Change the course

“BUT IT’S SUCH a privilege to even think about this. I should accept that what I have is better than what most other people can ever hope for.” This is a common refrain among people considering big changes in their work, while fascism, climate change, and genocide rage around them. And it’s often true that their waged work is not the place that is really calling for their attention—that it’s work in their communities and neighborhoods that needs more from them, however they can manage to give it. But I want to humbly suggest that this category of statement is one of the ways that the fear of change shows up. It’s a natural response to uncertainty and precarity, to the inability to ever really know what might happen on the other side of a choice. But acknowledging fear does not mean heeding its counsel.

More importantly, privilege is a resource to be used not tossed away. It’s worth too much to discard.

Let’s talk through an example: a senior manager at a tech company is frustrated by changes happening above her. There’s the coercive RTO plan that she knows is going to cause attrition when she can least afford it; there’s the simultaneous hiring freeze that’s left key teams under-resourced, while her own demands to reduce the workload have been rebuffed. There’s the new director who keeps referring to the support engineers as “girls”; the CTO who proudly returned to work after one week of parental leave; the company-wide edict to find new ways to stuff so-called AI into every corner of the product, user needs be damned.

“But the pay is good and I need the flex time,” she says. “And I prefer to work in the office, and this gig is still better than a lot of other things out there. I should just suck it up, right?” That’s fear talking, and it’s both real and justified: even those of us with solid paychecks and a lot of privilege know full well that things could change for the worse with little warning. But the thing about fear is that while it needs you to listen to it—ignoring it only makes it louder—the last thing you want to do is obey its orders. You are not fear’s soldier; fear is your prediction. And a prediction isn’t a tool for divination so much as it is an opportunity to change the course.

And there is so much that we can do to change that course! None of the privileges that too few of us enjoy were won by people who merely did what they were told. They were fought over in big and small ways, in thousands of tiny resistances, by people who saw what was happening and refused to help it along.

Our intrepid manager may not be able to cure her executives of brain worms, but neither must she be a willing accomplice to their foolery. She can tell the new director that his language about the support engineers is demeaning and that she won’t stand for it in her hearing. She can tell her team that she expects everyone to take their full parental leave, and reiterate that she doesn’t care where the work happens so long as it gets done. She can work with her senior engineers to come up with a realistic plan for which services they can continue to support and which ones need to be put into maintenance mode until the hiring freeze is over. She can work with her peers to document and socialize the risks of the new and totally unwanted features. She can use that flex time to make space to volunteer with a group supporting LGBTQ+ kids, or contribute her technical expertise to the local abortion fund. She can reach out to folks in her network, ask how they are doing, and share her own stories in the spirit of both validation and cooperation. She can stay in touch with anyone who quits in frustration, offering to be a support to them if they need it—knowing full well that she may need their support, one day, in turn.

Because the thing about privilege is that spending it doesn’t deplete it—hoarding it does. If you are unwilling to use your privilege, to push back against the unending pressures of exploitation and abuse, then it ceases to be useful. It becomes a prison instead of a tool, a cage instead of a sword. But if you use it, you can build bridges and escape routes, you can find friends and comrades, you can hold some space against those who would prefer to see you cowering and afraid, unable to wield the power that is ever in your hands. More importantly, you can come to see how much capacity you have for adapting and surviving even in challenging circumstances, for putting a wrench in a system that’s trying so hard to squash you down. You will recognize how that capacity is enlarged and renewed when you exercise it with others, when instead of giving up you reach out and realize what you can do together—remembering that nearly every right we have as workers was won by people just like you. And that, in and of itself, is real privilege. Use it well.