The Search for Autonomy: Gavin Mueller's "Breaking Things at Work"

 
Okay today we're looking at Breaking Things at Work, the new book from Verso by Gavin Muller. It’s an interesting text because it's short and I was reading it and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The first part is just the history of Luddism and industrial push-back from the early eighteen-hundreds to current but also includes the office environment.
 
The thing is it has one of the absolute best last chapters of any social science book that I've read. Usually, these last chapters are some sort of call to action that really you can't do much about, the problem they were looking at in the text is stuck as it is unless you go about really changing the entire system. 
 
I think where Mueller really excels is where he hits on his sense of autonomy. The whole point of the book is that it is not having autonomy where you have the freedom to work on your own terms is where the push-back begins. 
 

Quick story: I worked at a pizza shop. I tried to make my work like art. By creating each pizza as a little piece of art it felt as if I had control over what I was doing. I didn’t get paid anywhere comparable to the amount of my productivity over most of my co-workers because I was good, and I was fast. But  I was able to do the work on my own terms. Then my boss decided to put a scale in and really regiment just the amount of cheese we were adding. Which makes sense from a business perspective because you want to make sure all your products are consistent and to cut down on your food cost, so the people don’t add too much cheese. But that constraint really made everybody mad, especially the fact that at the same time they installed a bunch of cameras in the store and the far as I remember there were installed it like three cameras in the kitchen for everyone camera in the dining room and we were open late night that we have a lot of problems with. Our boss was less concerned about that then being able to exert control internally and I think what Mueller is thinking is something like this. The autonomy is what controls being able to do things on your own terms as you like them and not fully controlled. 
 
What we have is a lack of Freedom where the employee is the tool instead of using technology as the tool itself. And that's where we get this larger unrest and a lack of satisfaction, needing meaning at work. The other thing that Mueller does well is that he doesn't claim to have a big answer. What we really need  to create that autonomy is to have some sort of organization at the firm level or even at a higher level of the social political organization. I really liked the book in the end even though the first part I was a little unsure about what he was trying to do. It all came together well.