Abstract
This article is about telling stories about refusals of work. It investigates storytelling about refusals of work as powerful political responses to precarization. Workers, this article posits, learn through listening to each other’s refusal narratives about (1) the conditions of their work, (2) the precariousness it organizes, and (3) the possibilities for refusal. Through storytelling, this learning also happens on an affective level: possibilities can be made to feel real. To work through this problem in more detail, the article focuses on learning from the narratives in two literary works: Heike Geißler’s Saisonarbeit, translated from German to English as Seasonal Associate (2018), and Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001). The article concludes that in telling stories about refusals of work, workers may find a potential for collaborative political action and potentially collective action in a time when unions are struggling and it is becoming harder for workers to survive.
Striking, stealing, protesting
Taking a longer break at work. Making a private call during work hours. Taking goods home. Giving away free drinks and food. Going to the bathroom and staying there for longer than necessary. Covering for a coworker by lying to the boss. Coming in late. Going home early.
Workers engage daily in such practices at work, activities that do not align with the employer’s interests but are to serve the immediate needs of the workers themselves. This article starts with the question how we may consider these acts, however, small or mundane, as refusals of work. What answer is already given to precarization by workers themselves in their everyday practices? How may we think of such individual acts as shared practices with political import or how may they become more collaborative and collective?
The scholarly literature on precarization and precarious labor often outlines how in insecure and temporary jobs, where workers are especially vulnerable to exploitation, resistance is difficult. Whether it is getting contracts instead of gigs, negotiating better contracts individually or organizing collectively, pushing back against growing insecurity has proven to be a struggle (Alberti et al., 2018; Appay, 2010; Woodcock and Graham, 2019). There are examples of such collective organizing, such as the formation of unions that organized strikes among Amazon workers in the United States (Oladipo, 2022) or more traditional European unions working together with grassroots organizations to organize for the rights of Deliveroo or Uber drivers (Woodcock and Graham, 2019; see also Jaffe, 2019, for a collection of examples of organizing). Still, unions are struggling to keep up with the changes in contemporary labor markets and are sometimes also reluctant to take the struggles of temporary, zero-hour contract or otherwise precarious workers on board (Appay, 2010; Woodcock and Graham, 2019; Van den Berg & Vonk, 2020; Van den Berg, 2021).
Notwithstanding such difficulties in collective organizing, workers of course do resist and refuse. Ostensibly small acts, such as putting the out-of-office message on for the duration of the summer (a strategy among academic workers), stealing stuff (pens, paper, food), taking longer lunch breaks, or taking the job literally and ‘quiet quitting’, are political acts. Workers do not simply comply with everything that is asked of them in the workplace. There is a long history of mundane acts of refusal that suggests that even in very insecure circumstances, workers will seek opportunities and room to maneuver in their own or their communities’ needs and interests (Mueller, 2021; Vee, 2019). Workers have always sought ways to hold on to their and each other’s integrity, their time, or their health despite the pressures of work, be it industrial labor, post-Fordist employment or a gig. Some of these refusals happen without too much reflection or strategy: the felt resistance to certain tasks may just cause foot-dragging or a desire to have another smoke. It may just take the form of shrugged shoulders or an eye roll. But some of it is reflexive and purposeful. And sometimes it makes for a very good story, the sharing of which can be very joyful.
This article is about telling stories about refusals of work. It is through storytelling that workers share their strategies to reclaim some time and space, and it is through storytelling that they learn about possibilities for refusal and sometimes even about political horizons beyond the taken-for-granted. Taking a longer smoking break can turn into an opportunity to discuss how to navigate the demands of the boss and build the kind of solidarity that is ‘covering for each other’. This is what Stefano Harney et al. (2013) called ‘the secret once called solidarity’. In what they term ‘the undercommons’, vital and ever-shifting relations of support are built and maintained. Such support can be as concrete as offering goods, creating room for study, lying to the boss for each other or calling in sick together. But it can also be the very act of creating the possibility, together, of refusals. Workers can, together and through narratives, enact a realm where certain acts can appear as possible – natural and likely, even. Through narratives of refusals of work, therefore, the impossibility of resistance to precarization of work can be challenged.
Workers, this article posits, learn through listening to each other’s narratives about (1) the conditions of their work, (2) the precariousness it organizes, and (3) the possibilities for refusal. To work through this problem in more detail, I will focus on learning from the narratives in two literary works: Heike Geißler’s Saisonarbeit, translated from German to English (by Katy Derbyshire) as Seasonal Associate (2018), and Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001). The point here is to glean from this account the ways in which a narrative about refusal can make one feel not only precariousness but also the possibility of resistance and refusal. It is on an affective level that these stories (also) work. The approach here builds on the work done by literary scholars that argue that literature about precarious workers and precarization can establish not only a cognitive understanding of the issues at stake but also a feeling through it on an affective level. This may be where the potential for building new solidarities based on our shared precariousness lies: on affectively resonating with the precariousness of others (see the collected volume of Rys and Philipsen, 2021, the collection of Hogg and Simonsen, 2021, and especially the introduction by Emily Hogg, 2021).
