Framing work as a right tethers employment to social status, excluding those who are already the most marginalized

(Steven - Ph.D. student, Centre for Disability Studies University of Leeds, “Access to work or liberation from work? Disabled people, autonomy, and post-work politics,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 4.2, 2015, https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/212/398)

A phrase which has been frequently used on the ‘left’ in the UK and Europe is “the Right to Work”.x One recent example of this is a campaign of that name led by the orthodox MarxistSocialist Workers’ Partyxi and the public sector trade unions, which focuses on “fighting job losses” (Right to work, n.d.) and attempts to defend and preserve the public sector against austerity measures. However, this agenda does not question the system of heteronomous wage work as a primary means of organizing society. As Gorz (1999) points out, the demand for the ‘right to work’ – as if it were a citizenship right – is tied up with the valuation of paid employment as an essential component of social status, which, even if ‘full employment’ were to be achieved, would still leave many disabled people excluded from the status of full members of society (p. 64–5). Counter posed to this is the demand of disabled activists such as Sunaura Taylor (2004) for a “right not to work”: Shouldn’t we, of all groups, recognize that it is not work that would liberate us (especially not menial labor made accessible or greeting customers at Wal-Marts across America), but the right to not work and be proud of it? ... What I mean by the right not to work is perhaps as much a shift in ideology or consciousness as it is a material shift. It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work, which should not be taken at face value as a sign of equality and enfranchisement, but should be analyzed more critically. (para. 20) Graby, “Access to work?” CJDS 4.2 (May 2015) 147However, this demand is neither new nor exclusive to disabled people —as Kropotkin wrote a century ago: We must recognise, and loudly proclaim, that every one, whatever his grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable or incapable, has, before everything, the Right to Live, and that society is bound to share amongst all, without exception, the means of existence it has at its disposal.... Enough of ambiguous words like ‘the right to work’, with which the people were misled in 1848, and which are still resorted to with the hope of misleading them. Let us have the courage to recognise that well-being for all, henceforward possible, must be realised. (Kropotkin, 1913, pp. 42–3, emphasis in original)As the Anarchist Federation (2008) argues, “The right to work is the right to misery and denies the possibility of the right not to work” (p. 16); thus, anti-cuts campaigns that make the ‘right to work’ their focus leave disabled people, the group most severely affected by the cuts, unrepresented and implicitly unwanted in their activism. This constitutes an example of what the Canadian anarcho-communist collective Common Cause (2013)describe as the ‘dual consciousness’ of non-disabled workers, in that, while on one level it involves workers fighting back against a reorganization of capital that results in the loss of their income, it simultaneously entrenches capitalist values and excludes those who are most acutely oppressed by the ideology and the material reality of wage labour. As Marta Russell (1998, argues, “[to] buy into the capitalist propaganda that work is god, that people are labourers first and human beings second, serves only to oppress us all” (p. 83).