Getting robbed by the boss? April 15 is Steal Something from Work Day! Does your boss work less than you but take home a bigger paycheck? Is somebody zipping around in a private jet at your expense? If the corporation is making money at the end of the day, that means they’re not paying you the full value of your labor—that’s where corporate profit comes from! So if you need something in your workplace, take it. You earned it! Steal something from work! It could be a paper clip, or some cash out of the register, or full-on embezzlement. If you’re a barista, grab a bag of coffee; if you work at a garage, get a wrench set. If you’re unemployed, take something from someone else’s workplace! Unemployment works for the bosses, too—it forces people to take any job they can, and sends the message to other workers that if they don’t knuckle under they’ll be in for it too. Steal something from work! You could share it with your friends, or give it to your family—the family you never see because of your job. You could use it yourself, to do something you’ve always dreamed of—maybe something making use of all that potential you would fulfill if only you didn’t have to work for someone else all the time. Don’t take shit from your boss—steal it! Steal something from work! Break down the divisions that separate you from your co-workers. Work together to maximize your under-the-table profit-sharing; make sure all of you are safe and getting what you need. Don’t let the boss pit you against each other—in the end, that only makes all of you more vulnerable. Build up enough trust that you can graduate from taking things from work to taking control of your workplace itself! Chances are you already steal from your work—if not physical items, at least time on the clock. Good for you! But don’t stop there—think of how much more you could take, how much more you deserve. Mark your calendar and plan ahead— April 15 is Steal Something from Work Day! Disclaimer: This website is intended as a rhetorical device only; in simple terms, it aims to uncover the already prevalent phenomenon of workplace theft, not to encourage those who otherwise would not commit such illegal acts. Neither the host, nor the developers, are responsible for people navigating to it, or what they do afterwards.

Frequently Asked Questions Is STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK immoral? Stealing is immoral, yes. That’s why your employers should pay you the full value they obtain from your labor, rather than paying you a fraction of it and taking the rest for themselves as profit. If you take something from the workplace, you’re not stealing, but simply taking back the results of your effort. Is STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK illegal? Technically, it may be. Slavery, on the other hand, was legal until December 1865. Is STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY anti-employer? Hate to break it to you, boss, but your employees steal from you every day. By encouraging them to focus on one day a year, we’re looking out for you! Consider this a harm reduction approach. Does STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY make it harder for employees to get away with stealing? Not significantly. The number one obstacle to employee theft is not bosses or cameras, but misguided coworkers. STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY is a consciousness-raising holiday promoting worker solidarity and legitimizing employee redistribution of wealth. Not everyone has an easy time stealing from the workplace. Some demographics are singled out for surveillance, and many people can’t afford to risk getting into trouble! That’s true! That’s why, if you are not one of those people, you should STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK to share with those who can’t risk it themselves. I’m retired. Can I participate in STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY? Yes, you can—just go back to your former place of employment! If you had to wrestle over a pension with them, they’ve got it coming. It’s never too late to STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK! I’d love to STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK, but I work at a local non-profit foundation providing free services to survivors of domestic violence. If you truly love the place you work, chances are it’s under-funded. That’s because the for-profit mega-corporations are hogging all the resources! Time to pay a visit to someone else’s workplace. But my employers give to charitable causes when they make a profit! If I STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK, they’ll have less to donate. Who do you think should choose the most deserving charitable cause for your earnings—you, or some corporate bureaucrat? Just because you STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK doesn’t mean you have to keep it all for yourself! If I STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK, will it make me a more selfish person? Not necessarily! By and large, people find it easier to share things when they don’t have to trade their lives for them in miserable drudgery. STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK might actually make you a more generous person! What does God think about STEALING FROM WORK? Academic theologians such as German Old Testament scholar A. Alt, author of Das Verbot des Diebstahls im Dekalog, suggest that the commandment “thou shalt not steal” was originally intended against stealing people—against abductions and slavery. This lines up with Jewish interpretations of the statement as “thou shalt not kidnap”—for example, as stated by Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, famed as the author of the first comprehensive commentary on the Talmud. If this is so, the real crime is not the worker taking back a part of the fruit of his labor, but the economic system that forces him into wage slavery in the first place. Likewise, as Jesus explains, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24)—don’t put your employer at such risk! What if I STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK and my company goes out of business? Is this biting the hand that feeds me? Corporations plan workplace shrinkage into the budget well in advance. They’re practically counting on you to steal something! If that surplus goes unclaimed, it’ll just stay in their coffers as more unearned profits. Will the costs of STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK be passed on to consumers? Your employers are shrewd businessmen—if they were simply trying to distribute goods to the needy as affordably as possible, they’d be in a different line of work. That means if they could be charging customers more, they already would be. The prices of their products are determined by the market, not by the cost of producing them. But won’t STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK destabilize the economy? What if the market crashes again? Will STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK bring about the end of the world? Are you kidding? Who does all the work in this society—bosses, or workers? If anything, things would go more smoothly without them. If every corporation went out of business tomorrow and we could get our hands on all the resources they’ve hoarded, don’t you think we’d be able to distribute them more sensibly? They’re lucky we don’t steal everything! Will STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK inhibit real social change? Shouldn’t we be organizing to address the root of our problems rather than acting individualistically? Maybe you’re onto something! But STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK doesn’t prevent you from organizing collectively. For example, you could coordinate with your coworkers to share what you pocket. Really, what good would it do to get organized together if you were still afraid to take what you deserve? On the other hand, imagine if we could go beyond taking things from our workplaces, and take over the workplaces themselves… Why is April 15 STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY? As most employees know, every day can be Steal Something From Work day. But we can’t encourage people to go steal from their workplaces all the time—for all we know, that would be illegal. The best we can do is ask people to limit their workplace theft to one day a year! If there was ever a good day to Steal Something From Work, it has to be April 15, Tax Day. For the government, every April 15 is Steal Something From You Day. They take your hard-earned money and dump it right into some oil war or back-room deal—that’s yet another way the corporations are making out at your expense. Don’t take it sitting down. Steal something from work. Remember who’s stealing from you!

Interviews The Guardian, March 2019 Why and when did you start Steal Something From Work Day? And what is its purpose? Steal Something from Work Day arose as a way to call attention to the widespread phenomenon of workplace theft, which we understand as a form of covert protest activity. We’d prefer to live in an egalitarian society in which everyone has direct access to the resources they need—but so long as we don’t, we think it is important to reflect on the ways ordinary people get by in the prevailing order. What do you encourage participants to steal? We don’t encourage people to steal anything. We simply provide a space for people to talk about what they are stealing and why. You can find scores of narratives from participants in workplace theft in our annual coverage of Steal Something from Work Day. What date will the event be this year? And roughly how many people do you expect to take part? This year, Steal Something From Work Day falls on Monday, April 15. It coincides with Tax Day, calling attention to the variety of institutional forces that profit on the labor of employees—from individual employers to the military-industrial complex. Considering that employee theft accounts for billions of dollars annually and involves up to three quarters of the workforce, we anticipate that millions of people will be participating. Why do people steal from work? On the basis of all the interviews we have conducted and all the testimony we have received, we can summarize that the two chief reasons people steal from their workplaces are, first, needing resources to survive or at least live with dignity, and, second, losing respect for their employers on account of the asymmetry of power in the employer-employee relationship. Why do you think the number of people stealing non-cash items from work is on the rise? Since the recession of 2008, the economy has recovered, but this has largely benefitted employers, not employees. Your average employee senses this and acts accordingly via whatever means are at hand. What is your view on the morality of stealing from work? Stealing is immoral. That’s why employees should receive the full value of their labor, rather than a fraction of the value they produce for their employers. When employers enrich themselves on the labor of employees, many employees experience this as a form of theft. From this perspective, much employee theft is an attempt to reclaim the value of their labor and their dignity and autonomy. As much as employees steal today, there is no danger that the employing class will take home less profit this year than their employees. A truly ethical project would be to set out to create a society in which no one would have any incentive to steal from anyone else. This is the question that really concerns us. Beyond Capitalist Meritocracy An Interview with Steal Something from Work Day Press Liaison Robyn Bausez April 15 is celebrated worldwide as Steal Something From Work Day. Every April 15, millions of employees around the world steal from their workplaces. Sweatshop seamstresses slip spools of thread under their sweaters. Cashiers outsmart surveillance cameras to pocket cash from registers. Secretaries pilfer envelopes, carpenters slip screws into their tool belts, baristas treat their friends to lattes on the house. Employers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to employee-organized shrinkage in the US alone. Is this website genuinely intended as a rhetorical device, or is that disclaimer simply intended to protect yourselves from being stolen from via lawsuits? We don’t need to encourage people to steal from work—they’re already doing it, whatever anyone thinks about it. STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY is simply an awareness day. Just as Black history is important all year round but the point of observing February as Black History Month is to bring it into the spotlight, STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY is every day, but it’s also April 15, so workers can take time to think about what is being stolen from them. Who steals more, consumers or employees? Here’s a hint: which way do they point the cameras? What is the most valuable thing you’ve stolen from work? Where were you working at the time? The first rule of STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY is—you do not talk about stealing something from work! But there are different notions of value when it comes to stealing from work. The wealthiest people are usually the ones who get the opportunity to steal the most, whether that be via legal or illegal white collar crime. So perhaps it’s a dead end to assess stealing from work in purely financial terms—it means privileging the ones who start with more, and thus can get access to more. Think instead of the night watchman who writes a novel instead of doing his rounds—or the story that Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails secretly recorded his demo while working as a janitor at a recording studio—or of the fed-up employee at an animal testing corporation who smuggled in a camera one day and got the whole place shut down. There are plenty of things to steal from work besides cash and condiments. In theoretical terms, capitalists and socialists alike have always looked at work as something that produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that working uses up value. That’s why the forests and the polar ice caps are being consumed, the same as the hours of our own lives: the aches in our bodies when we come home from work parallel the damage occurring on a global scale. Everything ends up on the market, costing more and more but meaning less and less. In the long run, perhaps the most valuable thing anyone could steal from work is the realization that there are better things to do with one’s life than sell it away. Millions of workers know this already, but as a society we have yet to act on this knowledge. What would you say to people who would turn in a co-worker for stealing? The universal moral prescription against theft is intended to protect the collective interests of humanity against individual thieves. Ironically, when an employee turns in a coworker for theft, that prescription ends up protecting the individual interests of a few employers against the collective interests of their employees, whose labor it is that produces the wealth they hoard in the first place. So even though it may be intended to preserve fairness, turning in a coworker for stealing can actually accomplish the opposite—it’s the equivalent of informing on freedom fighters struggling against a dictatorship. The power that enables employers to exploit employees doesn’t just come from inequalities of wealth; it is maintained by the part of every worker that identifies with employers’ interests rather than with his or her own interests. People identify with the interests of those who exploit them for a variety of reasons: notions of right and wrong (which are often framed by those in power), the idea that they might become employers themselves one day, a hesitance to acknowledge the embarrassing fact of their own exploitation. Employers thrive on the tensions and competition between their employees: so long as the employees don’t view themselves as having shared interests, they will not act together to defend themselves. Instead, they may turn each other in for small-scale attempts to redress the grievous imbalances of the workplace. Capitalist values are founded on the idea that those who own capital deserve the power it affords them; in concrete terms, this includes the power it gives them over others’ lives, even though this is hardly a “democratic” relationship. Capitalism implies a meritocracy: the best and brightest are rewarded with the most power, and everyone else ends up serving them. In practice, of course, the cutthroat competition of the market often rewards the most rapacious and merciless with the most power. Stealing from one’s workplace can be seen as an attempt to distribute power and resources according to a logic of need rather than of conquest. Employees who turn in co-workers for stealing may be trying to abide by the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But stealing from a corporation is fundamentally different than stealing from another human being. The wealth of a corporation is the accumulation of profit derived from workers who are not paid the full value of their labor and consumers who pay more than the production cost of their purchases. Redistributing this wealth is not stealing so much as it is reversing the effects of a theft that is already in progress. Workplace theft is thus a challenge to the morality of capitalist meritocracy; at best, it can imply a totally different value system.