In both Seasonal Associate and Hotel World, relatively young women work in precarious jobs. In Seasonal Associate, the job is temporary work in an Amazon fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany. Hotel World chronicles the lives of several women that have a relation to one hotel. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the story of Lise, who is a receptionist and has fallen ill to a mysterious exhaustion. I selected these works because of their extraordinary clarity and precision in their descriptions of what work in contemporary jobs is and what the work feels like. The affective dimensions of work, how it leaves traces on the body, how it exhausts and sucks the life out of the protagonists, is rarely investigated in such detail in novels. Both novels also arrive at the possibility of refusals and therefore let the reader in on the possibility of noncompliance.
In general, characters in novels rarely spend as much time at work as real-life people do. There seems to be a growing body of work, that does put work center stage in literature (McKeon, 2016). However, in most novels, work is still strangely absent (Abatiell, 2015) and rarely the object under literary investigation. In contemporary literature, though, precarization is a growing theme (Hogg and Simonsen, 2021). Both works that are central here are set in contemporary Western Europe (in the United Kingdom and in Germany), in the context of austerity and struggling welfare states. This context matters because it affords some protections to workers that is the legacy of earlier worker’s movements and the project of the welfare state and, in the case of Seasonal Associate and Leipzig, also the socialist state. The protections that the protagonists enjoy, however, are not enough to make ends meet and do not offer enough economic or financial security. In contemporary welfare states in Western Europe, in fact, it is often through welfare that insecurity is organized (Lorey, 2015). Nonetheless, the context of these protections and provisions such as sick leave and social housing matters because they were built as the result of worker’s struggles in industrial economies and because these protections are constantly under threat in contemporary Europe. I therefore focus on how refusals of work are possible in the context of Western Europe, in what the welfare state has become, in a context where collective bargaining and collective workers’ actions are traditionally strong but struggling, to see how, in this context, individual workers find ways to act politically themselves. Most importantly, I selected these two novels because they move beyond an investigation of work and their protagonists’ relationship to it. Both also share stories of refusals of work, stories of resistance and of saying ‘no’ to work, or stories of using work’s resources for other purposes. By engaging with these stories of refusals, I aim to show (1) what we can learn from such narratives about how contemporary work can feel and (2) how the sharing of these stories is politically relevant beyond the acts of refusal themselves.
Precarization, collective action and storytelling
Precarization
One of the struggles of collective organizing of labor today is its position with regard to precarious labor and precarization. Often built for industrial labor relations in the 19th and 20th centuries and organizing what could then more easily be called the working classes or the proletariat, labor unions, at least in Europe, have trouble keeping up with changes in contemporary labor markets (Alberti et al., 2018; Appay, 2010). The scholarly literature on precarization, grappling with this dynamic, has grown tremendously in recent years (see for a good overview of the literature Han, 2018). The concept of precarization is now connected to wide-ranging issues such as informal labor, downward social mobility, casual or unstable labor relations, or a sense of loss of securities in general (Han, 2018). A massive literature on ‘new’ forms of work and ‘new’ insecurities took flight, even though many voices also sought to resist these very claims of newness (Breman, 2013; Hogg, 2021). In general, though, scholarship around precarization originates in Europe and its struggling labor markets and welfare states. It is focused on various forms of insecurity and on the impossibility of organizing workers and citizens under the category of the proletariat (Han, 2018; Lorey, 2015).
In fact, it was the troubled relationship between unions on the one hand, and people working in flexible labor regimes and the increase in insecure contracts in especially service sector labor on the other, which gave rise to the term precarity in European social movements (Han, 2018; Lorey, 2015). Precarity and its conceptual accompaniment of the ‘precariat’ (a class-based term combining precarity and proletariat) were rallying cries of the EuroMayDay social movements in Southern Europe in the early 2000s (Han, 2018; Lorey, 2015). These movements did not just seek to speak out about precarious labor and living conditions but also sought ways of, as Isabell Lorey (2015) put it, ‘organizing the unorganizable’ (p. 8). One way to organize the precarious, at this time, was to start organizing not from a place of employment or shared class position, but from the precariousness of life itself. The point was not so much to organize on the basis of shared interests because this had become impossible since interests of precarious groups had become so disparate. Rather, the movements organized based on breaking through the isolation and individualization that was shared among the precarious (Lorey, 2015).
