Collective Refusal (Odell)

In 1938, the United States Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing the forty-hour workweek. The law did not emerge from a national conversation about the optimal distribution of work and leisure. It emerged from decades of labor struggle — strikes, organizing, the accumulated political pressure of millions of workers who had individually discovered that individual resistance to exploitative working conditions was structurally futile. Odell extends this historical analysis to the attention economy and, more acutely, to the AI-mediated productivity culture. The builder who maintains boundaries in a competitive landscape where others do not is making a choice the market punishes. The punishment operates through the same mechanism that punished the pre-union worker: the person who refuses the terms is outperformed by the person who accepts them. Only a collective refusal, backed by the threat of withdrawn labor at scale, can shift the equilibrium. The 2023 Hollywood writers' strike is Odell's exemplary case.