When rethinking work or business, many instinctively seek a path that is less ego-driven, less competitive, and less hierarchical. And rightly so. Yet, I wonder how often these alternative paths end up leading to a familiar place—a priority for the productive.
What if, instead, we aimed for the reproductive?
Today, I've got three ideas from Angela Garbes's Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change. This is a book about recognizing 'mothering' in all its varied forms and affirming its economic, social, and revolutionary value.
Garbes is a writer based in Seattle, a mom of two, and a first-generation Filipino-American. She writes in a way that is at once profoundly intimate and unflinchingly political. And that 'both can be true' spirit is really at the core of her project.
Essential Labor vigorously explores mothering and care as revolutionary forces. It's quite explicitly about how we care for children, the elderly, the infirm, ourselves, and each other. But its argument also reaches into territory that's tended to be more hostile to mothering and care—places like work and business.
I don't want to make it seem like the value of this book is in rethinking work. Its chief value is in lifting up mothering and care, highlighting their power to shape and even revolutionize our societies. At the same time, work is right there in the title: essential labor.
What could it look like to approach our work and businesses as a practice of mothering?
Not the familiar trope of the 'office mom,' but instead, rethinking the practices, systems, and values of work through the lens of mothering.
As Garbes put it:
Reimagining our approach to mothering can birth its transformative potential. Day in and day out, this work can be our most consistent, embodied resistance to patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and the exploitation that underlies American capitalism.
1. Care can be embedded in every action and system.
The division between home and work remains paramount to the system we live under.
Caregiving is often seen as work that happens in the margins. It occurs at home before and after paid work. It happens in daycares, preschools, and elementary schools after drop-off. We find caregiving in hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes.
When we set about the productive work that pays the bills, we stop giving care and start doing the job, making shit happen.
American society values work in terms of how much we produce, and how efficiently we can do it. It tells us that our output is our worth. Caregiving, conversely, is inefficient. But it pays dividends. If we were to think about work in terms of our humanity—making people feel dignified, valued, and whole—then caregiving is the most important work we can do with our time on earth.
When care work does make it into our job sites, it's often unpaid and overlooked. On workplace sitcoms, care work is the butt of jokes. In corporations, it's the purview of the nagging HR department.
It doesn't have to be that way. Care can be embedded in every action and system. Instead of being a second thought, it can be the first. At work, care is social and cultural, yes. However, care can also be structural, finding its way into policies, org charts, software, and operating procedures.
What if, instead of asking whether a policy or procedure will increase efficiency or productivity, we asked whether it will increase reproductivity? How could we move toward a work environment where every day is an opportunity to learn and grow and feel better at the end of the day than at the beginning?
2. Binaries inhibit possibility.
Garbes examines caregiving and disability in a chapter titled "Mothering Insists on Worthiness." On the surface, she makes an argument for the social model of disability and the porousness of 'disabled' as a social identity. However, her deeper argument is about binaries writ large and the ways they disrupt social bonds. She writes:
Our culture loves a binary, and we tend to view things through strict divisions—black or white, right or wrong, true or false—rather than with nuance, when two seemingly opposing concepts can be true at the same time. Able-bodied and disabled is a widely accepted binary, though it is possible to pass through one on the way to the other, to experience both throughout one’s lifetime, even simultaneously.
The false binary of able-bodied versus disabled is an iteration of a broader binary: independent versus dependent.
Independence is always contingent.
Whether I'm considered independent depends on whether the built environment was designed for people like me, whether our social expectations match my preferences, and whether my career allows me to pay for housing, healthcare, and food. My decisions must be directed toward maintaining that particular version of independence, lest I become dependent.
As we perform independence, we foreclose on possibility. We limit our choices the more we back away from the specter of dependence.
Binaries are socially constructed with the effect of imposing limits on our imaginations. Without rigid boundaries around certain identities, we're free to imagine new ways of living, caring for one another, and working. To that end, it’s no wonder that Garbes devotes two whole chapters to interdependence.
3. Appetites are healthy.
Much of the status quo approach to productive labor demands that we limit our appetites. We talk about discipline and accountability while counting hours like calories. We trim the fat in our budgets and train our focus like a muscle.
In a chapter titled "Mothering as Encouraging Appetites," Garbes explores the role caregivers play in how we relate to our bodies. She writes:
Caregivers play an essential role in the development of young brains and bodies that do not hold disdain for themselves.
Garbes delves into some of the experiences that shaped her relationship with her body, as well as the questions and concerns she now has as a mother of two girls.
These are critical explorations as they relate to mothering and caregiving. But I'm also wondering what pleasures and possibilities we deny ourselves in our work. What do we hunger for at work, and why do we suppress our appetite? What hedonic rabbit holes do we avoid ourselves because they're distractions or time-wasters that take us away from the 'real work?'
My tongue, my body—they’re pleasure-seeking missiles launched the day I was born, and that I have no idea how, and no desire, to shut down.
What if we approached work in the way Garbes approaches food and other pleasures?
I know, I know. Our collective productivity might crash. Our consumption habits would rapidly shift. Our children might get the impression that life is about more than focus, discipline, and cranking out another project.
And yet, I think that's precisely what the Earth is hungering for. It's what our families hunger for. We have an appetite for change and should feed it.
The work of mothering might just be the first step.
We will always find ways to take care of one another. When we lean into this natural, unstoppable, and very human urge, the results are expansive. And I want more.
3 Ideas for Rethinking Care Work