Our encounters with the direct labor of others, not to be confused with the labor embedded in the phone we swipe or the strawberry we eat, could in principle be mapped in starburst networks, thick and thin lines of varying lengths indicating intensity and frequency. We encounter people’s direct labor when they provide us with a service — the barista we engage with for ninety seconds a few mornings a week, the postal worker we pass on the sidewalk — or when they work alongside us, in our offices, stores, and warehouses. Some people’s labor, while essential to the demos, we rarely encounter, and if we do, the circumstances are likely to be dire. Sociologist Allison Pugh begins her book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World with an account of this type of labor. Erin Nash, an apprentice chaplain at an East Coast hospital, is a person who we might meet on the worst day of our life — a day when our child, parent, or partner has a life-threatening operation or even dies. Pugh describes an encounter Erin has with a patient who, terrified and enraged at the prospect of being intubated, screams out loud and clutches Erin’s hand when she offers it, pulling her close and clinging to her while he calms himself. Later he thanks Erin for connecting with him in that awful moment, for seeing and understanding his pain.

While we may fervently wish never to require the help of someone like Erin, Pugh argues that the work Erin does is emblematic of an increasingly important form of labor in our modern society: connective labor. Connective labor, labor that “involves ‘seeing’ the other and reflecting that understanding back,” has, Pugh contends, become an essential component of an increasing number of American jobs. Our encounters in the classroom, the doctor’s office, and the hair salon satisfy more than just direct needs. They generate “mutual purpose, dignity, understanding.” In these interactions, “we express and experience our humanity” — the “resonant meanings” that emerge, contributing to the broader social fabric.

In a moment marked by persistent dread about job loss and de-skilling as a result of rapid advances in digital automation and artificial intelligence, Pugh’s insistence that our society is generating new skills and capacities, or at least spreading them to new occupations, is bold and affirming. New ways of working, some of which involve acquiring new skills, have undoubtedly emerged over the past few decades. Bosses have used smartphones and apps to recalibrate a wide variety of occupations, and software and hardware engineers have been trained to make it all possible. These kinds of skills are not readily viewed as progress, however, or at least not progress for most workers, and perhaps not even for society. Instead Pugh describes the spread of a more valuable, quintessentially human skill set — one that, on the whole, benefits both individuals and society. Connective labor brings us together and creates a sense of belonging and meaning that is greater than the sum of encounters involved.

Who is engaged in connective labor? There are the folks we might expect — therapists, doctors, teachers, nurses, home health aides — but Pugh also includes occupations we might not: hairdressers, baristas, bank tellers, coaches, personal assistants, and sales staff. As we consider this framing, two questions come to mind. First, are the skills Pugh captures in the term “connective labor” new skills, or are they simply more visible now in our workplaces and practices? Second, why are we seeing the increasing importance of connective labor at this juncture?

Returning to Erin, Pugh’s emblematic hospital chaplain, it is apparent that connective labor draws on an old repertoire of skills. Chaplains belong to a long-established profession that arose out of the religion and health movement of the Progressive Era. We might even trace the practices of chaplains back further, to the traditions of pastoral care launched by Pope Gregory I. Pugh is not overly concerned, however, with the newness of connective labor skills but rather with the fact that they’ve been ignored or overlooked even as they gain importance. Connective labor is “work that is essentially invisible, only partially understood, and not usually recognized, reimbursed, or rewarded, despite its ubiquity and importance.” In this vein, we might situate connective labor alongside unpaid care work, kinwork, and the gendered burden of the “mental load.”

Perhaps wary of trapping herself in an academic cul-de-sac of timeline debates, or because she feels the answer has already been satisfactorily answered by previous scholars, Pugh is not much interested in litigating the “why now?” question either. She is content to leave her readers with a brief DIY explanation for the expansion of connective labor that blends Nancy Fraser’s scholarship on the commodification of care work with Eva Illouz’s contributions on emotional capitalism. The reader is left to her own devices in deciding how much the increasing prominence of connective labor is the result of the marketization of women’s work and how much comes from cultural shifts that value and indeed demand an emotional style in the workplace. If we are unsure of the proportions or disagree about how much weight to give therapeutic ingredients, it is of little concern to Pugh. She’s engaged in a “conceptual ethnography” of connective labor itself, following “where the idea of connective labor took [her].”

