No-Collar Labour in America's 'New Economy'

Abstract

Advance waves of the new no-collar work first swept across Wall Street when office managers, conceding a barely-begun struggle, declared 'Casual Fridays' as the order of the day. Dress codes and other protocols of workplace formality were to be relaxed on the least industrious day of the work week. Far from spontaneous, Casual Friday is part and parcel of the new wave managerial ethos that preaches the levelling of workplace hierarchies. Employees are to feel empowered and individualized, workplaces are to feel fluid and recreational, and work is to be liberated from rigid, bureaucratic constraints. After several decades in which Americans were encouraged to find the true meaning of themselves in leisure time and consumption, work, according to this ideal, is once again the place where our identity is to be most deeply felt and shaped. Perhaps this is just as well. The U.S. boasts an economy where the amount of leisure time available to workers has been in steady decline since the early 1970s, and where chronic overwork, and not unemployment, is the primary feature of the labour landscape. Since there is no easy return to the days when a clear demarcation between work and leisure existed, the efforts of the new managerialism are aimed at dissolving the boundaries as much as possible.