It is in this vein and this tradition that the present article should be placed. At stake here is how organizing from a position of precariousness is rendered possible when what is shared is precisely the isolation and individualization that makes a collective response impossible. Isabell Lorey (2015) investigated various possibilities in her Foucaultian and Butlerian analysis, possibilities that center primarily around finding ways to resist the governmentality of precarization – the destabilization not only of work, but also ‘of the conduct of life and thus of bodies and modes of subjectivation’ (p. 13). For Lorey, it is key to refuse this governmentality, in part by refusing its isolation and by viewing insecurity as an opportunity as well as a threat. It is, says Lorey (2015), ‘through permanent singular refusals, the small sabotages and resistance of precarious everyday life (that) a potentiality emerges that subverts the disciplining of governmental precarization time and again’ (p. 111). The present article is an attempt to further develop this perspective and to work through the problematics by analyzing narratives of refusals. In doing this, it supplements existing literature on how cultural works aim to make readers feel precariousness (see Hogg, 2021, for an overview) by looking into how cultural works can also establish a world in which resistance is possible and necessary.
Workerism and the women’s strike
Employers need workers’ labor. Without the extension of labor power, time, muscle power, thought, care, and creativity, there would be no university, no family life, no industry, no restaurants. Even though workers are usually not exactly free not to, given the coerciveness of work, it is useful to consider how workers gift their labor to the employer. In the Marxist school of thought of operaismo or workerism, this analysis forms the basis for political action (Tronti, 2010; see for an overview of workerist ideas and strategies Pizzolato, 2017; see also Weeks, 2011). In their time, workerist movements turned the leftist struggle on its head. Capitalism, they noticed, is completely reactive to workers. It is the workers’ creativity, struggle, innovation, and labor that makes production possible. Without workers, the employer or the capitalist cannot do anything – in this sense, he follows workers (Tronti, 2010). The factory or the workplace, workerism posited, could become a revolutionary space if we take workers’ power more seriously. Asking for work, or a guarantee to work, or claiming a right to work, therefore, is reacting to the market and positioning oneself in a dependent relationship to the employer. Instead, in workerism, it is possible to think about refusals of work and in fact to think about a life without work. For operaisti, strategies in anticapitalist struggle include sabotage and refusals (Pizzolato, 2017).
A default response to precarization with unions or political organizations is still often to organize collective action to secure work for its workers. Organizing is about wages, or the terms of labor, for example. With a workerist point of view, a different set of questions comes into view. Perhaps organizing for secure work, in the context of capitalism, is asking for exploitation, given that all work in capitalism is exploitative in the Marxist sense. Workerist perspectives and contemporary perspectives that build on that tradition, put into view that work, in fact, is not a solution but a problem (Weeks, 2011). For example, Kathi Weeks (2011), a United States-based political theorist, posed the question of work as a political problem and, building on the European traditions of workerism and feminist Marxism, posits that refusals of work are not only possible but also that postwork imaginaries are crucial.
So, workerism puts the withdrawal of labor and reinventions of the strike front and center in our thinking. Through withdrawing labor, whether in traditional strikes or in other forms of action, workers collectively make visible just how much employers need them and how much is thrown into disarray or chaos when they stop working – and how much that chaos costs. This is how a strike puts pressure on production. Striking is how, in labor’s and the labor movement’s history, limits were put upon exploitation (Komlosy, 2019). Putting this strategy to use for unpaid, reproductive labor, the international feminist organization International Women’s Strike used the slogan ‘If we stop, the world stops’ (Campillo, 2019): without the reproductive labor performed by so many every day, hardly anything is possible. Not performing this labor is the most effective way of proving this point. A strike can thus be more than a form of resistance to paid labor and employment. As the Women’s Strike has proven, a strike can also be an effective form of organizing against a certain division of labor (for example, along lines of gender and race), a hierarchization of work (where certain forms of work are considered more important than others, as is apparent in the paid/ unpaid labor division) and a struggle for a recombination of certain tasks (Federici, 2019). The Women’s Strike makes the point: we cannot continue like this. We withdraw our labor to prove this point: we must rethink and rearrange the way we work fundamentally.
Indeed, what if we would put the tool of the strike to use for a future without work instead of a tool to secure work? Because, in the words of writer Kassandra Vee (2019): Striking remains one of the best tools for getting out of work. But why should we reduce our imaginations to what strikes have become: a drag. (. . .) What other forms of workplace organizing and striking can we imagine that do not involve respecting the workplace, that do not imply a horizon of going to work forever?
