Tonja Jerele: We should resist underestimating professions simply because they cannot afford a seat at the table

Although she is currently focusing her research work on the epistemology of journalism, she has not stopped pointing out that the mountain of invisible work rests only on women’s shoulders.

Women have many roles today. In one of your writings, you pointed out that women today are, on the one hand, both production workers and secretaries, as well as mothers and housewives. So they have to switch between different roles all the time. But what is different from men? Why must we see the roles of women as inextricably linked?

Because society treats them as inseparable. A man can only be a project manager, but a woman is always a mother, wife, partner, who is also a project manager. In public, our identities are often reduced to our relationship to others, we are rarely independent entities. Men, however, are not defined in the same way by their family roles as women, who are still and again increasingly believed to be the main caretakers of the home. The problem with capitalism is that it only sees and values ​​the work that we are paid for or that exists in the labor market, but does not recognize the reproductive work that we do inside the home, such as cooking, cleaning, washing, community organization as such. So what counts is what can be monetized and called productive. But the irony is that there is no capitalism without it. There is simply no invisible part of women. It cannot exist because as a society we have to reproduce ourselves – someone has to create new workers, feed them, see them through childhood, take care of their health, education, all the way to entering the labor market. The entry of women into the labor market is conditioned by the fact that we still do this work. At the same time, we have professions in which the majority of women enter and are intended for reproduction, for example educators, nurses, cleaners… Devalued, although absolutely necessary. Otherwise, I think that at the end of the day, even if the work was divided equally between the partners today, both of them would still be quite exhausted. Especially if we take into account that today we are often doubly burdened – with taking care of both children and parents, which creates a lot of pressure precisely on the generation with the most workload, which is precisely why we call it the sandwich generation. The problem is that there is really a lot of all this work today. Life is speeding up and we have more and more things to worry about. Thanks to modern technology, we are constantly available and there is no longer a limit to where and when work or any of our social functions begin and end.

So technology hasn’t brought us any progress in our leisure time.

That’s right. Instead of freeing us to live a better life, we are only more insecure, controlled and chained to work. More than 100 years ago, the first movements to shorten the working day to, say, 6 hours appeared. At the time, they argued that we need to shorten it if we want to have a workforce that can deal with culture, personal development and additional lifelong learning. In fact, this is something you should do now. In the west we live in societies of abundance, we could slow down, spend more time with families, friends, community. Why not have 4-day and 6-hour workdays? The consequences would be extremely positive: less electricity and raw materials would be used; we would be on the roads less, which would be good for the environment and the roads; they would rest more and exercise more, which would have a direct positive effect on health and reduce the burden on the health system; we could do more hobbies and fix more things, which means the economy would probably do better too. But we are going in the exact opposite direction. A few decades ago, we could reasonably expect that if we did everything right, at some point we would get the life we ​​wanted – a stable job, our own home, a family, annual vacations and a comfortable retirement. Today, these assurances no longer exist. Moreover, it seems more and more that technology companies want to replace workers with their products, atomize us even more and make us subordinate to technology itself.