Toxic Work in Post-2008 Spain
Illustration portrays a protest placard from the 2011 Spanish anti-austerity movement. Author and exact date unknown. Image retrieved from the 15-M Archivo.
The meaning and function of work within many capitalist countries around the world has transformed radically in the 21st century. According to ecofeminist Yayo Herrero, during precapitalist times work used to encompass all the life-sustaining activities that protected the multispecies collective. Such activities centered around a gamut of labors of care: care for the home, for the land, and for interpersonal relationships. Ultimately, this expansive understanding and approach to work supported community survival by propelling life forward. But then with the extreme expansion of capitalist logic in the last half of the 20th century, work drastically limited itself in scope to include only remunerated work.
From then on, the exclusivity of wage labor separated workers from each other. This mainly took shape in the segregation of men from women, who were predominantly working in unpaid spaces of care as homemakers, wives, and mothers. Consequently, the various types of capital that were once shared more equally—monetary, professional, political, and social capital—were disproportionately redistributed amongst men. Women, on the other hand, were pushed to the socioeconomic periphery. As a result, a new androcentric and individualist labor market was established that financed a social hierarchy, advancing some and hindering others. This hierarchy has only intensified in the post-2008 context. As unregulated and unrestrained policies of the neoliberal project dismantle workers’ rights in favor of profits and cheapness, capitalist work is further siphoning wealth to the upper echelons of society. Thus, the gaping distance between workers of differing demographics continues to dilate.
Besides social costs, the capitalist conceptualization of work accrues enormous environmental costs, too. In a planetary context, the capitalist model of work now destroys life instead of sustaining it. Its sacrosanct pillars of productivity and growth threaten the biophysical equilibrium of Earth by transforming its climate, diminishing its biodiversity and lastly by endangering the possibility for human (and nonhuman) societies to continue living in the future. Work’s necrotic nature today—meaning the more we work the more that dies—evinces that capitalist work can also be thought of as “toxic work” or the harmful economic activities that deplete life. “Toxic work” is real and tangible in contemporary society; it can be seen pillowing within the urban smog of cities or wading within the indefatigable “black tides” along coastlines.
In my cultural studies and environmental humanities dissertation project, I study the problematic nature of work in post-2008 Spain. While capitalism would argue that work’s shortcomings result from temporary crises (the financial crash, the pandemic, supply and demand conditions, etc.), I contend that work’s problem is endogenous. Examining various manifestations of “toxic work” in Spanish society and cultural products reveals work’s epistemological insufficiency; meaning, since work no longer works for workers, nor for the environment, perhaps the problem lies with our limited, capitalist concept of work itself.
Toxic work is as viewable in cultural products as it is in the smoggy air and dirty water. For instance, Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Biutiful (2010) graphically plots capitalist approaches to work with humanity’s inevitable approach towards death. The film’s storyline follows two ailing protagonists: Uxbal and the city of Barcelona itself. Uxbal, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, works a series of odd jobs in frantic pursuit for money. But the more he works, the more viewers witness toxicity metastasize; death and decay advance within him and all around him. Labor is literally lethal. It drags humans and nonhumans to the same sickly, epochal end.
Such dark depictions and desolate debates about work in the 21st century, as exemplified in this film, have led multiple scholars to question if the world will soon exist without work—or without humans (Kolbert, Rifkin, Srnicek and Williams, Susskind, Weisman, etc.). The underlying tension appears to be that neither work nor humans can salubriously live while the other parasitically survives.
Beyond physical toxicity, ecocritical pioneer Lawrence Buell proposes the idea of “toxic discourses” or the toxic rhetoric deriving from Western attitudes and capitalist values that have critical implications on human and nonhuman life as they rapidly spread across communities and contaminate our world. Though different from the material poisons infiltrating environments, the toxic discourses that circulate society are no less virulent.
Thinking about Buell’s perspective, toxic work then must also include the toxic rhetoric that we enact about work that ultimately harms our well-being. Economists worldwide are already discussing and debunking such toxic discourses surrounding work, like “freedom” and “flexibility” (i.e., deregulation) in the labor market, showing how such neoliberal-based frames reap hefty impacts on human well-being. Docu-fiction products like Director Juan Miguel del Castillo’s film Techo y comida (2015) realistically comments on how deregulatory labor policies in post-2008 Spain decline the possibility for workers to lead a dignified life. In the film, a single mother, Rocío, struggles to find dependable salaried work in the “flexibilized” labor market. Despite her hard work and relentless determination to care for her son, she is swiftly fired from or overlooked for jobs. And without any unemployment benefits or social support—prime characteristics of an era that seeks “freedom” from social and fiscal responsibilities—Rocío and her son end up on the street, hungry and homeless. In the end, the film traces how neoliberal rhetoric informing work, like freedom and flexibility, procure harmful effects on human life.