Pugh spent five years collecting data for The Last Human Job, interviewing more than a hundred people and spending more than three hundred hours observing practitioners in classrooms, squad cars, doctor’s offices, and any other place her ethnography took her. Her insistence on deep and wide listening as a methodological imperative fits with her previous projects. Her last book, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity, was an evocative examination of the complex ways in which increased precarity and insecurity in people’s work lives shape their personal lives and sense of self. It is through this listening that Pugh aims to reveal how connective labor is produced by and essential to our very humanity.

Despite its importance, Pugh argues that we don’t see connective labor. It’s like dark matter, causing “gravitational effects that cannot be explained by simply looking at that which we can see.” But the core components of connective labor, “using the body as an instrument, reading and deploying emotions, collaborating, responding to spontaneity, and making and managing mistakes,” Pugh contends, make connective labor “an artisanal practice, a humanistic enterprise at its heart.” Aiming to shed light on this dark matter, Pugh shadowed doctors, therapists, and teachers and came away with weighty conclusions about the importance of connective labor and what it provides for both individuals and society.

In the broadest sense, connective labor spins “connecting threads”: threads that bind “workers and their charges together on the basis of their shared membership in the vast collective of humankind, one that warrants a right to being seen”; threads that provide “a sense of purpose” to workers won from “having an impact, witnessing vulnerability, and connecting with individuals”; and, finally, threads that generate a “greater understanding of self and other.” Pugh’s conceptual ethnography and the stories she tells about primary care physicians struggling with overwork in rural Appalachia, elementary school teachers trying to reach children who’ve experienced violence and loss, and home health care workers managing ill patients and ornery family members bring these threads into relief.

The practices and products of connective labor reveal the deep capacities of human labor and how our work connects us in unexpected and complex ways, even while these capacities are forged in the satanic mills of capitalism. The increasing importance of connective labor has made it visible to capital as a site for profit-making and rationalization. “As soon as I noticed the existence and prevalence of connective labor, I could also see that it was increasingly being subjected to new systems of data analytics, apps, and artificial intelligence that tried to make it more predictable, measurable, efficient — and reproducible,” Pugh writes. Scripting, counting, gamifying, and many other practices commonly used in the carving out of the automation frontier are now being applied to the interactions between teachers and students, doctors and patients. Business owners and managers, Pugh contends, have opted to apply an “industrial logic” to connective labor, “treating this work to the same sort of . . . logic that one might see on an assembly line.”

A private Silicon Valley school in which administrators have created two categories of teacher, those who specialize in “content delivery” and those who specialize in “motivation,” is a site where this industrial logic is at work. Drawing on Harry Braverman, Pugh says:

Just as Frederick Taylor broke down the bricklayer’s craft into its component parts more than a century ago, the school disaggregated the teaching of particular content — happening every morning via laptops and headphones, as well as small-group lessons — from the connective labor that helped kids actually care about learning that content.

One teacher would teach the children the three Rs while another would ask the kids how they were feeling and help them set goals. While in this particular school the “content specialists” and “advisors” were paid the same, Pugh is concerned about the implications of this de-skilling, imagining a future in which cash-strapped districts might replace the content specialists with apps and Khan Academy tools and the advisors with lower-paid “feelers who come with less training and could command less pay.”

We hear the story of Veronica Agostini, a young woman hired to oversee a cognitive behavioral therapy app. Veronica’s boss considers her a coach and monitor rather than a therapist and pays her accordingly. Yet the people using the app need the help of a real person, and Veronica fulfills that role, spending hours every day “helping them work through some hard things.” Despite the pain and trauma that she witnesses and helps folks process as part of her job, Veronica herself minimizes her contributions and efforts, viewing herself as simply an extension of the app. “Their collective insistence,” Pugh observes, “rendered invisible the work she actually did to witness the clients’ needs and struggles and the price she paid for it in the emotional residue their trauma left behind.”