Historically, groups that organized based on workerist ideas used the strike as a tool beyond the question of work. For example, they turned the daily work of reproductive labor into a struggle. The strike, then, is not a tool for work security but a tool to demonstrate that the ongoingness of life is under threat. A famous example is the rent strike. Organizing against rent increases, renters organized committees that set what they considered reasonable prices themselves. They refused to pay the rent that the landlord requested, collectively set an alternative, and organized to protect participants against evictions (Meuhlebach, 2017, 2023). The point is to both reclaim labor time as free time and to reclaim wages, through rent strikes and what workerist and autonomist groups called auto-reduction: a reduction of prices by the collective itself, so without waiting on the landlords to set one. An example is an autoreduction collective in Turin that reduced the prices of public transport. The collective printed its own alternative tickets that were sold for alternative prices (Muehlebach, 2017, 2023). These repertoires are still used. There are rent strikes in various countries and autoreduction collectives working to limit water charges (Muehlebach, 2017, 2023).
Tactics adrift
What we can learn from these forms of organizing and from the workerist tradition is that an organized response to exploitation and work does not have to be a formal strike. Of course, massive collective action is still necessary and called for, but it is important to consider other acts of refusal and to consider them as political acts. The Spanish feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva (2004) wrote about their various organized responses to precarity and made a documentary film: ‘Adrift in the circuits of women’s precarious lives’ (2003). In the film, working women who were made precarious share stories and walk. They use the method of the drift, building on the work of the Situationist International and drift through the city of Madrid together. While walking, they inhabit the city and claim it as their own, while sharing stories of their work and lives. Many stories that they share are about the various clandestine acts of resistance at work. A young woman who works as a cashier gives away free food; another woman refuses to clean the toilet more often than her boss. Invariably, the stories engender a rapport between the women, laughing about how they mustered the nerve to do what they did. Telling the stories is a joyful act, one that creates a shared mocking of the structures that make the narrators precarious.
The acts of refusal here are what Michel de Certeau would call tactics (1984): the women use a moment, an opportunity to turn the system against itself. De Certeau’s famous example of a tactic is a secretary who uses her time working to write a love letter. The time and means of the boss are used here to do something important to the secretary, but not productive for the boss. The secretary steals back some of the time and some of the means that were already stolen from her. The women from Precarias a la deriva also take back something: stuff and profit, but most of all their dignity. In telling stories about their refusals, they regain an energy that they had lost through the work that made them so exhausted. They shared not only their burden in their stories but also their ways of compensating for it by finding ways to refuse. The drift is a collaborative way to organize a sharing of these stories and of building this rapport. The women from Precarias a la deriva turn their refusals of work into stories to share with each other and us as viewers.
Storytelling: narration as political learning
In their analysis of resistance against legal authority in the United States, Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey wrote about how, through circulating stories of resistance, a collective can come into view. Based on hundreds of interviews, Ewick and Silbey investigated how ordinary people experience and interpret the law. They wrote about their respondents’ actions of taking on legal bureaucracies to get what they believed was right, or to get what they needed or wanted. Their basic question was: ‘If hegemony refers to that which is unthinkable, resistance must depend at some point in thinking the unthinkable. How does this happen?’ (Ewick and Silbey, 2003: 1328). Based on their extensive analysis of these stories of encounters with the law, Ewick and Silbey were able to paint a lively and precise picture of just how ordinary people resist legal authority and how people talk about these resistances. They claim: ‘By narrating those moments when they were able to best power, actors extend temporally and spatially individual acts of resistance’ (Ewick and Silbey, 2003: 1329).
So, stories of resistance are successful beyond the situation itself when they bring into view, even if just for a moment, the self-evidence of power. When stories show how power works through what is taken for granted, by questioning this taken-for-granted, or social structure, resistance becomes more than a single act. The consequences of the refusal in such cases extend beyond the social transaction of the act itself. The people telling the stories are usually quite powerless in the face of the large institutions and organizations that they take on. However, even then, Ewick and Silbey’s analysis shows that the powerless can navigate the system in such a way that they can get what they want, even if only temporarily. Sometimes they can, for example, take the rules extra literally, creating space to use them for other purposes. Sometimes people claim space, or drag their feet, delay and create new situations through such uses of space and time.
