not just to rethink work, but to rethink our society and what feeds it. This means conversations about power–how it’s wielded, who benefits from it, and who bears the costs while being told those costs are necessary and inevitable.
The way modern work functions—and what it demands of us—is a byproduct of our cultural and moral frameworks. Underneath all of what we see playing out in our daily lives lies deep-seated religious and secular ideologies that define productivity as a virtue, suffering as a necessity, and worth as something that can only be earned through effort and performance.
If a better future were possible without confronting the depths and power of these systems, we would have arrived in it already. Instead, we’ve only redesigned and rebranded the surface features while leaving the underlying beliefs untouched and unexamined–guaranteeing that the same old outcomes will play out under a different name.
Even if we could isolate modern work in the United States from…everything else…the conditions of modern work are far from ideal. Burnout rates climb to new heights annually. Gen Z still can’t find entry-level work. Parents—primarily women—are leaving the workforce because of childcare shortages and return-to-office mandates. The elderly are working retail to supplement fixed incomes. All while the wealth disparity between billionaires and the rest of us exceeds that of the Gilded Age, and the last vestiges of America’s social safety net get swept away for more tax breaks for them. These are not isolated crises. These are features of our reality, not flaws.
What I’m interrogating is not new territory. Critique of—and resistance to—oppressive, extractive systems has long existed, particularly within Black and Indigenous scholarship and lived experience. My aim is not to restate that wisdom, but to examine how it shows up in modern work.
This next phase of the newsletter is intended to challenge what we tolerate, shine lights on the aspects of our culture that remain unchecked despite their cost, and force us to sit with their consequences. Anything and everything that is assumed as fact or foregone conclusion must face our collective scrutiny.
Going down this path is a risk, but it is a necessary one for me to take. These are deeply uncomfortable topics that will force us to reckon with our complicity and how we’ve benefitted from them, whether we meant to or not.
Most of us participate in these systems because choosing not to comes at great personal cost, and one we’re rarely allowed to acknowledge. Regardless of our belief and endorsement of what is happening, our participation makes us complicit—willingly or not—in exchange for some semblance of stability and comfort.
Awareness doesn’t change the fact that we still must participate to survive, but it removes the illusion that unquestioned participation is neutral. Continuing to look away from these systems and their implications is an active choice of disengagement and the grave consequences for all of us.
Breaking through these illusions requires confrontation, and I ask that you stay with me as I do that.
More soon.