If the automation trends shaping connective labor continue in the direction they’re headed, Pugh predicts a near future of concierge medicine and personalized education for the wealthy and health care apps, chatbots, and online instruction for the poor. Moreover Pugh fears we will lose something even greater at the societal level. “The power of connective labor, especially in the mundane quotidian world of everyday commerce and civic society, is in its capacity to knit together communities of disparate souls — in other words, to create belonging,” she says. Mechanizing and thereby minimizing this essential work results in alienation and the loss of social intimacy in profound ways. To prevent this, Pugh says we need both “a new awareness of connective labor and a social movement to protect it.”

Pugh is correct, not only in recognizing the nuances of human labor and how it shapes both our personal identities and society more broadly but also in her appeal to protect connective labor. Her instinct in reaching for Braverman to better understand the forces looking to control and degrade connective labor is also a sound one. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital (LMC), and Braverman remains as relevant as ever for understanding the labor process under capitalism. As the title of Pugh’s book indicates, she is concerned with the humanity inherent in, necessary for, and reinforced by connective labor. For her, connective labor is an artisanal process threatened by automation and the application of “industrial logic.” A closer look at Braverman’s argument in LMC offers some insights into how we might better understand the forces shaping connective labor and the conceptual tools needed to protect it.

Braverman’s aim in LMC is to examine and elucidate the labor processes in capitalism — in particular how these are shaped by capitalist property relations — and in doing so he starts with human labor itself, ruminating upon what makes it special. Building on Karl Marx’s musings on spiders and bees, weavers and architects in Volume 1 of Capital, Braverman insists that “work as purposive action, guided by the intelligence, is the special product of humankind.” Braverman saw in human labor a practically limitless potential, easily adaptable and flexible to nearly any task, its capacities evolving and growing faster than uses could be found for it.

Capitalists benefit from the “infinitely malleable character of human labor” but have long dreamed of escaping it. David Noble discussed this desire at some length in his comprehensive study of numerical control, recalling how the First Industrial Revolution brought laments from factory owners and a desire for “‘deliverance from the intolerable bondage’ of having to negotiate with and depend upon the work force to turn a profit” and how, at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, it seemed as if the “automatic factory” would at long last become reality, the “emancipation from human workers,” in the words of one prominent manufacturer, finally at hand. But even as the proportions of the extravagant promise of generative AI expand by the minute, human labor, in all its nuances and capacities, remains at the core of work, society, and profit-making. As Braverman wrote, “Human labor, whether directly exercised or stored in such products as tools, machinery, or domesticated animals, represents the sole resource of humanity in confronting nature. Thus for humans in society, labor power is a special category, separate and inexchangeable with any other, simply because it is human.”

We are encouraged to dismiss or deny the centrality of human labor — a persistent ideological feature of modern society. Managers and owners are particularly prone to do so, considering human labor to be little more than a “factor of production.” Their forgetfulness is rooted in the peculiar social relationships at the heart of our political economy. “Labor, like all life processes and bodily functions, is an inalienable property of the human individual,” Braverman argues. “Muscle and brain cannot be separated from persons possessing them; one cannot endow another with one’s own capacity for work, no matter at what price, any more than one can eat, sleep, or perform sex acts for another.” A worker sells her capacity to work. She does not surrender it. The capitalist must figure out how to extract value from a worker he can never fully control and thus must exert his energies toward controlling the labor process. The worker has been alienated, with little or no say in the labor process, and the capitalist must now manage the worker, attempting to realize her “full usefulness” in what is an inherently antagonistic relationship. “It thus becomes essential for the capitalist that control over the labor process pass from the hands of the worker into his own,” Braverman explains.

No one accomplished greater gains in service of this goal than Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor taught owners and managers that it wasn’t enough to simply control workers through the general setting of tasks. Bosses needed to, whenever possible, take all decision-making power about the organization and practice of work away from workers. “In pursuit of this end,” Braverman said, “no pains are too great, no efforts excessive, because the results will repay all efforts and expenses lavished on this demanding and costly endeavor.” Braverman spent a good deal of attention on the turn-of-the-century “scientific management” guru who, he warned readers, had not been surpassed or dismissed, as some would happily believe, but whose philosophy and aims have been wholly incorporated into the quest for control of the labor process.