Analysis Stealing from Work at the End of the World —Workplace theft in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic collapse, and “essential” and “remote” labor.

The Team is Real —A model for how employees at a variety of businesses can support each other beyond networks of kinship or affinity.

A Theft or Work? —A grad student brings poststructuralist theory to bear on time theft, why the master’s degrees will never dismantle the master’s house, and how to resist work when it has spread so far beyond the workplace.

Yes, We Even Stole from Work under Socialism —An extract from A Worker in a Worker’s State, a book written by Miklós Haraszti in 1972 when he was a young employee at the Red Star Tractor Factory and suppressed by the Hungarian government as a threat to socialism.

Beyond Stealing from Work—Stealing from the workplace is only the beginning. Stealing from Work at the End of the World For ten years now, we have observed April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day. Coinciding with tax day—when the government robs workers of a portion of their earnings to fund the police, the military, and various welfare programs for the ultra-rich—Steal Something from Work Day celebrates the creativity of workers who take a swipe at the economy that exploits them. Yet today, the consequences of the global rip-off called capitalism have gone so far that nearly a quarter of us have no employment or source of income whatsoever. Many of those who still have jobs are being forced to risk death on a daily basis just to bring home a paycheck, while more privileged workers have seen their jobs invade their very homes. Tax day is pushed back to July—it’s difficult to rob those who have no income, though our oppressors aim to squeeze it out of us sooner or later. The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic should put things in proportion. While executives and loss prevention experts wring their hands about workplace theft, sticky-fingered employees are not the ones responsible for systematically draining resources from hospitals or accelerating catastrophic climate change. It’s not stealing from work that is outrageous—the outrageous thing is how much capitalism has stolen from us. But How Do We Steal from Work in a Pandemic? As history accelerates, the humble little gesture of workplace theft, via which so many workers have asserted their autonomy and made ends meet, has almost become outmoded. In a global disaster that is just a taste of things to come, we have to become more ambitious about what we aim to seize. “Essential” Workers The workforce has been divided into “essential” workers, “remote” workers, and the unemployed. In many cases, “essential” simply means “disposable”—along with doctors and nurses, it describes a range of low-paid jobs that involve a high risk of exposure to COVID-19. Of course, if you are working one of these jobs, you still have access to material goods; you can still steal from a grocery store or warehouse. When so many people have no access to resources whatsoever—while employers and the politicians above them are conspiring to force us to risk a million deaths to re-start the economy—stealing to support those who cannot buy products becomes a solemn duty to humanity. What can “essential workers” do besides sneaking food, medical supplies, and cleaning products out of workplaces? Can we set our sights on something more systematic? Last month, facing layoffs, General Electric employees demanded to be kept on to build ventilators for the treatment of COVID-19. This points to the possibilities for workers to steal back their entire workplaces. Yet making demands of corporations like General Electric will produce few results unless we are able to find ways to exert leverage on them. In Greece, unpaid workers in Thessaloniki went further, seizing the factory they had worked in and using it to manufacture their own line of ecological cleaning supplies. This is an example of workplace theft writ large, one we can aspire to emulate in the United States over the coming years. Could we steal the existing infrastructure and use it to produce a different society? Should we aspire to take over the global supply chain and run it more efficiently than its current overlords do? The quintessential 21st century work environment is the Amazon warehouse. Surveillance devices and software force humans to behave like robots. In some Amazon warehouses, gigantic screens display footage of employees who were caught stealing to terrorize workers into obedience. Cashing in on the pandemic, Amazon has added over 100,000 new positions, but all the profits are still concentrating at the top. Signs in Amazon warehouses instruct workers to remain three feet apart at all times as an anti-viral measure, when their work stations are actually two feet apart. Is there a place for such places in our dreams of the future? Before we decide what aspects of the global supply chain to keep, let’s look closer at the meaning of the word “essential.” Police in some parts of the US have explicitly stated that “protesting is not listed as an essential function”; they aim to take advantage of the pandemic to suppress any dissent, though dissent is the only means by which we can assert our needs and defend our safety. Freedom is inessential, along with the lives of frontline workers. Meanwhile, the governor of Florida has deemed professional wrestling an essential function along with all other “professional sports and media production[s] with a national audience.” As in ancient Rome, what is essential is bread and circuses. So we should not accept the concept of “essential workers” at face value. Capitalism has monopolized activities like food production that used to take place on a more decentralized basis. We are among the first human beings to be born into a society in which the only way to obtain food is to go to a grocery store staffed by employees. Most of us have no other option today; this monopoly is what makes grocery store workers “essential.” In almost any other model, these workers wouldn’t be the only line between us and starvation. On a fundamental level, Amazon warehouses and corporate grocery store chains are like police: they are essential to the maintenance of this social order, but they are not necessarily essential to life itself. We depend upon them because—through centuries of successive enclosures of the commons—we have been robbed of everything that sustained our species through the first million years of our existence. When we are thinking about how to steal our lives back from work, this suggests another point of departure, alongside individual workplace theft and collective workplace occupations. We can begin to re-establish means of subsistence outside the economy—for example, via occupied urban and suburban gardens. Especially for those who are now unemployed, this is a way to steal the possibility of subsistence from a world optimized for employment alone. Perhaps, one day, where there are currently Amazon fulfillment centers, there can be community gardens complete with collective dining areas and childcare bungalows. Remote Workers In the age of surveillance technology, some of the differences are eroding between warehouse workers who are monitored by drones and white-collar workers who are monitored by technologies that take screenshots at random throughout the workday. All of us are being “optimized” according to capitalist control mechanisms and criteria. In remote or “smart” working, our employers invade our bedrooms, ruthlessly fixing our most intimate activities to the demands of the market. Middle-class workers have to worry about whether the décor of our bedrooms and the behavior of our children will be acceptable to our employers. Nothing is sacred. Camera-bearing drones maintain surveillance inside warehouses, just as the camera on the device you are using to read this article can be used to surveil you. At the same time, as more and more of our lives become dependent on digital technologies, some of the differences between the employed and the unemployed are also eroding. Among those of us who are unemployed, many of us also spend our days in Zoom meetings and clicking around on phones and computers. Our behaviors—paid or not—can be almost identical. Our online activity continues to provide income to corporations employing a profit model based on the attention economy, harvesting data, and the like. Presciently, for Steal Something from Work Day 2013, one of our authors analyzed the ways that time theft alone can fail to take us beyond the regimes of capitalism: Workers who engage in tactics of la perruque [i.e., time theft], but use the reclaimed hours to participate in a digital capitalism that commodifies user attention, merely sneak from one job to do another. In 2013, we call it “social media”—in thirty years, it will have no name. […] We add stars and comments to Amazon products improving their sales; we self-surveil with Facebook; and we help search engines anticipate human desires by performing as a human test audience for them. So while time theft is the one ostensible remaining means of stealing something from work for an entire social class now under de facto house arrest, we should not assume that it will suffice to get us beyond the logic we are trying to escape. That goes for the unemployed as well as for those working remotely. What is the solution? To return to the wisdom of our forebears, we should never use any tool produced by the capitalist system for its intended purpose. To quote “Deserting the Digital Utopia,” “There is an invisible world connected at the handle to every tool—use the tool as it is intended, and it fits you to the mold of all who do the same; disconnect the tool from that world, and you can set out to chart others.” For those confined to working or playing online from home, this offers a way to think about our little individual revolts. When you are engaging in time theft, don’t just click around on the internet, delivering additional information to the corporations and governments that are spying on all of us. We have to use this time creatively and effectively to prepare for the next phase of global collapse. Teach yourself a skill that you can use away from the computer, something that can help you heal or nourish people, whether biologically or psychologically. Create new connections and networks that can assume an untraceable offline form in the near future. Print out letters and deliver them to all the tenants around you inviting them to participate in the unfolding rent strike and offering them support. Remember, you must always have a secret plan. Now more than ever, stealing something from work has to mean assaulting the system that forces work on us in the first place. The Team is Real A Model for Cross-Workplace Organizing Step one: Wear the button when you’re at work. Hook people up (discounts, freebies, extras, etc.) Step two: Wear the button when you go out. Get hooked up. Remember to ask your teammates where they work. Step three: Build the team. Talk to your friends and trusted coworkers. The more people on the team, the better. We are line cooks and bartenders, waitresses and bakers. We sell produce at farmers’ markets; we operate cash registers, we stock shelves and make espresso drinks. We take commodities, rearrange them and move them around, adding value so that our employers may make a profit. We are workers in the service industry, in essence no different from those who work on construction sites or in the few remaining factories of our post-industrial cities. Unlike our industrial counterparts, most of us have been ignored by organized labor. We are excluded from collective