Are you having a rough time at work? Considering a career change? Need some advice on handling a tricky colleague? Want to know how to negotiate a pay rise? Probably. It’s hardly news that work in 2022 is not really working for most of us. Wages are low, bills are high, strikes are rampant, and awful bosses just keep on being awful. Even those of us lucky enough to be in what we long called our ‘dream job’ can find ourselves struggling to progress or battling with a difficult workplace culture. Others stay stuck in jobs they don’t want to do simply because they have no other choice.
In this context, maybe it’s no surprise that the ‘career economy’, as I termed it in my book Make Bosses Pay, is one sector that has flourished. You can’t move for career coaches on Instagram and TikTok now. Bookshop shelves groan with the weight of a hundred productivity and work advice self-help books. Every Google search for meaningful and factual advice about employment rights results in a sassy listicle advising you on How To Know When Your Workplace Is Toxic.
This content is marketed almost exclusively towards millennial and Gen Z women, with Insta-coaches touting beautifully designed goal-setting worksheets, shiny-haired women reenacting salary negotiations, and pastel book covers emblazoned in bold typography promising to revolutionise your relationship to work. Maybe the #girlboss is not so much dead as she is now a career coach, talking to the front-facing camera about her online course schedule, and posting infographics on drafting a complaint to HR.
Of course, career coaches have existed for decades as a legitimate source of advice and self-improvement for those who seek it out. Traditionally, though, these have been professionals trained in coaching, counselling or other related disciplines, and then registered and certified with coaching bodies who can verify their worth. In the wild west that is social media, that doesn’t seem to matter anymore — a ring light and an anecdote about a man remaking the same point as you in a meeting and getting all the credit are all the qualifications you need. It’s often unclear what a workfluencer’s background is and, sometimes, even who’s profiting — a number of TikTok accounts offering free work advice, for example, can seemingly be traced back to businesses rather than the self-starting solo woman they’re presented as.
Perhaps none of this would really be a problem if it actually helped. But at the core of the career economy is an empty and dangerous promise: that you can self-actualise your way out of the facts of capitalism, mental illness, poverty, or sexual harassment.
Of course young women are looking for answers about the inequalities we face in the workplace and our careers — for the most part, we’re paid less, treated worse and progress slower than our male colleagues. Sexual harassment is rife in sectors such as hospitality and personal services where women are over-represented. It’s only natural that we’d look to social media and the internet for solidarity and support.
Only, that’s not what we find there. While workfluencers talk often about building a community, this often operates more pertinently as a customer base for the sale of any number of different books, courses and offers of bookable one-to-ones. Among them you’ll find many a mention of confidence and assertiveness, a reminder to engage in self-care, and probably an instruction to “find yourself a work wife, stat!”. You’re essentially paying through the nose to be told the problem is you.
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The conditions that make our work lives so hard are structural and they are political. Capitalism creates the power imbalances that lead to bullying and harassment. Our wages literally don’t go far enough to cover the basic costs of our lives. Our health and relationships suffer as a result. Until these things change, work will remain unfair — but as individuals, we simply do not have any capacity to abolish hierarchy, grow the economy, or overthrow capitalism on our own.
What the workfluencers never seem to tell you, though, is that together we do. The only response to these structural and political inequalities is collective, not individual. The problem isn’t our work ethic, attitude or confidence levels, it’s the system in which we’re forced to work, and it’s only through solidarity and strength in numbers that we can ever mount a challenge strong enough to take that on. Whether they know it or not, the career economy’s brokers trade on the very same insecurities they claim to want to tackle, and their so-called solutions obscure those that might actually help: trade unions; organising; campaigning; community action.
Of course, it’s also incumbent on those unions and campaigners to work to take up the space that the career economy currently occupies. When a young woman sits down after a rough day and taps ‘ask for a pay rise ’ into her phone, she should be met with factual advice about equal pay and the living wage, and links to join a union that can advise her further, rather than a page of personal essay book extracts and an Amazon link to a workbook.
In that sense, the career economy has expanded to fill a gap left by unions and organisers who arguably haven’t modernised fast enough. But, in another sense, it has expanded, because fallible people struggling with something are always an easy target, whether by bosses or by so-called career coaches. Only collective action will ever build enough power to change that.