The New Norm: Constant Availability in the Workplace

Like many (perhaps most) forms of labor-management negotiation, the macro-negotiation you are describing proceeds within the prevailing limits on our imagination about how work is organized, and then calls upon workers to trade off their various interests within those limits. Perhaps a shorter formal workweek is the optimal compromise, but your original point of departure was not an expansion of the formal workweek, but the increasing appropriation of the worker's attention and disruption of psychic life by the pervasive-communications network enveloping increasingly-remote knowledge workers. In the grand tradition of pork-chop unionism, you propose to bargain that away for a one-time 20% pay hike.

Actual effort to treat the worker's psychic integrity and control of the workplace boundary as the primary goal of the organized knowledge-worker force would lead to very different negotiating outcomes, one hopes. As the membership of the UAW comes over the next decade to balance more equally member workers who make knowledge and member workers who make cars, we shall see how the negotiation evolves. I think the best route to improvement here is to put a less focused emphasis on the "deal du jour," and to look a little more broadly at what workers might think about work, and demand from those who claim to control "the job."