bargaining by assertions that our work is too precarious, that we can’t be expected to stick around long enough, that our workplaces are too small. Yet when we confess to our more securely employed acquaintances that we work for minimum wage, we never fail to hear the refrain, “Sounds like y’all could use a union.” Not that we mourn the official union’s lack of interest in our exploitation. We don’t need more boredom, bureaucracy and control in our already stifled, suppressed lives. But we could do with a bit more money at the end of the month, a few more groceries in our pantries, a dose of complicity in our friendships, and a sprinkling of agency in the places where we spend most of our waking hours. In the absence of a formal organization with pretensions of representing our interests, we are forced to supersede the union form and take directly for ourselves that which we are denied by the market. Along with workplace sabotage, slacking off instead of hustling, and the occasional sick day when it is just too beautiful outside, workplace theft constitutes our everyday practice of class struggle, our faceless resistance. Even those of us who work for “responsible,” “ethical” businesses find ourselves looking for ways to take home some extra food or to slip some bills out of the register. And when we can, we give freely of the commodities we produce, transforming them from objects with value (a price tag) to objects for free use (nourishment, intoxication, fun…). In this way, we subvert the commodity form on a daily basis by giving free food and drinks to our friends, but we do it in a limited and isolated manner. The Team is an attempt to coordinate and elaborate that subversion: to spread it beyond the circumscribed boundaries of friendship while at the same time creating new relationships based on a common material condition, that of exploitation, and a common practice of rebellion, that of re-appropriation. Essentially The Team functions by the use of a common identifier—a button, a pin, a t-shirt or hat, anything that could be used to alert a stranger to the presence of a fellow member. The identifier should be unique enough to be easily distinguished, yet not so explicit as to tip off the boss. The deployment of explanatory cards is an optional compliment that while adding a potential risk also provides the opportunity to interject a more explicitly anti-capitalist theme. What do the kids say these days? Everything for Everyone! With only a few months of practical application, The Team has proven to be a moderate success in at least one average-sized Midwestern city. Almost two hundred buttons and cards have been given to enthusiastic young service workers. Some of us have enjoyed a trip to the grocery store with no bill upon checking out. Others have been able to feed their caffeine addictions for another day with no exchange of currency. Soon we hope to be riding city buses and partying in hotel rooms. Perhaps one day something will “fall off the truck” into our laps. In the meantime we are finding that social activities that normally leave us feeling isolated from those immediately surrounding us are now enveloped in an atmosphere of excitement and purpose. Knowing head nods and revealing conversations have once again found their way into the air around us. One story reached us of a twenty-something barista whose adolescent dreams of a network of free coffee suppliers has, years later, found resonance with our little union of thieves. We are finding that even apathetic hipsters and seemingly hostile liberals are making themselves at home in our attempt to do class struggle. The Team, of course, is not a perfect system. There are many flaws, the exclusion of workers who cannot directly seize what they produce foremost among them, yet we believe that for every obstacle we, as a class, are capable of finding a creative solution. Some have suggested a central warehouse for things like toilet paper, soap, light bulbs, and office supplies—commodities that most jobs provide access to. Others have expressed interest in a directory of free social services. In the end, the point is not to establish some sort of alternative economy where we all just go on working our miserable jobs, but rather to help create a climate of subversion, to plant seeds that may manifest in various untold forms, to experiment, and above all to begin to attack the sources of misery. In our fantastical visions of the near future, we see ourselves reclining on patio furniture while savoring lattes, stocking our larders with the finest of produce from local markets. We are enveloped in sensations of pleasure foreign to our proletarian tongues as we drink freely of the bourgeoisie’s wine. When we travel, we are greeted by friends and strangers with gifts of bounty and luxury. And when guests are received by us in turn we show them a night on the town like no other. A cornucopia of goods, freely taken and given, all at the expense of those who would exploit our lives, all in the spirit of the negation of capitalist relations. These words have been written with the hope that others beside ourselves might take up this project and make it their own. —Committee for Attacks Against the World of Work (CAAWW - Birds of the Coming Storm) A Theft or Work? Why Steal Something from Work Day Means Burn Down the Internet A critical essay on the possibilities and limitations of stealing time at work as a revolutionary practice. Our contributor is one of the countless grad students who have better odds of participating in an anarchist revolution than landing a tenure track position. Like anything stolen from work, this text bears the imprint of the context in which it was created—yet hints at what it will take to abolish that context. Thieves of time, one more effort to steal back the world! La Perruque, “the Wig” It is impossible to steal from work. If you are at work, you are either an employee or a boss, or else both. A boss cannot steal from work because he or she already owns the apparatus of production; an employee cannot steal from work because working means being part of that apparatus. If I get away with it, the staplers and printer cartridges my bag are just a category mistake, a peculiar misgrouping of my little hands with other company property. If I don’t, they are a trail of evidence proving that I was never really an employee. The labor of workplace theft is a ruse, but the ruse rouses. The soul is an engine calibrated for pursuing the impossible: as long as capitalism makes equipment out of people, people will make off with equipment. This is a sign of life. The question is how the ruse relates to capitalism, how capitalism absorbs and reverses it, and whether the ruse can help us to abolish capitalism. Let’s begin with the labor of stealing back your time, if only because that may be your primary workplace activity. Michel de Certeau, a hybrid Marxist/Jesuit philosopher of language whose specialties included May ‘68 and late-medieval demon possession, discusses this in The Practice of Everyday Life: Take, for example, what in France is called la perruque, “the wig.” La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on “company time” or as complex as a cabinet maker’s “borrowing” a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room. Trickery and Domination For de Certeau, la perruque is exemplary of “tactics,” as opposed to “strategy.” The difference between the two is central to his analysis of how power functions everywhere from the factory and the kitchen to language itself: Strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces… whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces. His basic insight will be as familiar to dishwashers lolling in the locker room as to conspirators planning revolutions: The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuver “within the enemy’s field of vision,” … and within enemy territory. It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a distinct, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. Since de Certeau was writing in the 1980s, computers have rapidly replaced both letters and lathes in our workplaces. Digital spaces may operate differently than the ones he was examining. Yet the problem is not just that de Certeau was writing thirty years ago, but that he presumed an eternal present. The space of tactics, he says, takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment. The subject of de Certeau’s analysis turns the “actual order of things” to his or her “own ends, without any illusion that it will change any time soon.” And de Certeau seems to agree: tactics can evade, subvert, and defy structures, but not destroy them. De Certeau sounds like King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 2:18-26, presenting a work/play dialectic in a closed and unchangeable universe. As far as de Certeau can see, free moments are free, but they are doomed to remain forever transitory: born to lose. Vanity of vanity, nothing is new under the sun. For worker/theorists who both enjoy the ruse of workplace theft and refuse a “realism” that cannot envision the abolition of the workplace, is there any way to retain de Certeau’s insights without his assumption of a static universe? He is, after all, a fine theorist of secret games like ours. Or, to use de Certeau’s metaphor, though our tactic is inevitably immersed in and permeated by its surroundings, can we insinuate ourselves like worms into a place from which la perruque could constitute revolutionary sabotage? Can the Master’s Degree Dismantle the Master’s House? A good Jesuit, de Certeau flourishes a mind like a filigree of silver: he is refined toward ornate visionary practice and ordered instruction. To be crude, he’s a fancy poststructuralist academic, and he concisely presents the ethos of the well-meaning academic leftist: If one does not expect a revolution to transform the laws of history, how is it possible to foil here and now the social hierarchization which organizes scientific work on popular cultures and repeats itself in that work? The resurgence of “popular” practices within industrial and scientific modernity indicates the paths that might be taken by a transformation of the object of our study and the place from which we study it. He presents the academy as a place where la perruque can have different effects, precisely because, in a regime grounded in science, the university is the factory that produces the systems of control: Let us try to make a perruque in the economic system whose rules and hierarchies are repeated, as always, in scientific institutions. In the area of scientific research (which defines the current order of knowledge), working with its machines and making use of its scraps, we can divert the time owed to the institution. So here we have the Poststructuralist Battle Plan: Gain access to the means of academic production; Escape the space of strategy by situating oneself as a thief; ???? Prophet. De Certeau claims that as (social) scientists, academics can make clandestine use of science, the means by which everyday life is produced, and thus undermine the structural difference between the theoretical remove of strategy and the immersed immediacy of tactics. It sounds so tantalizingly like sabotage that even those who dream of “a revolution to transform the laws of history” could see the value of pursuing an MA in Poststructural Theory. If shops have lathes, what could we use at a university? Funding, projectors, libraries, food, photocopiers, scanners, USB voice recorders, staplers… bricks and ivy! The academy is an armory waiting to be raided. But we should be suspicious of this plan because the most expensive piece of academic machinery is the