Detailing Taylor’s “baptism of fire” trying to get Midvale workers under his thumb — a process that involved betraying the very workers he’d worked side by side with — Braverman distilled the lessons of so-called scientific management, in particular the principle he called “the dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers.”

Workers who are controlled only by general orders and discipline are not adequately controlled, because they retain their grip on the actual processes of labor. So long as they control the labor process itself, they will thwart efforts to realize to the full the potential inherent in their labor power. To change this situation, control over the labor process must pass into the hands of management, not only in a formal sense but by the controls and dictation of each step of the process, including its mode of performance.

Braverman’s analysis foreshadowed present-day struggles over work in the automation frontier, including connective labor. The artisanal skills workers possess, in this case the ability to connect, to see others, and to make them feel seen, are systematically destroyed and denied in this process. Capital uses lean production, time and motion studies, and software and apps to cultivate the capacities and knowledge that correspond to its needs and to deny those that do not. “The labor process is to be rendered independent of craft, tradition, and the workers’ knowledge,” he said. “Henceforth it is to depend not at all upon the abilities of workers, but entirely upon the practices of management.”

There are definite limits to the “displacement of labor as the subjective element of the process,” and the automatic factory remains mostly a fantasy. Workers have fought back through sabotage, quitting, soldiering, and, of course, organizing. Labor unions have been a primary agent in the fight to preserve the skill and dignity of human work. Nonetheless the drive to control the labor process is unstoppable. Every new job, every new skill, is subject to it. Braverman was so elegant and compelling in his articulation of this essential point that it’s worth quoting at length:

The transformation of working humanity into a “labor force,” a “factor of production,” an instrument of capital, is an incessant and unending process. The condition is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work; and since the workers are not destroyed as human beings but are simply utilized in inhuman ways, their critical, intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter how deadened or diminished, always remain in some degree a threat to capital. Moreover, the capitalist mode of production is continually extended to new areas of work, including those freshly created by technological advances and the shift of capital to new industries. It is, in addition, continually being refined and perfected, so that its pressure upon the workers is unceasing. At the same time, the habituation of workers to the capitalist mode of production must be renewed with each generation, all the more so as the generations which grow up under capitalism are not formed within the matrix of work life, but are plunged into work from the outside, so to speak, after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in reserve. The necessity for adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form, for overcoming natural resistance intensified by swiftly changing technology, antagonistic social relations, and the succession of the generations, does not therefore end with the “scientific organization of labor,” but becomes a permanent feature of capitalist society.

The industrial logic that Pugh impugns might then more fruitfully be thought of as a capitalist logic that overwrites all waged labor in ceaselessly expanding cycles of degradation. As her title suggests, Pugh may consider connective labor as one of the last domains of work in which the humanity of the worker is essential, unlike for the autoworker, warehouse worker, truck driver, or farmer whose work and skills were degraded long ago. We could expound upon the complex and essential skills that do remain, even in degraded work, but it’s more useful to conclude with a consideration of Pugh’s suggestions for how to protect connective labor and what Braverman’s analysis of the labor process in capitalist society might offer in this regard. Pugh argues that in order to protect connective labor we need new norms and values and better institutions, in particular organizations that offer a “relational design, connective culture, and resource distribution” that fosters connective labor for the good of both workers and clients as well as society.

Pugh’s discussion focuses heavily on the first two components: relational design (leadership, mentoring, peer groups) and connective culture (values, practices, rituals that bind individuals). One example offered of an organization that exhibits these components is a private boys’ school on the West Coast. Pugh shadowed the principal and founder, Bert Juster, whose philosophy emphasizes developing relationships between teachers and students through intentional practices such as “restorative justice circles” and policies that “systematize” love and joy. Bert incorporated “explicit conversation about love into the admissions process, so that families knew from the start that the school made it a priority, which ‘weeds out the families who are not right for us.’” Another example is a small California health care practice that provides poor, at-risk patients with personalized care and attention that they would never receive in a traditional health care setting. Patients have access to physicians, nurses, social workers, and “a cadre of former medical assistants who were the ‘care transformers,’” advocating for patients in their health care journey. The medical assistants liked the model so much that they asked to switch to a salary system so they could work weekends.