For Kathrine McKittrick, in her book Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), sharing stories ‘engenders creative radical theory’ (p. 73). In the chapter on her work and friendship with Sylvia Wynter, she wrote that she learned from Wynter that ‘sharing stories is creative rigorous radical theory. The act of sharing stories is the theory and the methodology’ (p. 73). For McKittrick, storytelling is the pivotal work of creating knowledge that allows for what she calls Black livingness. It is a methodology of curiosity, of wonder, meant to prompt ‘ways to engender struggle’ (p. 7). Sharing stories is a form of knowledge production that depends on a relationship between the one telling the story and the one listening. It is per definition a social, collaborative act. Storytelling holds the potential of ‘collaboratively calling into question’ dominant systems of knowledge, systems of knowledge that produce death through accumulation by dispossession (p. 74). Sharing stories of alternative ways to be human, sharing stories of humanness, then, is a collaborative work of liberation. In one of the works that McKittrick references, Dina Georgis’ The better story (2013), the aspect of political learning through telling stories is laid out as well when Georgis states that a story is ‘the way we narrate the past, seek and transmit knowledge, and imagine our future’ (p. 1). Georgis wants to learn how our politics may benefit if we learn from the emotional truths shared in storytelling (p. 2).
Carrying these insights into the issues at stake in this article, the question is: What political lessons can we draw from storytelling about refusals of work in the contemporary labor markets? How may we open up discussions about collective action and political responses to precarization if we learn from stories told about refusals of such work and start learning from the emotional truths in literary works. Of course, both literary works discussed here have a massive public and are hardly whispers in the undercommons, nor are they necessarily rallying cries in collective action (though they could figure there, too). Indeed, the novels are not the informal storytelling that is necessary and an everyday political act that many workers engage in daily. However, by zooming in on these novels, we can gain an understanding of how a narrative of refusal can be shared and how the people reading or listening to such a narrative can gain an affective understanding of the realm of possibilities of refusal. In analyzing the novels, therefore, I focus on these affective aspects and on the way both authors show opportunities and intricacies of refusing the everyday discipline of work. So, while both novels are literary works first, they figure here as examples for understanding how narratives of refusals of work may work on an affective level. While the reception of the novels is beyond the scope of this article, we do know that as soon as a story of resistance or refusal is told, the acts extend beyond the situation (even fictional) in which they took place and become collaborative and a moment of potential political learning.
Narrating refusals
Heike Geißler’s ‘Seasonal Associate’: refusing work at Amazon
For Heike Geißler, author of the novel Saisonarbeit (2014), translated from German to English as Seasonal Associate, resistance at work is a matter of saving the self, or of keeping the fatal at bay. In Seasonal Associate, a woman works in an Amazon fulfillment center in Leipzig for the Christmas period. To be more precise: because Geißler addresses the reader directly, it is as if the reader works for Amazon during this season: ‘you’ work there. At the same time, Geißler, the author/worker, refuses to use the informal subject pronoun of ‘Du’ and insists on using the formal ‘Sie’ (this distinction is lost in the English translation), stressing the alienation of the labor and refusing the informality of Amazon’s communication with its workers, that always uses the more informal ‘Du’. The reader (‘Sie’, you, me) works at Amazon in Leipzig for the duration of the Christmas period and is addressed as an Amazon worker. Seasonal Associate is not a journalistic work, but a literary emergency maneuver. The book opens: Is all this a matter of life and death? I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later. At that point, I’ll say: Not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives. Or the fatal, that which kills us. (p. 11)
Geißler introduces the reader to what work at Amazon is like in detail. There are lunchrooms and lockers, repetitions of certain practices and repetitions of work. There is a deepening exhaustion and pain. With every page the reader feels how, indeed, they have allowed the fatal into their lives. The ‘you’ of this narrative becomes somewhat dusty and too tired to live. But just as we are about to succumb to the numbing rhythm of Amazon, Geißler saves the reader/ the Amazon worker and shows us how we might act politically within the confines of this job to refuse it altogether: What you and I can’t do, though, because you and I don’t want to, is to think your employer into a better employer and to compare these working conditions to even worse, less favorable conditions, so as to say: It’s not all that bad. Other places are worse. It used to be worse. We don’t do that. You and I want the best and we’re not asking too much. (p. 198)
The reader/worker finds a book in the box they were working on, goes to the toilet, somewhat finishes the work of the day and does not return: And then the time comes, and it’s not as if you’d been waiting for it all along. But now that the time’s come it is as if you’d been waiting for it all along. From now on, at any rate, everything takes place with astounding consistency. So you suddenly have this thought: I could just stop. I don’t have to see it through. (p. 199)
Geißler is not naive here. She does not simply believe that work will be better if we resist it. The refusal here is merely a way to remain a person who is alive. The worker in this story does not want a permanent contract and it is precisely in her embrace of the temporary, precarious nature of her relationship to Amazon that she finds the room to refuse. This resonates with Isabell Lorey’s (2015) proposal to refuse governmental precarization by refusing to be frightened by insecurity. The Amazon associate here has another life to return to. The temporariness of work is used against itself. The permanent workers at Amazon, the ones dependent on Amazon, or the workers who hope to receive such a contract later, would not dare to resist in such a way. The reader/worker here is protected by what is left of the German welfare state, a relatively cheap rent, a partner that has a paid job as well. The worker’s chosen form of resistance is obviously not accessible to everyone. But to Geißler, it is vital to distinguish the worker very clearly from the job and the employer. It is vital to hold on to a life outside of work so that the worker does not believe what the boss tries to convince her of: that what is good for him will also be good for her and that they share an informal bond (‘Du’) instead of a formal one (‘Sie’). Workers should acknowledge that, in fact, work can be fatal in the sense that it can slowly but surely take our aliveness from us. A ‘no’ to this work is also a clear ‘yes’: a yes to a life of dignity.