well-exercised brain. A stapler can be removed from its post, but prying your brain loose from the system in which you have immersed it is something else entirely. You never actually arrive at the moment when you have just stolen a graduate-student brain. The moment, instead, is always either the discovery that this was not in fact a graduate student brain, but the brain of an unemployed writer with an unpalatably narrow range of expertise, or the expansion of the academy to incorporate a range of once-threatening ideas. Ethnographically, de Certeau’s plan is unconvincing for other reasons. The college town in which I write has a healthy infoshop, still selling shirts announcing the now departed presence of the 99% movement, and continuing to engineer tactics against ecocide, homophobia, and other contemporary faces of hierarchy. But neither that shop, nor that fleeting movement, nor the tactics that flow through it are significantly enhanced by the thousands of college students a few blocks away. The marks of la perruque are all over the classroom—professors and students working to use the academic machinery against itself and other hierarchical structures. Personally, I have both taught and attended courses that teach potent radical texts. Students who get high marks for understanding Marx, Bakunin, Fanon, Debord, and Solanas are no more likely than anyone else to engage in the struggles those texts endorse. The university seems to be a machine that provokes people to commit a perruque in which they redirect their attention to structural inequalities, then neutralizes this by means of a flood of relativizing information. The now-harmless critique is administered to classrooms as a sort of vaccine against outbreaks of mobilizing rage, while technologies of cathartic distraction (beer, usually, with or without basketball) expel the remainder safely from the system. And if you leave, it only gets worse: I have spent full years of what I occasionally pass off as an academic life diverting my energy and resources into sneakery and tactics. The university cannot be drained in this way. Elsewhere, de Certeau seemed to understand this tendency of the university to reabsorb subversion quite well. He understands, for instance, that the historian “has received from society an exorcist’s task. He is asked to eliminate the danger of the other… ejecting those dangerous individuals from the social body, and keeping them temporarily or permanently isolated.” In observing how the student riots of 1968 were neutralized, de Certeau indicts the academy, and notes how the students in revolt were later decried for their limited vocabulary of “two dozen words” like “consumer society,” “repression,” and “contestation.” Good words, but the University will demand that you use so many words that they cannot be used for anything in particular. There was a graduate student from the anthropology department, a self-described Marxist, who came frequently to our Occupy encampment. He would tell us that if we really wanted to change things we would go home and read more theory. This is not a diploma. 100% Time So la perruque of writing about la perruque doesn’t constitute sabotage. Yet the problem is not the academy. De Certeau is right in asserting that nearly everyone sneaks time from work to do their own projects, even if they are being watched. But somehow millions of people running errands in company cars, making snacks from spare ingredients, and sexting while “on the clock” have failed to abolish capitalism. Every workplace has two reflexes that work to prevent la perruque from damaging the functioning of the system. Let’s call these reflexes release and recapture. Release is a simple reflex. In the academy, it takes the form of scheduled forgetting, and in most non-academic jobs it is described poetically as “the blind eye.” La perruque is simply forgotten so the system can continue as it was before. Jobs that can be done by machines already are, so the remaining jobs must accommodate the fact that humans require play. Play: that is, a space of free movement so the system can adjust to inevitable tiny changes without shattering. A gear also requires play; humans just require more play than gears, and tend to fracture more dramatically when they are not provided with it. This should not be mistaken for freedom any more than the fact that skyscrapers sway from side to side in the wind should be mistaken for a “small victory” for the forces of horizontal movement. Recapture is a more complex reflex, and while it is ancient, it seems to be becoming more important these days. We can see historical traces of recapture, for instance, where certain pre-existing facets of slave religions have been nurtured by masters in order to promote docility. Let’s consider how recapture relates to la perruque. In 1948, the corporation 3M began encouraging employees to use 15% of work time to do any project they want, so long as it ultimately benefited 3M. It was in this creative space that a 3M employee invented the Post-it note, making the corporation countless millions. Today, Google encourages its employees to spend 20% of their time thus; that recapture of free time created gmail. The nightmare capitalism of the future will consist only of “100% Time,” constant freedom under total capture. Or maybe that future is already here. Consider your own recent moments of la perruque. What were you doing? Think hard, because some of your favorite activities may have been designed to leave no harsh mnemonic trace. Were you fiddling around online? Workers who engage in tactics of la perruque, but use the reclaimed hours to participate in a digital capitalism that commodifies user attention, merely sneak from one job to do another. In 2013, we call it “social media”—in thirty years, it will have no name. Would that we had more lathes. Because we cannot build with computers, we ply games like Farmville or World of Warcraft, becoming background objects for other players; we add stars and comments to Amazon products improving their sales; we self-surveil with Facebook; and we help search engines anticipate human desires by performing as a human test audience for them. Tactics are immanent, whereas strategy is transcendent, so la perruque is always a movement down and in. With “social media,” we have learned to enjoy the practice of fleeing from a larger job into a smaller one nested within it. Facebook’s interface is surprisingly honest: a sort of matryoshka doll that recedes deeper and deeper toward the ends of attention. Only on the middle level, where one gathers and becomes a sort of currency counted in “friends,” does this work comprise what Julian Assange has called the “most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” The smaller jobs of glancing at ads, which finances the appalling and pleasurable spy machine, are too small to remember. Imagine a book stamping on a human face forever. As an aside, the video game industry is a phenomenally successful experiment in recapture by the military-industrial complex. Some argue that the first game was Tennis for Two (1958), created on a computer properly used to calculate missile trajectories, but most claim it was Spacewar! (1962), created by MIT’s military-funded computer labs and spread widely through the networked “ARPA community.” This military organization, famous for creating the Internet, spread Spacewar! as part of their general endorsement of “blue sky mode research”: they gave their employees nearly total freedom and funding, and fired them if they failed to produce lethal results. Perhaps in 1963, someone thought the proliferation of video games was too wasteful a perruque. But twenty years later, Ronald Regan revealed that the Air Force regarded Atari as military training for the masses: “Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The Air Force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.” It is has been a long recapture, but a successful one: 40 years after the release of Spacewar!, America’s Army became the name of both a murderous force of empire and the video game it uses as an official training and recruitment device. The Potlatch: Destructive Gifts What, then, can we do? Can any perruque oppose the regime of 100% Time? De Certeau offers a hint. La perruque is no doubt related to the potlatch described by Mauss, an interplay of voluntary allowances that counts on reciprocity and organizes a social network articulated by the “obligation to give.” … It survives in our economy, though on its margins or in its interstices. It is even developing, although held to be illegitimate, within modern market economy… the loss that was voluntary in a gift economy is transformed into a transgression in a profit economy: it appears as an excess (a waste), a challenge (a rejection of profit), or a crime (an attack on property). Waste, challenge, and crime! This sounds quite like how we reclaim our time “on the clock,” but where does de Certeau find the “obligation to give” in la perruque? The love letter and the family furniture he mentioned in his first example sound generous, but certainly many forms of la perruque are like masturbation in employee bathrooms—unlike anything we would call “generosity.” Taking a closer look, we see that de Certeau is directing our attention to Marcel Mauss’s ethnographic conception of “the gift.” Mauss hoped to use ethnography to show that capitalism is neither natural nor complete, that “Apparently there has never existed… anything that might resemble what is called a ‘natural economy,’” no matter how much capitalism asserts itself as a system of natural (that is, rational, or at least non-magical) exchange. One of his most powerful tools for this purpose was his analysis of the potlatch, a cycle of ritual gifting among the indigenous Kwakiutl people of the American Northwest. The principle was simple (more so in Mauss’s academic reduction, certainly, than in Kwakiutl reality): to receive a gift is to take on an obligation that must be paid with interest. So gifting spirals. We are weighed down by generosity, and collective efforts to relieve ourselves produce spirals of accelerating gifting. A madness of generosity. It is not clear why de Certeau, writing in the 1980s, saw this in la perruque, but it should be familiar to anyone mired in Facebook. The gift of “friendship” is an obligation, as is Farmville manure, or mentions by friends. Social media is already a potlatch. We have created 100% Time by trying to rid ourselves of the curse of free time. But Mauss’s description of the potlatch gives us one more hint: In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated. Whole boxes of olachen (candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands of blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and thrown in to the water, in order to put down and to ‘flatten’ one’s rival. Recent historians have suggested that the potlatch only reached this immolative form when the Kwakiutl were confronted with the crisis of colonization. Previously, the spirals of gifting had been acquisitive rather than destructive. Perhaps this is true. And perhaps there is a kind of gift spiral that can only emerge in 100% Time, in which it will not be enough to waste the hours we reclaim, nor to share them, but within which a new relation to time must emerge. Perhaps in the furtive laboratories where tactics are invented, we are only now discovering a mode of laziness that manifests as revolutionary sabotage. Perhaps here can we finally put on la perruque to end all perruque. “Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.” “Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating.” Resources De Certeau, The Practice of Every Day Life

