Among the countless online resources devoted to “the future of work” is a video that is required viewing for the Year 10 class at my daughter’s public high school. In montage it shows machines ordering and transforming the world for the comfort and pleasure of human beings. Driverless tractors plough fields. Cows are guided into factories where autonomous robots briskly attach their teats to industrial pumps. Shoppers at supermarkets are scanned and charged as they leave, untroubled by the friction of human contact. Amazon packages are delivered by drones. AI therapists are celebrated as “better than humans.” And at the end comes a single, dramatic question: “Will our children be ready?”
Lots of people have been debating that question — so many, that anyone who poses quite different questions about work and technology runs the risk of sounding out of touch. Try to defend “the human” as a general category of importance and you risk being labelled ignorant, fearful, romantic or nostalgic about life in inefficient, hierarchical, analogue societies. Express concern about the accumulations of unaccountable power in a digitised-everything world — the surveillance, the exclusion, the environmental destruction, the damaged bodies and minds of workers who must make and maintain the machines — and you can sound like a modern Jeremiah, perpetually wracked by lamentation over a fallen world. My own rule is that if I find myself mentioning Black Mirror it’s time to stop talking and go and do something else.
Allison Pugh’s masterful new book, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World, will be read with gratitude and relief by anyone who has participated in conversations of this kind. Pugh does not, like James Bridle, try to narrate what is lost, or might be lost, from a world of work without us. Nor does she proclaim a new age of social organisation, like Yanis Varoufakis. The Last Human Job is not a manifesto for collectively transforming society through automation, or a text on how we might make things a bit better. Pugh’s contribution is to give a name to something that we all already know, connective labour, and to carefully explain what happens to society when it is eroded or attacked.
Connective labour is Pugh’s term for the work of “seeing” the other and reflecting that understanding back to them. It is an inherently human activity that can’t be automated and is highly resistant to systematisation. It has five dimensions: using the body as an instrument of connection; reading and deploying emotions; collaborating; managing spontaneity; and making (and reacting to) mistakes. All of these things rely on human expertise, spontaneous judgement and vulnerability.
Connective labour is not (just) about “greasing the wheels of productivity.” It is, rather, something integral to workers’ self-concept and sense of belonging. It transforms both the person performing the labour and the person on the receiving end. It shapes how both parties experience themselves as human.
Various phrases have been used by feminist and other scholars over the decades to describe patterns of human attentiveness similar to the idea of connective labour. Terms like soft skills, caring work, empathy, emotional intelligence and invisible skills are all commonplace, and are frequently used in the same breath as the word “undervalued.”
The case for introducing connective labour as a new term that touches on, but transcends, all of these is a compelling one. Connective labour isn’t just an individual practice or attribute; it is a kind of social architecture. According to Pugh, connective labour practices accumulate and create the “connective tissue” of society. The connective labour idea makes clear that, whether we acknowledge it or not, all the decisions we make about whether and how to standardise working practices are also decisions about how deep, dense and flexible we want the connective tissue of society to be.
The evidentiary foundations for her argument are rich, expansive (including five years’ fieldwork) and deftly conveyed. Although the main empirical attention of The Last Human Job is on therapy, teaching, medicine, nursing, the clergy, community organising, hairdressing and various caregiving occupations, Pugh makes clear that connective labour is also central to many jobs not directly concerned with well-being.
Consultants, lobbyists and salespersons engage in connective labour for the purpose of persuasion; prison guards, spies and detectives use it as part of an apparatus of control. Connective labour involves knowing and reflecting human thoughts and desires. “But it does not,” she notes, “always involve holding that knowledge tenderly.”
The concept of connective labour is sinewy. It binds acts of judgement, speech and action across domains of work that are often discussed in isolation. As one of her interviewees observed,
“How do you know when it’s the right time to intervene when your kids are having a fight with another kid? You know, how do you know when the right moment is? How do you know when to say goodbye for the last time when someone’s dying? I mean, it’s in here. (She gestured to her heart) It’s in here.”