Importantly, Geißler shares this insight with the reader through the literary and narrative form of a novel. The refusal is narrated and shared and thereby becomes more than the act itself. The reader/worker even tries out what it would be like to have a conversation about it with others: You try it out in a conversation with yourself. But no matter how many conversation partners you think yourself into, they all share your opinion sooner or later, and that is this: I could just stop now. It’s enough now. (p. 200)
In writing this, after writing many pages on the far-reaching effect on the body of the precarious labor itself, Geißler offers the readers the feeling of the possibility of stopping, of the realization that stopping is a possibility. It is not just the affective experience of working for Amazon that Geißler lets readers in on, but also the possibility that is always there, though not always equally accessible to all: to not participate.
Ali Smith’s Hotel World: giving stuff away
In Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World (2001), Lise lies in bed. She cannot do much more. Even lifting her arm is too painful. All her muscles ache, and she is completely depleted. Lise has forgotten how exactly she became so tired. She is unaware of time. Only her mother’s visits, every day at four in the afternoon offer some structure. Lise has some forms lying around on the bed with her. They inquire about Lise’s condition and ask about which tasks she is able to perform. Lise looks for something to write with, to fill out the forms. She understands that she should write something, but she cannot get up to look for a pen, she cannot sit up. The narrator can tell us more than Lise can. She takes us to Lise’s job as a receptionist in the Global Hotel.
Smith’s narrative of Lise’s work and all the concrete conditions of that work is, like Geißler’s, of a rare precision. The reader learns many things about the service economy and what it means to its workers and their bodies. In Hotel World, but also in Smith’s short story collections and other novels, work, alienation and mundane acts of resistance are recurring themes (Pittel, 2023). Hotel World connects the lives of several women to the Global Hotel, confronting their various lived experiences of neoliberalism and capitalism (Paye, 2019; Shiach, 2019).
One of the things we learn in Hotel World is how workers at the Global Hotel are watched by surveillance cameras. Lise has internalized this surveillance, is constantly aware of being watched, so she pulls her uniform down, as per company policy, whenever it is hiked up. Global Hotel uniforms are ‘78 per cent polyester, 22 percent rexe. They induce perspiration’ (p. 116) Lise has a hard time getting to know her colleagues because most workers don’t get to spend much time there. There is a constant flux of new young women that start work as chambermaids and then leave. The company has set up an elaborate system of control and punishment for these young women. Not following company policy, with regard to the uniforms or other things, leads to disciplinary measures or discharge easily. Lise’s job primarily consists of working with the digital systems put in place to administer guests’ complaints: (. . .) when you work in a hotel, whatever it is you do – whether it’s smiling at guests on the front desk or spitting in food in the kitchen, stripping beds of the smells of people or smoking against the rules out on the fire escapes, whatever – presses you hard, with your nose squashed and your face distorted and ugly, right up against the window of other people’s wealth, for which employment you are, usually quite badly, paid. (p. 97)
This juxtaposition of the wealth of the guests and the precariousness of the hotel’s workers here works to introduce forms of resistance already: the spitting in food is almost a normal part of work, likened to stripping beds and smiling at guests. The examples given here are also highly visceral: there are smells to endure and squashed faces. Through this visceral focus, readers get close to the sweat and tense shoulders that workers at the hotel share. Working in the service economy can, as Silvia Federici wrote, enclose our own bodies. ‘Appearance and attitude are now closely monitored in jobs in the “service industries”, from restaurants to hospitals. Those who “work with the public” have their bodies – from their urine to their sweat glands to their brains – constantly checked’ (Federici, 2019, p. 30). Perhaps this is what has depleted Lise. The reader cannot be entirely sure. But we do read how Lise suffers: Pain travels round my body sticking little stakes into it like I am a new territory that has to be claimed. My hands act like they’re made of stones. They weigh my arms down. When I walked to the doctor’s – which didn’t used to be very far (. . .) I found out what slow motion can mean. That was the last time my heart flew, and it flew inside me like a trapped bird, a blackbird caught in a living-room battering itself about above meaningless furniture. (p. 88)
Lise is required to fill out a form to convince her doctor and other authorities that she is exhausted because the doctor cannot find a medical reason. At this point in the novel, Smith makes the form the novel’s narrative form. From this point on, the chapter reads as a form with new questions and categories, outlining with precision the visceral and material conditions of work: ‘The code on the door’, ‘The lobby’, for example. And then she asks the reader: ‘So imagine Lise’s memory opening, now’. She asks us to listen to what has happened, to listen to what working at the Global Hotel means to its workers. If this experience will not fit in a government or insurance form, Smith will make her own. Lise’s story has to be told.