Mauss, The Gift

Bataille, The Accursed Share Yes, We Even Stole from Work under Socialism We present this extract from the book A Worker in a Worker’s State, written by Miklós Haraszti in 1972 when he was a young employee at the Red Star Tractor Factory and suppressed by the Hungarian government as a threat to socialism. Throughout history, workers have stolen from their workplaces under capitalism and socialism socialism alike. Haraszti suggests that this stealing is actually the most creative and enterprising activity that takes place in the factory, implying the possibility of a world in which all labor would be equally creative and free. His text also provides a window into the lives of workers in the Eastern Bloc, revealing the void at the heart of the supposed workers’ utopia. So long as there are managers, workers will rob their workplaces—not just for personal gain, but above all to keep alive that which is best in themselves. At a time when young people in the West who did not experience the horrors of state socialism are spreading nostalgia for it while fascists gain legitimacy in Eastern Europe by presenting themselves as its foes, it’s important to remember that state socialism never gave workers the freedom or abundance it promised—and that its true opponents are not the nationalists who would inflict still worse horrors, but anarchists and other ordinary working people who resist all forms of imposed authority. Likewise, Haraszti’s text is prescient in anticipating how artisanal craftsmanship would be further commodified in the post-industrial economy, offering the illusion of free activity as yet another facet of the market. Instead of peddling nostalgia for state control of industry, factory work, or any other specter of the 20th century—or seeking to monetize our autonomous activity after the fashion of the 21st century—let’s take immediate action against against capitalism, socialism, and work itself. In Search of the Great Homer A homer is an object made for his own purpose or pleasure by a worker using his factory’s machines and materials. It is not made for sale as an additional source of income. The word does not appear in most dictionaries, but appears to have been the most widely used equivalent in England and North America. “Homers? Is there any chance of homers?” is often asked by those thinking of leaving this factory, when they’re tipped off about another place. Many factors must be taken into account when you want to change your job. Although for most workers homers are not vital, they’ll make them if they have the chance, and they’ll try to create the opportunity if it doesn’t exist already. Some will pay a high price to obtain a position that allows them to make homers. The government journals portray workers who make homers as thieves. Similarly, the factory bosses “fight” against homers. Warnings and sanctions rain down on the heads of those who misappropriate materials, use machines for their own purposes, or tap the factory’s supply of electricity. If the factory guard finds a homer in our pockets or on our bodies, he has caught a thief. But even if the journals don’t acknowledge it, both workers and bosses know very well that this is just words. The real damage to the factory is the time lost in making an object—time which cannot be utilized by the factory. “If the foreman knows you’re making homers, he’ll send one of us to fetch some glue and he’ll stick you to your machines for the rest of the day,” said my neighbor, joking with someone who was borrowing a tool from him to make a homer. The secret of this passion for homers is not a simple one. It can’t be reduced to the minimal value of the knick-knacks which the workers actually make and, especially on piece-rates, how long they take bears no relation to the value of the time lost. Workers on hourly wages turn to homers when they have given to the factory what the factory has demanded, or when they have a free moment. If hourly workers make homers they don’t risk anything—except being found out. Not only will they then be punished, the discovery will also offer an excellent opportunity to demand increased production from them. Workers on conveyor belts, or on fully automatic machines, completely delivered from the pressures of time, are only likely to make homers in their dreams. Technological development has given these workers a moral superiority, which at least forces the government satirists to look for a new theme in their attacks. But the piece-rate worker manages his time himself, and each minute that passes without an increase in the number of pieces represents a financial loss for him. With the constant pressure of piece-rates, the factory does all it can to preach the morality of labor. According to the rate-fixers’ estimates, the piece-rate workers should themselves renounce their passion for theft. In fact, management has to admit that nothing—neither prohibitions, nor punishments, nor public humiliation by the security guards—will persuade them to give it up. Perhaps it is more than an empty play on words to say that we “loot” [that is, cut corners in violation of regulations] in order to have time to steal. Making homers is a real addiction; those who go in for it know that they do themselves more harm than good. The bosses and the rate-fixers view the persistent refusal of piece-rate workers to give up this habit in terms of the basest instincts. “How does a person like that bring up his children? We gave him sound advice and even delivered a sharp rap across his knuckles, but nothing will stop him from pilfering,” the foreman grumbles, talking about a homer addict. Yet the passion for “looting” does not upset the bosses. Not because they force us to do it, but because “looting” doesn’t cost anything except the strength, nerves, wellbeing, thoughts and life of the worker—even when he thinks that he is stealing something from the factory. Why, then, are piece-rate workers so fond of making homers? The usefulness of homers cannot be the real motive, because the worker’s life is so dependent on the workshop, the machine, his materials, and his eight-hour shifts that there is no chance whatever of his making anything which he really needs. It would be a dubious triumph for “do-it-yourself”—given the gigantic level of infringements that would be involved—if the conditions of work were such that they permitted workers to make everything they needed for setting up house in the form of homers. Then, certainly, homers would be worthwhile, since every worker could do repairs, and make small gadgets cheaply and with little effort. Some of my colleagues still harbor a nostalgia for the days of the domestic artisan, but they rarely talk about their feelings, except when they are embarrassed or are making an excuse if someone catches them out. “Peasants, too, give what they produce to the State, but they don’t buy their vegetables in a market. Here, there are all the tools you could want, and stacks of discarded materials—but if I want to repair my faucet, I’m supposed to call the plumber.” This sort of talk is really a rationalization; it doesn’t bear much relation to the real motives for making a homer. Perhaps the mechanics and fitters, who are paid by the hour, really do have the means—thanks to homers—to set up their families, since they have at their fingertips, in the workshop, all the tools and machines necessary for household repairs large and small. But I am chained to my machine even if, at the most once a week, I find after an interminable number of runs that I have won a little time for myself. It is impossible for the piece-rate worker to flit across the workshop like a butterfly and to fiddle around with other machines. The foreman would see him at once, and fix him up with more work. Besides, the others are also riveted to their machines, and in any case our machines are too specialized, too large, too powerful, and too complicated: they themselves dictate what we can make with them. And so in fact homers are seldom useful things. Bizarrely enough, when they are, it is generally not for some outside use, but for something needed within the factory. In theory, there are special workers to manufacture the base plates and braces for mounting pieces, but in fact we must make them ourselves. It is an unwritten rule that when feasible we make everything our jobs require with our own machines. Such operations have real utility, but are also infuriating. They are hardly paid but they are necessary to get through faster, or even to complete a job. Even around such necessary preparatory work, the mysterious aura of homers begins to appear, to the extent that everyone calls these pieces “homers” even though in fact they entitle us to a supplementary payment. No one would think of telling his neighbor how he’d run through a series, and no one would be interested if he did. But everyone can talk with gusto about these preparatory “homers,” and find an interested audience. Without doubt, the reason is that we plan this work ourselves, and can complete it as we think best. Our machines rarely give an opportunity for other useful kinds of homers. But that doesn’t do away with homers, it only changes them. For piece-workers, homers are ends in themselves, like all true passions. Here the passion is for nothing other than work, work as an end in itself. The diverse forms of homer have only one thing in common: they have to be of a size that can be surreptitiously smuggled out of the factory. Some have not kept to this rule; and finished objects lie gathering dust in their locker, or their tool boxes, or beside their machines, until the worker changes his factory, when they try to get them out, or, if this is hopeless, give them away. For us, the potential of milling machines, lathes, and borers stimulates and at the same time limits our imaginations. The raw material is chiefly metal. The objects that can be made are key-holders, bases for flower-pots, ashtrays, pencil boxes, rulers and set squares, little boxes to bring salt to the factory for the morning break, bath mats (made out of rolls of white polystyrene), counters in stainless steel to teach children simple arithmetic (a marvelous present), pendants made from broken milling teeth, wheels for roulette-type games, dice, magnetized soap holders, television aerials (assembled at home), locks and bolts, coat-holders for the changing-room cupboard, knives, daggers, knuckle-dusters, and so on. In place of the order, “You make that,” comes a question: “What can I make?” But if this work is an end in itself, it is not thereby without a purpose. It is the antithesis of our meaningless “real” work: the possibilities are limited, but the worker who makes a homer uses his head and keeps his eyes open. He scans the raw materials around him, weighs up the unexploited capacities of his machines and the other auxiliary machines, like the small disc-cutter in the corner of the section or the grinding-machine, as he examines the hand tools at his disposal. Then he decides. He decides on what he will accomplish and works to realize that chosen object and not for some other purpose. If he uses the product itself, then before all else he will relish the pleasure of having accomplished it, and of knowing when, how, and with what he made it, and that he had originated its existence. This humble little homer, made secretly and only through great sacrifices, with no ulterior motive, is the only form possible of free and creative work—it is both the germ and the model: this is the secret of the passion. The tiny gaps that the factory allows us become natural islands where, like free men, we can mine hidden riches, gather fruits, and pick up treasures at our feet. We transform what we find with a disinterested pleasure free from the compulsion to make a living. It brings us an intense joy, enough to let us forget the constant race: the joy of autonomous, uncontrolled activity, the joy of labor without rate-fixers, inspectors, and foremen. A complex organization forces me to maintain a minimum level of quality in my daily work. In making homers, quality, which itself arises as I have envisaged it, is the aim itself, the profit, and the pleasure. It is so natural that the question is no longer “What are you making?” but “How are you making it?” The joy of this unity between conception and execution stands in extreme contrast to our daily work. “Where is the blueprint?” an inspector asked as usual when he came over to make a check. M— loves to repeat the brazen response (fortunately it did not get him into trouble) which aimed to rub in that for once he and the inspector had nothing to say to each other: “It is here, in my head.” The inspector had to puzzle over this for a while before it clicked. M— was making a homer. In outward appearance, nothing had changed. The same movements, which otherwise served only to increase production for the factory, were transformed by what he was doing into an activity of an entirely different kind. By making homers we win back power over the machine and our freedom from the machine; skill is subordinated to a sense of beauty. However insignificant the object, its form of creation is artistic. This is all the more so because (mainly to avoid the reproach of theft) homers are rarely