Elegy and bathos infuse many of her tales. We see workers caught agonisingly between the imperative to be present for clients in their moments of most profound need and the pressure to participate in Cartesian systems that aim to regularise and abstract those very moments into repeatable processes. We learn of a hospital chaplain who carries around a “cheat sheet” for coding the spiritual concerns of the dying (options include “unready for death”; “has tasks they must complete before they are ready to die”; fears “abandonment” or “punishment”). We see him present in the last hours of people’s lives, holding their hands, praying, hugging them and singing with them. We follow him as he fulfills his job requirement to “log” the “units of service” he provided in triplicate through the hospital system, a system that is not only dispiriting but Sisyphus-like in its pointlessness since the hospital doesn’t bill anyone for those units.
Even more concerning, perhaps, are the instances Pugh describes where connective labour has not simply been neglected but is actively undermined by design. We learn of an experimental school in the San Francisco’s Bay Area, for instance, organised around the idea that teachers should deliberately and comprehensively be decentred from the learning process in favour of machines. Children are provided with customised lessons from apps in tandem with non-professional “advisers” whose task is to generally mentor and coach students without teaching them any substantive content.
On this model, “care” and “attention” are consciously decoupled from the craft of teaching, enabling “enhanced” “personalisation” of lessons via apps and a palpably lower wage bill that need only cover less-credentialled and more replaceable “mentors.” Pugh observes how the system plays out for children:
An irrepressible little redheaded boy, looking about six years old, seemed to want to interact with others about whatever he was learning. He kept looking up from his screen to try to catch the eyes of kids around him, while they bent their heads to their own tasks. One time he called out, “What’s five minus two? Three right?” Nobody replied. Later, apparently finishing a problem, he exclaimed “yes!” and pumped his arm in triumph, looking quickly around to see who had heard him. Again it looked as if no one had, except me.
Pugh’s book is not a reflexive kick at standardisation in all contexts, or of automation per se. She and her subjects recognise that systems created to standardise work can and have contributed to reducing discrimination and incompetence and increasing efficiency and coordination. Nor does she romanticise public institutions as sanctuaries for connective labour: the need to fit work into austerity budgets can desiccate connective labour just as effectively as the profit motive can corrode it in private workplaces.
The Last Human Job is not a simple morality tale against digital technology, either, since it is clear that the older technologies of manuals, checklists and standardised forms, dating back more than a century to the introduction of Taylorism itself, are primary destroyers of connective labour. Indeed, a strength of Pugh’s book is that she shows how connective labour is frequently ground down by a one–two punch, the “old” methods of scientific management and work intensification coming first and then replaced by digital apps and AI justified as necessary improvements to human systems that are so evidently failing to cope.
The enemy of connective labour, then, is the mindless application of industrial logic, with its relentless drive to grind down the inherently personal dimensions of human relationships into tasks that are amenable to being measured, standardised, predicted and efficiently reproduced. At its core, Pugh’s thesis stands in a long line of critiques of Taylorism beginning with Simone Weil and her observation of the highly destructive impact of systems of standardisation on workers’ capacity to think, connect with other people and make meaning from their toil.
Pugh’s account is, however, highly dynamic and attuned to the contours of twenty-first-century America. In the words of a healthcare worker whose hospital was managed by people who (literally) viewed The Toyota Way as a corporate bible, “They use the analogy of trains, where we come at a certain time and we leave at a certain time. The goal isn’t about care. The goal is about discharged date and how do we meet that discharged date, so the goal is discharge, and to discharge them before noon.”
Silicon Valley is clearly not playing a benign role in all this. IT engineers are depicted as incessantly attempting to automate connective labour based on a well-meaning or wilfully blind misunderstanding of what it is and what is at stake when it is lost. Pugh carefully dissects the most common Big Tech arguments for automating connective labour, from “it’s better than nothing” to “it’s better than humans” to “we are better together.”
The endless promise that automation will “free up” people from “mundane tasks” and give them more time for “meaningful work” is rightly met by questions about who is going to be “freed up” and what kinds of work count as “meaningful” (and who decides?).
Pugh also lays bare the profound conservatism of “better than nothing” arguments for automated connection. True, many low-income patients told one survey they liked being helped with hospital discharge by a “virtual nurse” (an animated figure on a screen with a mechanised voice, programmed to ask them about their favourite baseball team before outlining the clinical steps they must follow). It is easy to understand why. A virtual nurse can explain procedures as many times as necessary, and that can be preferable to interacting with someone in a constant rush.