Lise’s suffering, it turns out, was not all there was. She found a way to refuse her work, the rules and policies as well. Lise is not able to escape ‘the fatal’ exactly like Geißler, but she is able to redirect the Global Hotel’s wealth and make herself feel human again: she invites a homeless woman that she has noticed before into the hotel to spend the night there. She can do this because she knows the hotel’s surveillance system so well that she knows the moment in which the camera cannot capture what happens in the lobby. Lise’s knowledge of this company, of this place of work is so detailed and expansive that she can redirect it for other purposes and offer herself space and life:
Ali Smith narrates Lise’s story of refusal. This is how we learn, cognitively but also affectively about how this may be rendered possible in the context of this hotel. We learn that there are ways to game the security system, and how the goods and services of the Global Hotel can be given to those that need it, despite this security system. We even learn how good this can feel or felt to Lise (‘still high’). The resistance here is a tactic in the sense of De Certeau (1984): Lise here uses a fleeting moment to grasp an opportunity to redirect the Global Hotel’s means. Smith also tells us as readers that Lise was eager to tell her story of resistance to others that worked at the Global Hotel, precisely because it takes so much in situ knowledge to be able to pull refusals like this off. Only a colleague would truly understand just how meaningful this was: Lise, excited, cannot decide whom to call to tell about her act of letting a homeless person have a room in the hotel for the night. The friends who would understand what she’s done all work for the hotel too, and could mindlessly or mindfully betray her to authorities. Other friends who don’t work for Global wouldn’t understand its full rebellious significance (. . .). (p. 114)
Stories and political desires
Telling stories about refusals, clandestine strikes and stealing from the boss are how individual acts can become collaborative and pedagogical. Many workers learn such strategies from the people they work with, or the ones they share stories about refusals with. Much of this storytelling is informal, a kind of everyday solidarity. By studying the more formal and mass-produced objects of two novels that also share stories of refusals of precarious work, we can get close to the affective dimension that telling stories bring: the reader gets close to what it feels like to work at Amazon Leipzig or in a global hotel chain and close to what it feels like to stop or use the means of the hotel for other purposes. This, we learn, feels like a relief, like a matter-of-fact truth that was always there (Geißler) and exhilarating (Smith). Because the (fictional) refusals were shared, they are not just a story. Like stories shared about everyday refusals among workers, they become a collaborative act of sharing knowledge and joy, a collaborative act that holds potential for collectivizing. Both women work within the context of a welfare state and precarious labor, and both women do so without a union in sight. Refusal is, in their stories, only possibly by mustering the courage to do something else themselves. There is a strong desire, though, in both novels, to share the analysis of work and the possibilities of refusal with others. There is a liberation where stories can be shared. Sharing stories about gaming the system is indeed often a joyful event. It creates a rapport between the narrator and the listener, a rapport of a shared position in power structures and a shared acknowledgment that this power can never be absolute, that one can act within a job but against it at the same time. Telling stories of refusals can potentially be a radical and generative act, an act of political analysis, but also, on a more basic level, an acknowledgment that, in line with the workerist perspectives outlined above, the boss is responsive to workers and has to use a certain amount of coercion and violence to keep workers in line. There is joy in this acknowledgment and in sharing how workers find room to maneuver. No longer simply a victim of capitalism, one can find a new confidence in struggle. On an affective level, it creates the room to break out of the isolation that is an effect of work under capitalist conditions but especially as an effect of precarization (Lorey, 2015). It also creates room to find meaningful actions and break out of the oppressiveness of concrete situations. The boss may be the boss, but at least you had a laugh with colleagues in a clandestine smoking break.