made with expensive, showy, or semi-finished materials. They are created out of junk, from useless scraps of iron, from leftovers, and this ensures that their beauty comes first and foremost from the labor itself. Many do not care if their noble end-product clearly reveals its humble origins; but others hold fervently to the need for a perfect finish. Were it not that homers have to be made in a few snatched minutes, and that often we can’t get back to them from one week to the next, if making homers were not such a fleeting activity, then one could almost claim that there were two schools: the first “Functionalist,” the second “Secessionist” [a pre-Soviet Hungarian art movement celebrating excessive decoration]. There are also passing fashions in homers. And just as homers are a model of nonexistent joys, so they are the model for all protest movements. Making homers is the only work in the factory that stands apart from our incessant competition against each other. In fact it demands cooperation, voluntary cooperation—not just to smuggle them out but also to create them. Sometimes my neighbor asks me to do the necessary milling for his homer, and in return makes a support for me on his lathe. On these occasions we wait patiently until the other “has the time.” Among piece-rate workers altruism is rare. Even in making homers, aid without a return is inconceivable. But it is not a matter of like for like: no one calculates how much his help is worth, or the time spent on it. Sometimes one can even come across selflessness without any expectations of recompense—which could never happen in “real” work. Most friendships begin with the making of a joint homer. These different joys are obviously marred by the knowledge that they are only the joys of an oasis in a desert of piece-rate work. Slowly, the factory returns to itself, the computer dries out the oasis, the pressures of production continue unchanged. Despite this, everyone is cheerful during these few precious minutes. This is manifestly obvious to all but the bosses—who don’t need to worry about the constant bad temper of piece-rate workers except insofar as it relates to production; and who don’t display the least understanding of this loophole to happiness, not even as a matter of tactics. A foreman’s anger is a sure indication of the happiness that the worker sows with a homer. I am convinced that homers carry a message. “Artisanal tinkering, survivals from a dying industry: if homers are a negation, then they are only a nostalgia for the past.” This might be said if you didn’t grasp the importance of homers for workers on piece-rates. In fact, they don’t know the old handicrafts any more and they detest the private customers for whom they often do black market labor after factory hours. Workers would gladly renounce the artisan character of homers, but they have no other way to assert themselves over mechanized labor. Similarly, they would gladly produce things which made sense, but the production of senseless homers is their only chance to free themselves, for a few minutes, from the “good sense” of the factory. They would gladly manufacture, often collectively, things which were useful for the community; but they can only make what they want to make on their own, or at most with a few others. So these two steps towards the senseless—producing useless things and renouncing payment—in fact turn out to be two steps in the direction of freedom, even though they are swiftly blocked by the wall of wage labor. In fact, homers are a vain attempt to defect from the cosmos of piece-ratios. Suppose that all of our work could be governed by the pleasures of homers, then it would follow that in every homer is the kernel of a completely different sense: that of work carried out for pleasure. The industrial psychologist, the expert in managerial methods, the social technician, and all the growing number of specialists who are replacing functionaries once breathless with the heroism of labor cannot comprehend the hopelessness of their task if they are unable to understand the pleasures of homers. Their task is to dry out the oases while filling the desert with mirages. Were it not that these experts in production are also dispensers of our livelihood, in command of discipline and achievement, we would enter the age of the Great Homer. This alienated sense, imposed from outside by wages (and its denial, the consolations of forbidden irrationality), would be replaced by the ecstasy of true needs. Precisely what is senseless about homers from the point of view of the factory announces the affirmation of work motivated by a single incentive, stronger than all others: the conviction that our labor, our life, and our consciousness can be governed by our own goals. The Great Homer would be realized through machines, but our experts would subordinate them to two requirements: that we use them to make things of real utility, and that we are independent of the machines themselves. This would mean the withering of production controls. We would only produce what united homer-workers needed and what allowed us to remain workers united in the manufacture of homers. And we would produce a thousand times more efficiently than today. To take the whole world into account, to combine our strength, to replace rivalry with cooperation, to make that we want, to plan and execute the plans together, to create in a way that was pleasurable in itself; to be freed from the duress of production and its inspectors—all these are announced by the message of the homer, of the few minutes that resurrect our energy and capacities. The Great Homer would not carry the risk of our frittering away strength senselessly; on the contrary, it would be the only way to discover what is even precluded by the homer of wage-earners: the real utility of our exertions. If we could direct our lives towards the Great Homer, we would gladly take on a few hours of mechanized labor a day, so long as it was needed. Otherwise, if everything remains as it does today, we face a terrible destiny: that of never knowing what we have lost. Connoisseurs of folklore may look on homers as a native, decorative art. As yet, they aren’t able to see further than that. But they will, and the day will come when homers are no longer forbidden but are commercialized and administered. People who work on automatic machines will be able to buy homers in the shops after seeing them in magazines or on television. Then, no one will suspect that homers were originally more than a “do-it-yourself” hobby or a mere pastime; that they once shone through factory controls, the necessity of making a living, and the pressures of wages, as a surrogate for something which by then perhaps will be even more impossible to name than it is today. The tiny gaps that the factory allows us become natural islands where, like free men, we can mine hidden riches, gather fruits, and pick up treasures at our feet. We transform what we find with a disinterested pleasure free from the compulsion to make a living. It brings us an intense joy, enough to let us forget the constant race: the joy of autonomous, uncontrolled activity. Epilogue At a factory in the Soviet Union, inventory control had determined that one of the workers was stealing from the People’s State. They heightened security and monitored him carefully. Every evening, as the man left work with his wheelbarrow, the security guard would search him fastidiously—packages, boxes, bags, pockets, everything—but to no avail. Although the guard never found a thing, he continued to search the worker at the end of each shift—year after year after year. Finally, decades later, the man was due to retire. As he pushed his wheelbarrow out for the last time, the guard searched it, then said in despair, “Look, it doesn’t matter anymore, but satisfy my curiosity. We know you are stealing something. Yet every day I search your wheelbarrow and find nothing. How can this be?” “It’s easy,” shrugged the worker. “I’m stealing wheelbarrows.” Beyond Stealing from Work In the final analysis, stealing from our workplaces is not a rebellion against the status quo, but simply another aspect of it. It implies a profound discontent with our conditions, yes, and perhaps a rejection of the ethics of capitalism; but as long as the consequences of that discontent remain individualized and secretive, they will never propel us into a different world. Stealing from work is what we do instead of changing our lives—it treats the symptoms, not the condition. Perhaps it even serves our bosses’ interests—it gives us a pressure valve to blow off steam, and enables us to survive to work another day without a wage increase. Perhaps they figure the costs of it into their business plans because they know our stealing is an inevitable side effect of exploitation—though not one guaranteed to bring exploitation to an end. On the other hand, the notion that stealing from our employers is not relevant to labor struggle enforces a dichotomy between “legitimate” workplace organizing on the one hand and individual acts of resistance, revenge, and survival on the other. So long as this separation exists, conventional workplace organizing will always be essentially toothless: it will prioritize bureaucracy over initiative, representation over autonomy, appeasement over confrontation, legitimacy in the bosses’ eyes over effectiveness in changing our lives. What would it look like to go about labor organizing in the same way we go about stealing from our workplaces? First, it would mean focusing on means of resistance that meet our individual needs, starting from what individual workers can do themselves with the support of their comrades. It would mean dispensing with strategies that don’t provide immediate material or emotional benefit to those who utilize them. It would establish togetherness through the process of attempting to seize back the environments we work and live in, rather than building up organizations on the premise of an always-deferred future struggle. A workforce that organized in this way would be impossible to co-opt or dupe. No boss could threaten it with anything, for its power would derive directly from its own actions, not from compromises that give the bosses hostages or give prominent organizers incentives not to fight. It would be a boss’s worst nightmare—and a union official’s, too. We might also ask what would it look like to go about stealing from work as if it were a way to try to change the world, rather than simply survive in it. So long as we solve our problems individually, we can only confront them individually as well. Stealing in secret keeps class struggle a private affair—the question is how to make it into a public project that gathers momentum. This shifts the focus from What to How. A small item stolen with the knowledge and support of one’s coworkers is more significant than a huge heist carried out in secret. Stolen goods shared in such a way that they build workers’ collective power are worth more than a high-dollar embezzlement that only benefits one employee, the same way a raise or promotion does. Remember the story of the hardware store employee who embezzled enough money to get a college degree, only to find himself back behind the cash register afterwards! When it was too late, he wished he’d done something with the money to create a community that could fight against the world of cash registers and college degrees. Even as he broke the laws of his society, he had still accepted its basic values, investing in status that could only advance him on the bosses’ terms. Better we invest ourselves in breaking its values as well as its laws! Practically everyone steals from work, even if many people won’t admit it, even if some people would like to reserve the privilege of doing so for themselves. Let’s draw this practice out of the shadows in which it takes place, so all the world has to engage with it and its implications in the full light of day. Perhaps workplace theft could be an Achilles heel for capitalism after all: not because it alone is sufficient to abolish wage labor and class society, but because it is the sort of open secret that must remain suppressed to preserve the illusion that everybody believes in and benefits from the present system. So if you find yourself coveting items in your place of employment, don’t just steal something from work—think about how you could steal everything from it, yourself and your coworkers above all. Stealing from work one thing at a time will take forever, literally—it would be more efficient to just steal the whole world back from work at once. That’s a daunting project, one we could only take on together—but it’s one we can begin right now. Next April 15, we won’t just pocket a few items—we’ll show up at our workplaces with helmets and torches. Stealing something from work is not enough when work is stealing everything from us. “It is better to loot than to shoplift, to ambush than to snipe, to walk out than to phone in a bomb threat, to strike than to call in sick, to riot than to vandalize . . . Increasingly collective and coordinated acts against this world of coercion and isolation aren’t solely a matter of effectivity, but equally a matter of sociality—of community and fun.” —War on Misery #3