Similarly, one sociologist is drawing attention to another toxic discourse framing work: passion. In her recent book, The Trouble with Passion: How searching for fulfillment at work fosters inequality (2021), sociologist Erin Cech found that capitalism persuades workers to inordinately prioritize passion over financial security. While seemingly innocuous (who wouldn’t want to love their job?), her extensive data and interviews reveal long-term exploitative and discriminatory consequences for workers. Cech warns that gender, race, and class minorities are especially vulnerable to the nefarious side of passion work, as it encourages them to work harder, without extra compensation, to prove that they too belong where they have historically not. Their opportunity costs are even pricier since they systemically originate from less economically privileged positions to begin with. Passion as a toxic discourse, then, speaks to neoliberalism’s powerfully cunning ability to take sensible economic ideas and pervert them for systematic advantage.
Like the docu-fiction work problematizing discourses of freedom and flexibility, cultural products are likewise raising a critical eyebrow to passion, too. For example, Elvira Navarro’s metonymically titled novel, La trabajadora (2014), follows the unraveling of Elisa, a copy editor and accomplished writer, whose living conditions and well-being are deteriorated by her determination to follow her professional dreams. Unlike common economic fantasies that push that hard work will eventually pay off, ultimately, Elisa’s passion work never does. Trapped in poverty, she suffers a total disillusionment from both her career and her city. As she is pushed to the outskirts of society, readers connect one’s belief in passion to toxic work’s continued capacity to cartograph vulnerable workers, like women, into the literal and proverbial margins of life. Thus, La trabajadora engages in the disarticulation of passion—and its insidious inequities—from the limited concept of work under the dominant rule of neoliberalism.
Various scholars, artists, domains, and disciplines worldwide are noticing how neoliberal policies surrounding work (paid vs. unpaid work, flexibilization of the labor market, deregulation, privatization, etc.) exacerbate the precarious life, both socially and ecologically. Among these, Cech’s research on subversive uses of passion to increase workers productivity while preventing them from complaining, making demands, or quitting, is particularly interesting in forming an understanding of how toxic work can lay psychological stake in unsuspecting yet powerful ways.
Overall, the destructive trajectory of capitalist work today demands a proverbial U-turn. Returning to ecofeminist positions that undergirded work in the past could reinvigorate value back into the labors of care that could help to achieve a more just and sustainable society (Herrero). To begin doing so, the limited concept of work must first be disassociated from the financial objectives that define the neoliberal economy and instead recoupled with that which is considered good for both human and nonhuman life, in all its social and ecological diversity. As such, an egalitarian world of work could become possible.
About the Author
Rachelle Wilson is a lecturer at The University of Michigan and a PhD candidate at UW-Madison where she studies 21st Century (Environmental) Spanish Cultural Studies. Her dissertation investigates the contentious contact between work, the environment and capitalism in post-2008 Spain. She is particularly interested in ecofeminist perspectives, socio-economic justice and public writing.
Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical inquiry, vol. 24, no. 3, 1998, pp. 639-665.
Cech, Erin. The Trouble with Passion: How searching for fulfillment at work fosters inequality. University of California Press, 2021.
Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the politics of the commons. Pm Press, 2018.
Herrero, Yayo. “Miradas ecofeministas para transitar a un mundo justo y sostenible.” Revista de economía crítica, no. 16, 2013, pp. 278-307.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history. A&C Black, 2014.
Orozco, Amaia Pérez. Subversión feminista de la economía: aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida. Traficantes de sueños, 2014.
Puleo, Alicia H. Ecofeminismo para otro mundo posible. Ediciones Cátedra, 2013.
Prádanos, Luis I. “The Pedagogy of Degrowth: Teaching Hispanic studies in the age of social inequality and ecological collapse.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015, pp. 153-168.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work. Putnam, 1995.
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. Verso Books, 2015.
Susskind, Daniel. A World Without Work: Technology, automation and how we should respond. Penguin UK, 2020.
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. Macmillan, 2008.