To accept this state of affairs as desirable, however, is to accept that relational services are a kind of luxury good. It implies that we will never have a society in which a discharge nurse has the time to help a low-income patient leave hospital in a way that is not rushed. It accepts a terrible status quo that entitles the rich to be seen by human beings and forces the poor to endure services that are scripted, sped up, surveilled or unavailable.
Arguments that automated service is “better than humans” are premised on a split between services on the one hand and relationships and emotions on the other, with the value of the latter being to grease the wheels of the former. Whether as replacement or augmentation for human beings (the “better together” argument), such conceptions fundamentally misunderstand connective labour. They fail to grasp that a machine, regardless of the level of “personalisation” it can display, can’t offer the experience of being seen by another human being. The very things that make human encounters challenging — the possibility of shame, vulnerability, judgement — are precisely the things that make them valuable.
Connective labour is highly unevenly distributed in American society, a point Pugh vividly illustrates with the career arc of physician Ruthie Carlson. Ruthie, who decided to become a doctor to serve society, began her career working in the public system in Alaska, where she was able to forge deep connections with communities and knew all of her clients face to face. But inadequate resourcing ran her ragged. She was “always on,” her clients were needy, doctors were too few, and she felt utterly depleted.
A corporate setting offered more practitioners, more resources, less privation and less of an expectation (and opportunity) to develop personal relationships with her patients. Efficiency was a major focus in this setting. Ruthie’s clients were consumer-oriented and she had little sense of solidarity or community with other physicians. Despite being better resourced, she was an unappreciated “cog in a wheel,” still under time pressure without the chance to connect with either patients or colleagues.
In her current work setting, providing individual services to the highly privileged clients within a “concierge medicine” framework, Ruthie is finally able to prioritise relationships. She has the time to do her job properly, isn’t overwhelmed by clients, and is well compensated. But although this set-up helps her use her professional skills as a physician with individual patients, it doesn’t support her wider vocation to “serve the unserved.” Alongside other “lifestyle professionals” — personal investment advisers, chefs, fitness instructors — she is devoting her skills to a tiny elite of hyper-privileged people on an exclusive basis.
Connective labour hasn’t been crushed across the board. But it is exploited, expanded or squeezed in different ways in different employment settings, each of them unfair and enraging in different ways.
The Last Human Job is fascinating, urgent and beautifully written. Its finest passages merit a place alongside Arlie Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self, Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character and other classic works of sociology. In its rich weaving of tales that could only have been gleaned by an exceptionally good listener capable of making her interviewees realise why their experiences and reflections matter, it is a monument to the author’s own practices of connective labour.
The book’s thesis will be instantly recognisable to anyone working in an education, care, health, social or spiritual-support setting, as well as anyone who has used any of these services as a citizen or customer. But it is not those on the frontline who should most urgently read it, but rather the people responsible for designing and shaping the systems through which such work is performed: the legislators, executives, managers, university vice-chancellors and administrative decision-makers of all kinds.
The Last Human Job doesn’t try to explain why connective labour came to be so poorly valued. Nor does it offer a detailed prescription for turning around current trends. Unions, the entities that have historically been the primary mechanism for enabling employees to work according to the norms of their occupational communities, are barely mentioned. Nor does Pugh attempt to engage much with the law or the legal strategies of workers, such as the initiatives underway in Australia to increase the wages of employees in aged care and other caring occupations by virtue of the centrality of historically undervalued “invisible” skills to their performance.
Pugh’s contribution, however, is immense, and it isn’t hard, after reading her, to see how different our current “future of work” discourse would be if we took the idea of connective labour seriously. In place of wordless films documenting the technological sublime, our stories of future work would be lively. In place of silence would be noisy tales of human drama, as workers spoke of the craft and skill required to teach, heal or care for people, while hearing them, in conditions of uncertainty and risk. We would stop asking children if they were “ready” for a dystopian world in which their only guaranteed adult role is that of a consumer and invite them instead to imagine how they will contribute to the irrevocably human business of listening, reflecting and being heard.
We might conjure, then, a “future of work” far less violently severed from the past. There will be some robots, certainly, but there will also be familiar rhythms of struggle over work’s meaning, conditions and purpose. •
The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World
By Allison Pugh | Princeton University Press | $49.99 | 384 pages
