Multiple Careers: Towards a Post-Work Way of Life

ABSTRACT

This article examines the capacity of college-educated young people who pursue in several careers – “slash workers” – to act independently and to make their own choices about their work and life in capitalist Hong Kong. Numerous studies have assumed an unproblematic link between precarious employment and the exploitation of young people’s labour. This article offers an alternative understanding of this link from the autonomist Marxist perspective of “refusal of work” and the “getting a life” project. While the literature on freelancing has illuminated workers’ potential to maintain a work/life balance, the novel phenomenon of slash work in Hong Kong adds to our understanding of freedom from labour. By having more than one career, slash workers: (i) blur the boundaries of paid work, volunteer work, and personal interests; (ii) anchor work around self, instead of self around work; and (iii) embrace breadth, instead of vertical mobility in their career trajectory. This post-work approach to work and life allows workers to be rule-setters, which inadvertently results in creativity in work.

KEY WORDS:

• Multiple careers
• multipotentialities
• precarity
• “refusal of work
• ” subjectivity
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editor and anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Solee Shin, Seo Young Park, Eileen Otis, and Stephen Chiu for helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The term “slash career” first appeared in Alboher’s (2007) book, One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success. It suggests the emergence of a new model of work for people who have multiple vocations to engage in a multitude of professional areas. They are people with “personalized careers that can only be described with the use of slashes” (Alboher 2007: xiv).

² The government report defined people as “voluntarily taking up part-time jobs” when employees work under 35 hours and are not available to work for longer hours for reasons other than unemployment or underemployment.

³ The summary statistics have excluded three respondents who had a high diploma, which is different from a bachelor degree. Their income ranged from US$839 to $1,935. This amount is lower than the territory-wide median monthly income of full-time employees with non-degree post-secondary education in Hong Kong (around US$2,355).

⁴ Given the uniqueness of this job and its combination, this respondent could be easily identified if additional details are provided.