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A Genealogy of Refusal : Walking away from crisis and scarcity narratives

Unions 101: What Library Unions do - and don't do - for workers

Library unions are as diverse as libraries themselves. The landscape is complex, but this overview looks at the commonalities all library workers should know.

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Manifest NO 68 Becoming fluent in hearing and saying No image_header 2021-09-14T13:20:53-07:00
Learning to say "No" starts with us. Practicing how to Say No! More has been gamified in a lighthearted way that has captured the attention of thousands of fans as well as more than a few reviews where gamers confess how "good it feels to play the game" because saying "No" at work can be such a fraught situation (Fizbin 2021).
The below flowchart, created by Shira Peltzman, is another lighthearted but useful tool that streamlines what to do when another project gets added to your pile--but using this flowchart requires being pretty honest with yourself, your capacity, and your joy in a project.

Is an hour spent at work better than an hour spent doing something you love? How can we say NO to projects or tasks, so that we can say YES to things we love? And, even if a project meets all of those requirements, does a not-NO automatically mean a YES? (Peltzman does not end the flowchart with "accept the project," but "consider it." In other words, these are the absolute minimum requirements a project needs to meet, but even that does not mean you should automatically commit to every project that makes it through the chart.)

In learning to say NO, deciding to decline is not always enough, If we're saying "NO" at work we will eventually need to challenge those who supervise us. If a boss pressures us to commit to a new project, stay late to complete a project, and/or maintain a rapid pace of service completion, but with fewer resources, we will need to find practical and effective ways to refuse. Outright saying "No" may sometimes be impossible, but we can remind ourselves to pause and reframe the conversation. We can utilize phrases like:
- I can take on this new work, but I will need your help prioritizing my other responsibilities and redistributing the tasks that I'll no longer be able to complete.
- I can complete this project early with your commitment that I'll be given these [new] resources.
- I can help with this if I have the support and efforts of collaborators X, Y, and/or Z.
All this sounds easy enough when it's put forward like we have above, but Sarah Ahmed reminds us that "You might be free to say no but your no is heard as destructive; hearings have consequences (becoming a killjoy is a consequence)... And then no becomes judged not only as how you stop others from doing something, but how you stop yourself from being something. They might not stop you from saying no but they make it costly for you to say no" (Ahmed 2017).

She cautions that "You need more than a right to say no for no to be effective." She warns that "If your position is precarious you might not be able to afford no. You might say yes if you cannot afford to say no, which means you can say yes whilst disagreeing with something." She implores us that "This is why the less precarious might have a political obligation to say no on behalf of or alongside those who are more precarious" (Ahmed 2017).

Sometimes you say "No!" but your boss can't hear it - that situation is so common the Say No! More videogame has a scenario about it:

That's why we created a genealogy of workplace refusal. By talking about such things, by learning together how to read the story of refusal, we can have a common narrative. We can develop a common acceptance of the language of "No" that allows us to examine dead-ends and the false turns workplace responses to crisis narratives can take. Donna Lanclos urges that in higher education, we should be refusing "quantification, employability narratives, tracking and surveillance, technocentrism, [and the] 'More with Less'" ethos (2019). Looking to the art of dance, Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto, from Trio A gives us a strong example of how to declare opposition to the dominant forms of our field (Rainer 1965):

Informing ourselves through the kinship diagram in this project, we can recognize false deficits, constructed crises, and other attempts to consolidate power by those in charge. We can see how to say no as a collective, refuse harmful data practices (like in the Feminist Data Manifest-NO), and organize ourselves for collective protest, unionize or strike. We can write and think and negotiate other ways forward that are informed by fictional, feminist, anti-racist, pro-labour, and abundant points of view.