Episode 109: Work Is Not Your Friend, with Alan Henry

In the TV show Severance, a clean separation between your work life and your home life turns out not to be such a great plan after all.

People have been paid for labor for at least 5,000 years, but the modern 'workplace' is a pretty recent invention. We look at how science fiction  has dealt with the transformation of labor — plus we talk to Alan Henry, author of the new book Seen, Heard and Paid.

Citations, links, & etc.!

Alan Henry’s new book is called Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized.

Here’s Alan Henry’s website and Twitter account.

5,000 year old cuneiform tablets from ancient Uruk record how much beer workers were given in exchange for labor.

The industrial revolution changed how we conceive of labor, and many writers mourned the loss of our older, more natural work life.

The Factory Witches of Lowell by C.S. Malerich is a fantasy novel based on the real-life factory town of Lowell, MA.

Sarah Bagley founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to demand better working conditions in the 1840s.

Bagley described workers as being turned into machines.

Science fiction took this fear and ran with it, starting with Frankenstein and continuing with Metropolis, R.U.R. and Brave New World.

More recently, the TV show Severance portrays what happens when people’s brains are hacked to make them more focused on work. Also, K.M. Szpara’s Docile handles similar ideas.

Pop culture is full of “work families” — people who work together and grow to become close.