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I argue that unpaid labor is being transformed in the US through the promise of future monetization. First, I develop a concept of social agency in conversation with feminist accounts of reproductive labor. In short, social agency is the ability to produce and maintain the social identities and relationships which constitute a person’s subjectivity. Second, drawing on Foucault, I show how a market rationality captures and exploits people’s social agency so that their social identities, relationships, and even their sense of self become a means to the end of enhancing their value and the often false promise of future monetization. Finally, I argue that this new site of exploitation necessitates new forms of resistance. In union organizing, people’s collective agency is used against the very exploitation of that collective agency. In the same way, resistance to the social agency’s exploitation will need to make use of people’s social agency.
The distance between the American university's professed commitment to altruism on one hand, and its reliance upon underpaid labor on the other, widens with each passing year. Unwilling and in some cases unable to pay just wages to employees, especially part-time faculty, institutions of higher education attempt to span this distance by equating academic labor with self-sacrifice. Despite rapid secularization at many religiously-affiliated higher institutions in recent decades, leaders in the expanding higher education bureaucracy have proven adept at defining underpaid labor as quasi-religious sacrifice, particularly in the context of relationships between students and faculty. With particular attention to recent developments at Roman Catholic colleges and universities, this presentation will demonstrate how a managerial class exploits a long-standing gap between Catholic social teaching and actual labor relations at Catholic institutions by means of sacrificial discourse, even at schools whose collective commitments to theology and religious practice have been marginalized.
The emergence of the COVID pandemic underscored the degree to which we are all dependent upon essential workers, including unpaid caregivers. Unfortunately, pregnant persons too often remain overlooked as caregiving, essential workers. We must better appreciate those who gestate, birth, and nurse our future firefighters, doctors, and janitors. This requires providing material appreciation, including maternity leave and expanded child tax credits. Those who do not perform the work of childbirth—a group largely composed of men—must contribute otherwise by redistributing its material burdens. However, those with uteruses have instead been subjected to forced pregnancy and childbirth, especially following the 2022 Dobbs decision. This contravenes, among other things, Christian commitments to suffer with our fellows when they suffer. As I argue in “La Labor de Nuestras Matrices”—a riff on this year’s presidential theme, invoking the work of our wombs—we must better appreciate the essential labor of pregnancy.