The women of Precarias a la deriva wanted to be respected at work, Ali Smith’s Lise wanted to share the wealth of the hotel with a homeless person, Heike Geißler wanted to keep the fatal at bay. The political acts that these women performed and told stories about are not geared toward collective action (right away) or any kind of formal organizing. They do not even necessarily express critique or voice a claim to be made to the powerful. Rather, they are just meant for the women involved to get what they want in the moment in which they see an opportunity to get it. This resonates with Jim Ferguson’s (2010) analysis of neoliberalism and the possible political responses to it, where he poses the question: ‘But what if politics is really not about expressing indignation or denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? Then, we progressives must ask: what do we want? This is quite a different question (and a far more difficult question) than: what are we against?’ (2010: 167). Indeed: stories about refusals of work bring into view what refusal may generate. A refusal creates room, energy, and space for other things. AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse pick up this question in their book New Urban Worlds (2017: 56–59) and investigate which experiments with alternative ways of living are already underway or done. Rather than looking at neoliberalism and critiquing it, they argue that we may learn much more if we pay attention to the various ways in which people already ‘game the system’. To truly understand this ‘gaming’, one must pay special attention to the details of social life (and in our case here: work) so that it becomes clear how the system is gamed. The stories told about refusals are a way to be attentive to these details and individual workers’ everyday political acts. The question becomes, then: what political acts are possible in response to precarization and exploitation? Or, as Heike Geißler puts it in Seasonal Associate: ‘You don’t want reports on exotic antitheses to the world, you want theses with possibilities for living in this world’. (209)
James Ferguson is right, though, that asking what we want is often a ‘far more difficult question’ than what are we against. Lauren Berlant (2022) writes about how we often find it quite difficult to know what we want, let alone formulate a collective claim on what we want. We often understand quite well, they argue, how we are overwhelmed by the world, through exhaustion or violence, for example. Perhaps we can learn to know what we want through telling stories about how we joyfully refused what we do not want.
Conclusion
Precarity writes on the body. Precarious, intermittent, and underpaid work often leaves workers exhausted and in pain. Both Heike Geißler’s Seasonal Associate and Ali Smith’s Hotel World tell a story about such exhaustion and the loneliness that working in contemporary jobs can entail. Both literary works also, though, find a way of setting their protagonists free through a refusal: a clear ‘no’ is felt in the body, a ‘no’ that generates room for clandestine acts of solidarity (in Hotel World) or an alternative future (in Seasonal Associate). Both literary analyses are driven by a desire to tell a story about a refusal of work. Hotel World’s Lise is unable to share her story but desires to tell others about her bold act and the Amazon worker shares her story by telling us all. The storytelling is, in the end, what allows them to break free from the isolation of precarization. It allows Lise to have a future beyond her exhaustion because the narrator can give her that. It allows the Amazon worker to share her detailed analysis of how working for Amazon is, in fact, fatal but also how Amazon may be refused. Set in European contemporary welfare states, both protagonists have access to certain guaranteed public forms of assistance that not all the world’s workers enjoy. Access to public health and benefits is crucial in both stories. Of course, we need collective action and organized strikes if we are to protect these securities or build new ones. The present focus on individual acts of refusal is not to discount the important histories of collective struggle. Rather, it is to find a potential for collaborative political action and potentially collective action in a time when unions are struggling, and it is becoming harder for workers to survive.
In sharing stories, workers investigate where employers, organizations, and institutions are vulnerable. Telling stories about how gaming the system can be done opens up the hotel to a homeless person, or uses Amazon’s disciplinary techniques against itself. It can relieve workers from feelings of powerlessness. It can break through the isolation and the waiting that is part of working in precarious positions in the contemporary labor market. Resistance and refusals are not only important at the moment in which they are performed. It is through telling stories that their import can be carried forward in time. The main argument in this article, thus, is that telling stories of resistance and refusal is also important to create bonds between workers, to create joyful moments of being together and of sharing vital knowledge that can help individual workers navigate their working lives. It is through telling stories that refusals can become collaborative and even a collective endeavor because it can invite others to do the same or to find ways in which, in their working lives, in situ, they can shape refusals as well. Sharing stories of refusals, therefore, also provides workers and readers with concrete options for action even amid the powerlessness often felt by workers in the uneven relation they have to their employers. They make workers feel that there is a possibility. This is how narrating refusals of work is politically relevant beyond the acts of refusal themselves. Refusing precarization is not just about small acts of sabotage but about finding the organizing potential through telling stories about such acts. Telling stories organizes joy and this is where an affective political response to precarization can be found: learning that resistance and refusal are, in fact, possible. Learning that the boss needs his workers and learning that breaking through precarization’s isolation is in fact possible if we share our stories.
Footnotes
Data availability statement
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support from a NWO-Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council, grant number VI.Vidi.201.070.
