Reviewing Olga Ravn's The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (September 2023)

Originally written in 2018 (in Danish), The Employees was first translated for an English-speaking audience in 2020. It is science fiction. It is very short—about 140 pages. Ravn credits Ursula Le Guin for the unorthodox presentation—a series of statements collected from employees during a very strange, but not too difficult to imagine, performance appraisal set in a high-tech world of spaceflight and human-humanoid worker coopetition. 'Not too difficult to imagine' because we, have no inconsiderable experience with corporate performance management. With what in the economist language of human resources is essentially asset management, where the asset is human capital—all those skills and all that knowledge that give us workplace value, regardless whether it's as a frontline service worker or a back office analyst, blue collar or white collar, a permanent employee or a gig worker.

While the book is a short read, it is not necessarily a quick read. It is quite abstract much like the art inspired it. Yet it is because of this abstract quality that the text is open for the reader to interpret in terms of their lived life. Ravn credits Lea Guldditte Hestelund for the installations and sculptures "without which this book would not exist." Photographs of artifacts from Hestelund's work shown at the 2108 Copenhagen exhibition, 'Consumed Future Spewed up as Present,' to which Ravn refers, are available online. See https://artviewer.org/lea-guldditte-hestelund-at-overgaden.

While the abstract art of sculpture, painting and writing are not for everyone—it is not my preference or area of expertise, and this was, for me, a somewhat difficult read—the novel 'feels' very real and authentic. Part of what makes the novel a not-so-easy-to-read story is that it requires active participation from the reader to instantiate the abstractions. Unlike the political economy texts I have reviewed, the language and imagery in this fiction describes sensory perceptions and affects with the intention of eliciting more than just an intellectual response. The performance appraisal is a familiar process, and it is generally understood to be essentially an economic assessment (for wage/salary adjustments and promotions). However, it is also recognized that it misses a great part of who we were as human beings, and this is something that the novel taps into.

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In the Foreword, we have this concise synopsis of the book prepared by the 'committee:'

The following statements were collected over a period of 18 months, during which time the committee interviewed the employees with a view to gaining insight into how they related to the objects and the rooms in which they were placed. It was our wish by means of these unprejudiced recordings to gain knowledge of local work-flows and to investigate possible impacts of the objects, as well as the ways those impacts, or perhaps relationships, might give rise to permanent deviations in the individual employee, and moreover to assess to what degree they might be said to precipitate reduction or enhancement of performance, task-related understanding and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, thereby illuminating their specific consequences for production.

This is corporate speak that could be expected from the Harvard Business Review, and it contrasts sharply with the style of the employee statements. The employees are not identified other than by number (e.g., Cadet 04, a humanoid, and Cadet 08, a human), but it is not always obvious which employees are human and which are synthetic. There are also large gaps in the 'committee's' human resources dossier and this suggests that some of the employment statements are missing ... for reasons unexplained.

We know very little about the 'committee.' We don't even know its formal title or the name and nature of the organization that it represents. The Foreword and the eight italicized paragraphs at the end of the final statement, Statement 179, are the only direct communications from the 'committee.' What we do know about this mysterious board is that it is responsible for directing employee work and production (of what, we don't know) and that it has the ultimate authority over the lives (existence) of all employees—human and humanoid. We also know from the 'committee' report at the novel's conclusion that:

[T]he committee itself was composed of bio-material, though with a down-loadable interface, and therefore capable of being regenerated—in other words humanoid rather than human as the crew had been informed (the decision that the committee should appear to be human was taken on the basis of research showing that human and humanoid employees alike have a tendency to react more positively to the organisation’s human representatives).

The committee was tasked with studying human and humanoid interactions with one another and with the various space objects ('foreign' or 'alien' objects that are not understood but are thought possibly to be a form of existence if not life) that have been collected as artifacts from New Discovery, a hitherto unexplored planet. The reason for the study is to determine whether these interactions have been conducive to greater or lesser productivity. Again, the nature of the work remains vague and undefined.

What we read in the employee statements encompasses the personal reflections and often very private thoughts of the employees—human and humanoid. For example, in Statement 10, a human employee questions their (sing.) own category (human or humanoid): "I don’t know if I’m human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?"

And then in Statement 018, a humanoid employee imagines evolving into a human entity—something more than just a replica—and to join the community of humanity:

The dreams are something you’ve given me so that I’ll always feel longing and never say, never think a harsh word about you, my gods. All I want is to be assimilated into a collective, human community where someone plaits my hair with flowers and white curtains sway in a warm breeze; where every morning I wake up and drink a chilled glass of iced tea, drive a car across a continent, kick the dirt, fill my nostrils with the air of the desert and move in with someone, get married, bake cookies, push a pram, learn to play an instrument, dance a waltz.

And then in Statement 019, another humanoid (presumably a different one) asserts boldly in apparent defiance of the 'committee:'

You made me, you gave me language, and now I see your failings and deficiencies. I see your inadequate plans.