These examples are offered as prefigurative instances of how connective labor can flourish in the right environment, to the benefit of all parties. Pugh admits that these sites of success “stem from places of great privilege” but insists that they model a social architecture that could be scaled up with both public support and Pugh’s third component, an equitable “distribution of material resources” that would help protect connective workers from being overworked, underpaid, and, increasingly, controlled by an algorithm.

Braverman is useful here, because central to Pugh’s story is the question of control over the labor process: doctors who don’t have control over how long they can talk to their patients, teachers who don’t have control over their pedagogy or the curriculum they teach, therapists who are forced to use checklists to assess how their patients are feeling, chaplains who must chart in triplicate when they’d rather be helping folks survive emotionally shattering experiences. Pugh’s positive examples involve instances in which workers (or at least some of them) have regained control over the labor process. In the case of the private boys’ school, control was achieved by a principal, benevolent though he may be, founding his own school where he is the boss. In the clinic, doctors, social workers, and medical assistants took control by carving out a space in which they design and implement patient care according to their own skills and knowledge.

If we are interested in a social movement to protect connective labor, we must consider the act of taking control of the labor process very seriously. Pugh’s account is a friendly one. The degraders are mostly systemic forces, or algorithms, or faceless administrators who we don’t meet. There is no call for confronting the boss and little discussion about how workers performing connective labor might, individually or collectively, claw back humanity at work. Pugh’s school principal and doctors were able to grab the reins, but the workers who perform the bulk of connective labor as Pugh defines it — nurses, teachers, home health aides, childcare workers — will not be handed control over the labor process, at least not on a meaningful scale. For them to get control, they must take it.

Thankfully teachers and nurses and home health aides have been vigorously doing exactly this all over the country. Indeed, connective workers, particularly women, are at the forefront, organizing in some of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy. These movements and struggles are not part of Pugh’s ethnography. But they should be. Nurses cannot adequately perform connective labor if they have too many patients to care for. Teachers cannot “see” their students, or be seen by them, if they have too many children in their classroom or are forced to spend whole chunks of the year preparing for punitive standardized tests. The organizations that these workers are building are not just fighting for higher wages and better benefits; they are struggling for power at the point of production — power necessary both for protecting workers’ humanity and artisanal skills and for building a stronger social fabric in which the workers who perform essential connective labor are seen and valued.

A collective bargaining agreement is a crude instrument to be sure. Teachers and nurses would likely be the first to acknowledge the limits of collective bargaining for protecting the humanity and skills of connective workers or for creating a positive space in which workers can practice these skills. Moreover, as the automation frontier is fleshed out, unions are scarcely better equipped than they were a century ago to prevent or control capital’s use of automation and technology to degrade work. Nonetheless, building and enshrining collective power is essential. No social movement to protect connective labor will succeed without giving workers the power to shape the labor process and, in doing so, demand recognition of their humanity.

Building a “collective system dedicated to protecting the social well-being of a population,” as Pugh rightfully calls for, requires more than control over the labor process however. Connective labor is resource-intensive, and, as such, the equitable distribution of resources necessary to foster it is an equally important consideration. In her conclusion, Pugh advocates a “marketplace of care” that aligns the interests of consumers and providers through “state involvement in benefits, training, regulation, and subsidies.”

This is true as far as it goes, but if we are serious about avoiding a future of concierge care for the wealthy and chatbots for the poor, we must make explicit both the structures of power underlying our marketplace of care and the state involvement needed to produce a genuine alignment between consumers and providers. The marketplace of care in America — in health care, education, and childcare — is fundamentally unfair, profoundly shaped and constrained by the priorities of corporations, from health care giants to insurance companies to asset-management firms to Big Tech. A social movement to protect connective labor must utilize the levers of state power not only to enshrine the collective gains made by connective workers. It must also put an end to the austerity culture that starves our public institutions and demand the policies, programs, and funding necessary to decommodify the provision of care. As Pugh demonstrates so clearly, the stakes are too high for anything less.