Narratives Time is Always the Best Thing to Steal from Work —A narrative covering a lifetime of workplace theft.

Out Of Stock: Confessions Of A Grocery Store Guerrilla —A former Whole Foods employee recounts his efforts to run his employer out of business by means of sabotage, graffiti, and insubordination, reinterpreting William Butler Yeats’ line “The falcon cannot hear the falconer” from a bird’s-eye view.

Steal from Work to Create Autonomous Zones —The shocking true story of how a photocopy scam nearly escalated into global revolution.

A Cashier’s Guide to Putting Yourself Through College via Workplace Theft — How one worker stole a higher education from a hardware store.

What Became of the Boxes —An adventure in proletarian revenge.

Stealing from Work Is a Gamble, but It Can Be a Good Bet —The story of one risk-tolerant employee who set out to double his earnings.

Don’t Beg for a Piece of the Pie—Take the Whole Pizza for Yourself! —A chronicle of workplace resource distribution in Eastern Europe.

Like Most Workplace Thieves, I Am an Exceptional Worker—Being a small-time criminal, demystified. Time is Always the Best Thing to Steal from Work I’m writing this on company time under stay-at-home orders. I want to share an incomplete list of all of the things I’ve stolen from work over the course of my two and half decades as part of the work force. I want to start by acknowledging that my situation is likely different than yours. When and where we grew up, where we are living now. The kind of work we do. The relative privilege that each of us benefits from. This is not a prescription or playbook. You might have access to opportunities I have not. The time and place and situation may be different, but the bosses are still the bosses and the fight is still the fight. Look for the cracks and squeeze through them. Paper Delivery When I was in junior high school, I had a paper route. I delivered the paper every day after school. Once a week, there was a coupon day. An extra stack of little papers arrived at my house with the bundle of newspapers. I was supposed to stuff these coupons into all the newspapers before delivering them. I was a good kid. At the beginning, I did what I was supposed to. It made the load of papers in my satchel weigh twice as much. Still, I couldn’t help suspecting that most people didn’t care about the coupons. So I performed an experiment. I stopped stuffing the paper with coupons and waited to hear who complained. I made a mental list of the few houses at which people really wanted the coupons. I’d include the coupons in the papers I delivered to those houses. All the rest of them went straight into the recycle bin. This saved me a literal weight off of my shoulders. It also freed up an extra hour of precious post-school daylight hours to play with neighborhood friends. The paper route was supposed to teach me the value of a job well done—and it did. High School Tech Support In high school, I was in a computer class. We students had free rein to use whatever we wanted, as long as we did tech support for teachers who were having issues. Jammed printer. Dead network. Missing mouse. We would come fix it. Most of the time, though, I was in the corner using the high-speed audiocassette dubbing machine. It could transfer one tape to three others at the same time, at four times normal speed. I started a little do-it-yourself record label using that machine. This changed my life, connecting me to other young people around the world in the days when the internet was just getting off the ground. I also designed, printed, and mass-produced countless zines on those high school computers, printers, and copiers. Pool Admissions Desk and Concession Stand Around the same time, I worked in a concession stand at a fancy pool serving upscale neighborhoods. I made minimum wage. I never paid for nachos or slushees, and neither did my coworkers, friends, or casual acquaintances. In subsequent years, I also worked at the admissions desk. I operated the cash register. People who came to swim paid me and went on their way. Dollar fifty for kids. Two dollars for adults. Fifty cents extra for the water slide. All day. Over and over. On hot summer days, the pool brought in several hundreds of dollars per day. Some days, a group would come in from a day care or camp. Those were big days. It’s hard to skim off the top of a $1.50 charge. If you’re keeping the change, your pockets get heavy and jingly. There’s also a paper trail of receipts. But not if the cash register is broken. Weirdly, every summer I worked there, the cash register would stop working the first or second week. In effect, this reduced the cash register to a money drawer, abolishing the paper trail of receipts. I would do the math in my head, pop the drawer open, make change, and keep a running count in my head. How many customers have come through the door today? How much can I skim without anyone noticing? The answer: I bought a new computer, printer, monitor, and scanner to take with me to college. And a lot of records! Learning to do math in your head can be an important skill if you weren’t born with a silver spoon under your tongue. Grocery Store Every shift during my lunch break, I’d wander over to the juice aisle, pick out a bottle, then go to the hot foods bar and heap up a pile of French fries. If my friend was working the hot foods register, we talk for a bit, putting on a little performance for any potential spectators. If not, I’d just go sit down and start eating. As a cashier, I had a lot of discretion and prerogative. If something didn’t ring up properly, or lacked a barcode, or neither I nor the customer knew the produce code… they got it for free. Or, if I didn’t get the feeling that they were down, I’d ring it up for twenty-five cents. That way, they still saw me ring up something and weren’t forced to make a decision about the ethics of workplace theft. Any time friends came through my checkout line, I pantomimed ringing up their groceries, turning each so the barcode was facing up, away from the scanner. I’d say “boop” out loud with my voice. We’d share a nod, a wink. Then I’d ask them to buy me a pack of gum. Total bill: twenty-five cents. Once, I made the mistake of trying to pass along those savings to my best friend’s dad. He was pretty cool on most accounts. For example, during Sunday church, rather than making them listen to sermons, he taught his kids algebra and other math that was advanced for their respective ages. But on this day, I grossly misread his sense of ethics. When he noticed that I was scanning items upside down, he started making a stink, raising his voice about his principles. Luckily, I was able to recover the situation before anyone figured out what was going on. I was the slyest employee thief when taking food off the shelf; I always left with something tucked down my pants. A meal or two to tide me over from one shift to the next. I also stole pantloads of film, processing, and prints. I would drop off a few rolls of photos from punk rock shows at the film developing desk, checking the boxes for all the upgrades: oversized prints, duplicates, fancy finish. When I picked them up, I’d say I had some other shopping to do before checking out. They just let me walk away with them. I never once paid for film, processing, or prints there. The good ol’ days. College Computer Lab In college, I worked in the computer lab. The university had a really fancy computer sitting unused in storage. I took all its internal parts home with me one by one. Later, I bought a case and reassembled them into a new computer to serve the general public in a shared computer lab at a DIY collective space. Like many other things, stealing from work was easier in the 1990s. Web Design Internship It turned out I was good at web design. I’d crank out the work really quickly, then spend the rest of the time designing zines and working on other creative projects. Every Computer-Focused Office Job I have always stolen time from office jobs. It was especially useful to be good at keyboard shortcuts in order to hide or destroy whatever I was up to when the bosses came around. I also took all the normal office things: cables, paper, printouts, photocopies, staplers, staples, tape, keyboards, mice, laptop stands, chairs. I’ve stolen a few computers from jobs. Once, I traded a couple such computers for a car that I then drove around the country on a Great American Road Trip. When it’s provided, I always load up on food. Snacks for myself now, snacks for myself later when I’m not in the office. If friends come visit me at work, they eat for free, too, but they should also load up their bags and pockets. I try to make a point of using office-provided food to channel meals, snacks, and drinks to the houseless. In the Time of Global Pandemic This trip down memoir lane is all fine and good, even if some of the particulars aren’t necessarily useful anymore. But what does it mean to steal something from work when many people are working from home or out of work entirely? If you still have a job at a physical place and still have access to physical stuff, you can continue to steal. Food, supplies… toilet paper! Take some for yourself, for your friends and family, for your mutual aid network. Don’t just hoard it—everything you pass on to those in need will be returned to you fourfold. You can also steal for others so that they don’t have to. Do it without them knowing, if you think knowing might make them anxious. Cashiers still have the prerogative to selectively miss ringing up items for customers buying supplies during the pandemic. People loading bags of food for delivery can slip in an extra of this or that. If your workplace is now your living room