Yet another humanoid, in Statement 022, proclaims the desire to be equal with humans, in effect, promoted:

I need to train my cognitive flexibility if I’m to be in the crew on an equal footing with those who were born. Is this a human problem? If so, I’d like to keep it.

In Statement 030, we're not quite sure of the category of the speaker who says: "It’s hard for me to understand that the objects in the rooms haven’t got feelings, even though you’ve told me this is the case." But whether it is carbon- or silicon-based, this employee appears to have the capacity for empathy.

There is an incommensurability between the human and humanoid employees, which far exceeds the cultural incompatibilities among humans along gender, racial, religious or class lines. This can lead to antagonism but it does not imply hostility. But there remains a fundamental difference between the two categories as characterized by a humanoid in the following extended quote from Statement 031:

I’ve never not been employed. I was made for work. I never had a childhood either, though I’ve tried to imagine one. My human coworker sometimes talks about not wanting to work, and then he’ll say something quite odd and rather silly. What is it he says, now? There’s more to a person than the work they do, or A person is more than just their work? Something like that. But what else could a person be? Where would your food come from? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your coworkers? Would you be left standing in a cupboard? I like him, this human coworker of mine, his interface is impressive. I’m stronger than him, and have more endurance, but sometimes he’ll get an idea that means we can do our job in less than the designated time. He’s got an incredible knack for streamlining, from which I gladly learn. I’ve become a lot better myself at seeing how a workflow can be adjusted so that the task at hand can be completed more efficiently. This has surprised me rather a lot, because I’ve never known such improvements in my performance without an update being involved. Whenever we save time, I’m ready to move on to the next task straight away, but my coworker always says, Now let’s sit for a bit. I’m not sure what he means by this, but I sit down with him all the same, sensing that I might offend him otherwise and jeopardise our excellent working relationship. Perhaps it’s an old custom from before my time? It’s not possible for me to continue our work on my own, so I hope you’ll be kind enough to overlook the matter, and anyway it’s only about 15 minutes a day at the most that we sit for a bit. He tells me about the bridge and the woods near his childhood home, about the stream that flowed under the bridge, how they used to swim there, and a lot of other things from the place he calls Earth. He’s shown me a stream that runs down in the valley. Obviously I can’t leave the ship, but he’s pointed it out to me from the panorama room. The stream glitters, and it runs like a silvery thought through the landscape. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was warm. A human hand. He said: ‘You’ve lots to learn, my boy.’ An odd thing to say, seeing as how I was made a man from the start.

And so it goes through the various employee statements that are taken and evaluated by the 'committee' on board the Six-Thousand Ship as it orbits the newly-discovered planet, far from Homebase. On board the ship are alliances—of varying degrees of reliability and stability—that create the kind of unpredictability one could encounter in an ordinary terrestrial workplace. It is the sci-fi element of the transhuman and the conflict between humans and humanoids that adds a whole different level of complexity to the relations among crew members. And these complicated relations among employees is further heightened by the relations between crew members and the alien artifacts which are too poorly understood to be definitively classified. As one human employee puts it in Statement 046, "It’s a dangerous thing for an organisation not to be sure which of the objects in its custody may be considered to be living."

At a simplistic level, there is obviously the labour versus management dynamic looming large in the galactic background. And in the context of a diverse workforce that now includes humanoids, there are the expected differences. Among both humans and humanoids, there are those who would collaborate, there are dissenters, and there are those who even contemplate changing their category. In Statement 047, we have a human who longs to be an object:

Everything has to travel so far to come into existence. I thought these rooms would be a safe place for me. I wasn’t well on Earth. I didn’t like living in such close proximity to so many people. Notice the old hides on the benches, we’re the only ones who’ve got that kind. The animals they’re from are extinct now. Every time I try to make a safe place for myself somewhere, I find death to be there.... [I]n secret I go up to the objects in the rooms, the materials in the rooms, I lie down close beside them, put my arms around them, put my cheek to the orange floor, the pink, gleaming marble. I’d like to be one of them, less lonely, less human.

Fundamental to Ravn's story is the question, 'What does it mean to be human?' in a universe where line between humans and humanoids blurs and where a truly incomprehensible alien entity is first-contacted. Indeed, there are humanoids who want to become human and humans who want addons to enhance their existence. And there are humanoids who appear more humane than some of the humans, and of course, humans whose lives appear to be programmed. There are even crew members who imagine themselves being one of the alien objects.

Without disclosing the ending, it is worth mentioning that all of the statements by the ship's crew build to a climax at which point much is disclosed about the mission, including the determination that it could be "deemed a success when taking into account that the collected empirical data has proved to be highly valuable." Some part(s) of the ending may or may not have been anticipated. One thing is for certain. This is not a utopian future that Ravn has presented. It is thoroughgoing dystopian science fiction.

Despite the fundamentally disturbing nature of the story, what I find encouraging in it, and in dystopian sci-fi in general, is that while it portrays a future that could be, it does not end in resignation but hints that the future could be otherwise.