WHAT IS “WORK”?
Labor is disposable but “Work” is sacred.
We ask a lot from some words. The word, “Work” is one of them. If we think about it for a moment we’ll see that it’s carrying a lot. Maybe too much. Hear me out.
Work.
It's where we go. It’s what we do. It’s how we explain ourselves at dinner parties and first dates. When plans fall apart, a relationship strains, or an engine sputters out - the executive summary is that it’s not “working”. Work is the reason the alarm goes off in the morning; and ‘Work’ is the thing that ends the most important part of our day.
Few other words carry so much freight across so many contexts.
Location. Activity. Identity. Verdict. Purpose. Lifeline.
Is that all there is to life? Let’s take a closer look.
1. My childhood dream was to become an animator.
And at an early age that dream came true as I found my way into interactive games. The studio where we worked was a beautiful, custom-built facility. Everything from the architecture to the interior design told you that what happened here mattered.
Hundreds of artists, developers, designers, and staffers organized their lives around that job. Apartments were rented nearby. Lunches were bought and eaten at the same spots every week. Friendships formed in conference rooms and parking lots and late nights before a ship date. A small, but whole world, humming with purpose.
And we grew! We moved from our smaller, custom building to a larger campus. And for six years, that job was my world.
“Work” was my identity. My place of safety. My peace. It gave me freedom, and a means to pay my way through the life I chose for myself and wanted. Work was place to grow and to become someone useful and valued.
Then the mergers came. The acquisitions. The efficiency reviews. The redundancies.
Layoffs arrived in waves. I survived the first. The second. And then my time came too.
Some time later, I drove past the old campus.
I saw the shops we'd pack at lunch; mostly quiet. The haunts we'd closed down on a Friday night; fenced or gone. The building that had hummed with hundreds of people making things; hollowed out. And our original building, the beautiful custom built one? turned into a mattress store.
But I wasn’t ready for what happened next. No man goes through the same river twice, and going back to those places as the older version of myself reminded me of the younger version of me who was animated by ‘dreams’ I found painfully naive, and simple.
2. Work vs. Labor
“Work” means something very different depending on where you stand.
While at my dream job, I remember seeing an org chart for the first time. I happened to be sitting in the back of the room and pinned to the wall was a triangular diagram with a bunch of boxes. Well, in seconds I understood the basic idea: CEO at the top, layers of management in the middle, and at the very bottom were us, animators! I think my initial thought was ‘There wouldn’t be able to ship games without us here’. Only much later would I understand this was partially true. Sure, young artists, there wouldn’t be a studio without “us animators”. But the company can go on forever without “you”.
For those of us who yield up our, minds, talent, efforts, and time, “work” is intimate. We stake our routines, our identities, families, and our whole existence on it and become thoroughly intertwined in it. The question, ‘what do you “DO”’ is invariably answered with, “I am a (fill in the blank)”. It’s all very inappropriate.
For those who allocate capital as the owners, managers and financial planners, “work” is over in a different dimension. First off, what we call work, they call ‘labor’. The word Labor intentionally abstracts the worker’s function as a business unit that is bought cheaply and sold at a higher price. For the executive, work (labor) is a resource to be acquired, deployed, and when necessary, optimized. The difference in the relationship is fascinating in its asymmetry; an executive’s work is largely invisible and incomprehensible to the laborer. To the executive, a laborer’s work is understood in it’s absolutes, and minute details. The laborer’s work is studied, planned out before it arrives, carefully watched to make sure it’s profitable and quickly adjusted when it is not.
It’s for that reason that when employees and executives talk to one another about ‘work’ they talk past each other. The same word might be being used, but the meanings couldn’t be more different.
This isn't a moral critique. Society is made up of entrepreneurs, hourly workers, lenders, borrowers and those in public service. There’s nothing unfair or inappropriate in the arrangement between executives and laborers. There are no saviors to praise when opportunities come, and there are no villains to blame once those opportunities go. Owners make decisions that make sense from where they sit. And sometimes the smart decision means changing with the times; adjusting to bigger picture conditions, and following the logic of capital-in-motion.
Work is sacred but labor is disposable.
So, they move on.
We all do.
3. Why am I talking about this?
We've all seen those headlines announcing mass layoffs. Among those thousands of people just like you and me; parents of teens or youngsters; senior directors whose names were on that plaque in the lobby, who gave a speech at the holiday party. That person who trained us; or people we trained who made employee of the month three times in a row. People we learned and grew with; who gave real years, sometimes their best years, to that place. Now packing a box. Walking past the security desk one last time, maybe with an escort if, you know, things got emotional. Shuffling out of a building they spent more time in than their own home.
Nothing personal.
Wasn't it, though? We personally gave ourselves, sometimes intensely, sometimes passionately, to something we dared to build our lives around. And then it stopped needing us. Even if we bounced back with a better, or even a lateral offer, it takes a minute to recover your sense of time, of worth, of direction.
This is part of why I wanted to look at labor displacement more carefully. Because this has happened before. Many times. And the people it happened to weren't naive, or careless, or unprepared. What's coming ‘round next time will also carry a real human toll — not because anyone designed it that way, but because that's how transitions work. They don't ask for permission.
4. When did you start working?
When I got my first job as an animator I was ecstatic to report for duty. For most of us, entering the 'work force' means engaging with the 9 to 5 type of contract. The deal goes something like this, get a good job; show up 5 days a week; give it your all for 10 or 20 or as many years as you can hang on to it; and retire when you're in your sixties.
Somewhere along the way, the 9-to-5 thing stopped feeling like a good deal, if it ever was. Ever so slowly does the realization come that 'labor' is not a station of honor, but an easily interchangeable, highly disposable unit of business.
Even if we accept those conditions and agree that the only purchase that we have on our cushy, modern way of life is “work”, it's genuinely terrifying to be staring down an economy that no longer needs human labor. If the labor system never truly existed for our benefit, what happens once it no longer needs us at all?
5. Where do we go from here?
I’ve enjoyed a good career with amazing people at some incredible companies and I currently run a studio of my own. After a long climb to reach “the treasure” I find myself asking 3 questions I wish I had asked myself earlier more earnestly:
“What was work ever supposed to be?”
“How does money really work?”
“What are we really left with if we don't have 'work'?”
We asked a lot of that word. Maybe too much. “Work” was never just for a paycheck. It became location. Activity. Identity. Verdict. Purpose. Lifeline. But if this new era forces us to examine how much of ourselves we hand over to labor in exchange for meaning, maybe it’s also an invitation to separate the two again.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to go much further into those ideas. So I hope you’ll join me in the consideration of how the past shows us possible pathways to the future.
Law Jackson is a veteran creative professional with more than two decades of experience navigating the shifting landscapes of animation, storytelling, marketing, and digital media. Having lived through multiple waves of technological disruption firsthand, he writes about labor displacement, creative identity, economic transition, and the uneasy relationship between progress and human meaning.
Next: Blog #1 — The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