couch, dining room table, or bedroom, there are still ways you can steal something from work. If you’re lucky enough to have “unlimited” paid time off (PTO), then for goodness’ sake, take paid time off! Use it to focus on your physical and mental health. Use it to care for your friends and neighbors. Use it to volunteer in mutual aid projects. If you have flexibility to take some time away from the computer while on the clock, do it! Even if you don’t actually go anywhere, just step away from the computer for a while. You can steal time. You can take time during your workday, between Zoom meetings and Slack channel discussions, to do whatever you want. You can put some time on your calendar as “quiet working hours” to protect your calendar from meeting invitations. You can watch movies, educate yourself, or even write an article for an anarchist website about stealing from work! If you need it, take a nap or stare out the window. It’s OK not to be productive™ in this situation. This time is not simply working remotely. We are working remotely during a global pandemic that has already killed over 100,000 people, an ongoing fascist takeover, and large-scale economic failure. You have permission to forgive yourself for not writing the next King Lear, discovering the next calculus, learning another language, or mastering a musical instrument. If you want to do these things, you should. If not, that’s OK too. Just take care of yourself out there. Remember, your time is the most valuable non-renewable resource that you’ll ever have. If your heart is free, the time you spend is liberated territory. Defend it! Out Of Stock Confessions Of A Grocery Store Guerrilla This narrative is dedicated to the courageous individuals who attacked the Whole Foods during the general strike in Oakland on November 2, 2011; whatever the papers say, many of us employees would be overjoyed if you paid a visit to our workplaces. My Name Is Carlos I am twenty-eight years old. I am wearing a black apron in the canned food aisle of the well-known corporate natural foods grocery store at which I work. I’m staring into nothingness, reflecting on the decisions that have put me here. I am beyond depressed; I’ve reached that juncture where depression meets anger. I am hostile, reactionary, and dangerous. I’m so lost in thought that I’m honestly unaware of the shoppers scuffling around me—until a customer interrupts to ask a question I had already heard many times since I had clocked in. I turn my blank stare upon her: “What?” She repeats the question and I cut her off, pointing to the empty space where the product should be; below it is a sign that announces, in very large decipherable letters, “Out Of Stock.” She commands me to go check in the back, obviously annoyed at my poor social skills. I’ve been asked this question about a dozen times already; I let out a sigh through my clenched teeth. This customer isn’t happy with my reaction and asks for my name, since I’m not wearing a name badge like all the other employees. This is a threat. “My name?” I answer, drawing on all my resentment. “My name is Carlos. I work in the Bakery Department.” Two falsehoods. Confused by my response, she heads straight to the customer service booth to submit a complaint. This is not the first time this has happened; I disappear to my hiding spot. Thus begins the career of Carlos, grocery store guerrilla and ghost in the machine, the shadow employee known throughout the store for disobedience, obstruction, and customer service performance art. Death to Loss Prevention I had been living in the same city for almost five years already and hadn’t yet made contact with other anarchists. It was an incredibly isolated phase of my life. Between the hours I spent working and recovering from work, I schemed plan after spectacular plan to break free from my loneliness, only to have them crushed when I stepped back through those sliding doors. I often saw customers shoplifting; a shoplifter myself, I’d try to give them space, but I wasn’t the only one watching. The Loss Prevention Agent (LP) stalked the isles, attempting to blend in among the shoppers, though not much good at it. LPs are the scum of the retail industry, the vilest of would-be cops. I saw many taken into custody by these bounty hunters and eventually couldn’t stand passively by anymore; I began competing with the LP to get to the shoplifters first. This was incredibly risky: not only was I risking getting fired for preventing their apprehension, but I had to be secretive enough not to attract attention to any of the shoplifters I was attempting to make contact with. One distinctive group that shopped infrequently at the store wore all black and weren’t particularly subtle about stealing. Often they were lucky enough to come in when the LP wasn’t working, but one evening the LP began creeping behind them from a distance. Somehow the middle-aged rent-a-cop did not attract their attention. I was desperate to approach the would-be shoplifters in black, but I knew that could mean getting caught myself, so I decided to start with the LP instead. I walked to the back of the store and used the intercom to call for the LP by his first name, asking that he call me back at that number. Then while the LP attempted to return the call I headed to a different phone at another location in the store, from which I called for the LP over the intercom again. Miraculously, this little stunt bought just enough time for the shoplifters to leave untouched by the confused loss prevention agent. Afterward, the LP and the store manager questioned me as to why I had called twice and never picked up. My answer was simple and easy enough to believe: I was trying to contact him about the group of shoplifters I had seen. When he didn’t answer in time, I decided to follow them and called from a phone in another location. This put the blame back on the LP. A few months later, I met those same shoplifters in black outside my workplace and told them about what had transpired. They are my friends now and although I no longer work at that store, I do what I can to keep them safe when we are together. Sabotage on the Dairy Floor Anyone who’s worked in a grocery store knows how miserable the dairy department can be. You’re stuck in a claustrophobic freezer room for eight hours, terrified you’ll be accidentally locked inside. No matter how many layers you wear, the cold creeps in and reminds you of all the things you’d rather be doing. On top of that, you’re forced to listen to terrible muzak blaring from the speakers, occasionally interrupted by a shrill voice to add to your aural torture. Everyone was expected to work at least one dairy shift a week; although I did my best to evade it, I was often stuck stalking the dairy floor. On one of these shifts, I broke one of the large metal sliding doors by slamming it too hard in a fit of rage. I quickly found out that if one of these dairy doors stopped functioning correctly, I didn’t have to stock that particular door. I wasn’t content reserving my anger for the dairy doors. My second target was those deafening speakers. On one of my closing shifts, after my bosses had left for the day, I took the opportunity to paint the connecting wires with clear nail polish I had pocketed from the beauty section. I chose this method instead of just cutting the wires because I was already under suspicion for the dairy doors. After that, to my great relief, I didn’t have to hear 80s music anymore, as none of my coworkers could figure out what was wrong with the dairy speaker system. Following several broken doors, a new speaker system, and a long list of health code violations, I was taken off dairy duty. The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer In the course of my final days as an employee, I took it upon myself to leave messages throughout the store. Armed with a permanent marker, I wrote anti-capitalist slogans under items, on items, on the bathroom stall doors, on baby diaper boxes, and on all the self-help customer computers, being careful never to get caught on the security cameras. The most notorious of these slogans was “the falcon cannot hear the falconer,” which I heard repeatedly discussed by both customers and employees. It’s a line from a William Butler Yeats poem describing Europe after the Second World War; I used to say it to my boss at a different job many years earlier when he asked me to do things I didn’t feel like doing. Despite all the amusing things I wrote, this was the only one shoppers seemed to notice. Customers would simply ignore graffiti cursing work or capitalism as if it were just another tag on a shelf; but wherever I put up “the falcon cannot hear the falconer,” I’d witness customers staring at it, trying to decipher its meaning. Of course, any item that was written on became “damaged,” and employees were allowed to take home damaged items—so not only was I detracting from corporate profits, I was also improving conditions for us workers. And walking around the store with my permanent marker was one of my many ways of looking busy while doing as little work as possible. The Damage Done Aside from breaking the dairy doors, writing graffiti, and carrying out psychological warfare against my employers, most of my antics consisted of petty vandalism and general bad behavior. My acts of indignation would probably have gotten me fired on the spot or arrested if it hadn’t been the affinity I had developed with my coworkers around our hatred for work. Most of the grocery team would mark off items to bring home or just blatantly put groceries in their bags as they were leaving for the night. Only a few of my coworkers were “good” employees, and those were widely loathed; after my first wee