A November 17th article in the Brisbane Times about workplace productivity, "All the same to new white-collar intelligentsia", in fact brings to light an interesting connection between one of the Italian autonomists' favored form of protests - refusal of work - and Facebook, the popular social networking site.

The article correctly acknowledges that younger workers today do not spend all of their hours at the office engaged in job-related activity. They spend time reading blogs, making personal appointments, IMing with friends, or checking non-work e-mail. Speaking as a young worker myself, I can confirm this. Yet the piece's author, Lisa Pryor, frames this type of activity as a conscious action on behalf of the young white-collar worker, who is now expected to be available for work in near perpetuity. With instant, ubiquitous, and increasingly mobile access to the contemporary tools of the job (a web browser and a phone), employees almost seamlessly enter and exit states of work and non-work. We're likely and often required to send a work e-mail, or make a work-related call from home. In reaction to this, Pryor suggests, young workers take personal time out of their work hours.

Italian autonomist thinkers like Antonio Negri endorsed similar forms of social action, as refusal of work. This was in reaction to the increasingly modular, precarious, and fluid labor conditions that young Italian workers faced in the 70s and 80s - a broader labor condition when a full-scale strike might not have the same effect. Refusal of work meant sleeping on the job, working at a deliberately slow pace, but in a more general way, showing up but not really working. This was a way of questioning the value of labor, its measurement in hours, and the worker's relation to labor.

Are we in a situation today when refusal of work has become the assumed natural reaction to the expanding modularity and perpetuity of work? If so, does that dilute the weight of the ontological and social questions that are raised in the autonomists' vision(s)?

I'm guessing that Lisa Pryor may not have missed this connection, seeing as she quotes Adorno at the end of the article, but clearly this deserves more thought than a blog entry (not written on work hours) can put forth.