Hands up who remembers back in the day, at the height of hype on the IT economy, when every half witted career guidance counsellor in the country did their best to pilfer leaving cert students of their dreams by forcing them into dead end computer courses in preparation for a career in call centers? The mass media cheer-led us into a new millennium and we awaited the collapse of work as we knew it Jim, ready to lap it up in the leisure society, with dreams of flexible working from home wearing headsets and tapping keyboards. Then the repetitive drone of the dot com boom was suddenly slapped aside and the realization dawned that while Gates may have got his millions - millions of others were left with nothing but repetitive strain injury and flexiploitation. It’s admirable the myriad of ways they make us swallow their bullshit. They repackage it every once and awhile in a never ceasing effort to make old lines of conflict and tensions once spotted, less obvious.

Douglas Coupland coined the achingly appropriate term ‘McJob’ for the monotonous dead end short-term employment that so much of Generation X fell into and we now take for granted. He presented the McJob as a slacker lifestyle choice that facilitated an escape from the cage of traditional career choices allowing us to define ourselves as something other than our job descriptions that’d see us all going the Willy Loman way.

As a result he certainly fell for the worst excesses of post-modernity as a method taken on by power and capital to impose a frightening new method of work discipline and organization on us. This increasingly obvious face of work in advanced capitalist countries has had a number of different terms attached to it by arse-hole academics each vying for position to create the latest ‘post-whatever the fuck’ trend in the ivory tower. While simultaneously turning themselves into supposed experts on the reality the rest of us live. The best term for the McJob phenomenon is the most obvious - precarity.

Read the rest of this article and commentary over on the local indymedia

Labels: Class, Indymedia, Politics