A Labor Day post from a strategic futurist and women’s career coach
In 1886, workers marched through Chicago carrying a demand so simple it barely registers now: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.
The demand was about time. But underneath it was a deeper claim: that a worker’s body, attention, and life were not raw material to be extracted at the employer’s discretion. That there was a boundary between what belonged to the worker and what belonged to the boss. That crossing it without consent was theft.
One hundred and forty years later, that boundary has gotten blurry again. Not around time, around something harder to measure and easier to extract.
I’ve spent the last month developing a framework I’m calling the Performance Tax. It names something I see in my coaching clients every week but couldn’t find articulated anywhere: the cognitive, emotional, and temporal toll of appearing productive under conditions of at-scale surveillance. Not the work itself. The labor of proving the work is real.
And it is labor. Unpaid, unacknowledged, uncounted. The tax is falling hardest on women, who were already carrying invisible labor at home and emotional labor at work before anyone added a surveillance dashboard to the mix.
This Labor Day seems like the right moment to name it.
The Second Job Nobody Hired You For
Here’s what the Performance Tax looks like from the inside.
You spend your morning building a slide deck for a meeting where no decisions will be made. You write a status update that makes incremental progress read like a breakthrough. You keep a dashboard green that measures whether everyone is active, not whether anyone is effective. You perform enthusiasm for a project you privately believe is going nowhere. You attend a meeting whose real function is to prove the meeting was necessary.
By Friday, you have done real work. You have also done a second kind of work: labor whose purpose was not to produce anything but to produce the appearance of production.
That second job has no job description, no compensation line, and no off switch. And for women carrying good girl conditioning (the trained reflex to be agreeable, to never seem difficult, to perform alignment whether or not you feel it) the tax compounds. You’re not just documenting your work. You’re managing how everyone in the room experiences you while you do it.
The performance isn’t a side effect of modern work. It’s becoming the work.
And the existential experience of paying this tax while receiving endless incoming work slop from colleagues that are doing the exact same thing? An overload of cognitive dissonance and existential dread.
A Language the Workers Built
The strongest evidence for the Performance Tax isn’t in any academic paper. It’s in the vocabulary workers have been inventing since roughly 2022 to describe fragments of the same experience:
- Productivity theater. Appearing busy without producing.
- Mouse jiggling. Mechanically faking screen activity.
- Coffee badging. Showing face to satisfy a return-to-office mandate, then leaving.
- Quiet quitting. Doing the contractual minimum because the system has demonstrated that going above is a sucker’s game.
- Resenteeism. Staying while resentful and trapped.
- Presenteeism. Being physically or digitally present but mentally vacant and disengaged.
- Bossware. Surveillance apps that your leadership can use to track your keyboard movements, look through your laptop camera, and start to auto-document your workflows.
- Bore out. Pointless work experienced as such, lack of challenge at work.
- AI Slop and Workslop. AI-generated work product that has no value and creates more work for the recipient.
These terms weren’t coined by scholars or HR departments. They came from workers on TikTok, Reddit, and Twitter, naming their experience in the only language available. Each term captures a piece of a larger phenomenon. But none of them names the underlying logic.
That logic is this: when the tools designed to capture contribution capture only a performable version of contribution, workers adapt. They perform. And the performance itself becomes a second form of work, hollow work, that produces nothing except evidence that deliverables matter more than whether something coherent was delivered.
What AI Changes (Because It Changes Everything)
AI is not neutral in this dynamic. It’s an accelerant.
AI as amplifier of the tax: AI can now generate meta-work at near-zero cost. The status update that took forty-five minutes to craft takes a prompt and twenty seconds to generate. Powerpoints containing synthesized “concepts of a plan” are spun up in an instant. This makes the Performance Tax cheaper to pay, and more transparently absurd. Everyone knows the artifact is AI-generated. The theater persists, but belief in it erodes. We’re not less performative. We’re more efficiently performative, which is a different and stranger thing.
AI as escape hatch: The same AI can also be deployed to reduce the tax: automating the documentation so humans can return to the work, surfacing collective work states (“what is blocked, what needs attention”) rather than individual activity (“who is typing, who is online, who is fast”).
The question Labor Day asks is: who decides?
Right now, AI deployment in workplaces is being decided almost entirely without worker input. Surveillance tools are adopted faster than governance structures. Monitoring rolls out before consent is established. The people whose work is being tracked, performed, and hollowed out are not in the room where the decision is made about whether AI watches them or serves them.
That is not a technology problem. That’s a power problem. And power problems are what Labor Day was built to name.
What the 1886 Marchers Would Recognize
The specific demand in 1886 was the eight-hour day. But the deeper demand was for the worker to be treated as a person with a life, not a resource to be consumed. In 1930, one of the world’s pre-eminent economists, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that by 2030 workers would only be working 15 hours per week. We don’t seem any closer to that
The Performance Tax is the 2026 version of the same extraction. It’s not just your time being taken. It’s your attention. Your authenticity. Your cognitive bandwidth. Your ability to know what you actually feel, underneath the performance of feeling the right things.
And for women, the tax has a gender surcharge.
- thespianized consent – performing belief you don’t hold, performing enthusiasm you don’t feel, performing alignment because performing dissent feels more dangerous -> maps directly onto good girl conditioning.
- the meta-work burden – documenting, reporting, proving-> maps onto the invisible labor women already carry disproportionately, at home and at work.
- the invisibility practices – doing real work quietly while staying below the radar. These are the survival strategies of people who have learned that being seen too clearly is unsafe.
The Performance Tax is not evenly distributed. It’s a regressive tax, and women pay the highest rate.
The Bargain We’re Being Asked to Accept
There’s a phrase that keeps coming up in the research I’ve been doing: surveillance replaces trust. Organizations that don’t trust their workers to work install monitoring tools [Meta] to verify that they are (or to train AI). The monitoring tools produce data about activity, not contribution. The data erodes trust further because everyone knows the metrics don’t capture what actually matters.
The worker’s experience of this cycle is burnout. The system’s experience is “need for more data.” Both interpretations are internally consistent and completely unable to see each other. The loop runs until something breaks: the worker, the team, the trust, or the organization.
This is the bargain: accept that your work will be tracked, performed, and hollowed out, or leave. The same bargain the 1886 marchers were offered: accept that your time belongs to whoever pays for it, or starve.
They didn’t accept it. They organized.
What Would Visibility Without Surveillance Look Like?
The Performance Tax is not just the new status quo in our organizations. It is a set of choices, embedded in tools and processes and cultural defaults, that can be questioned and remade.
Surveillance asks: Are they working? Visibility asks: What is happening, and do we need to adjust?
Surveillance tracks individual activity. Visibility surfaces collective work states.
Surveillance replaces trust with monitoring. Visibility enables trust through transparency.
Surveillance deploys AI to watch workers. Visibility deploys AI to show work.
These are not theoretical distinctions. Worker owned cooperatives, self governing teams, and consent based governance structures already operate on visibility principles, and their outcomes are as good or better than their hierarchical counterparts, with dramatically lower turnover and higher resilience in crisis. The evidence exists. The question is whether the organizations with the power to adopt it will choose differently, and whether the people inside those organizations will demand it.
What Can We Do?
If you are a leader, shift one metric from individual tracking to team level visibility. Replace “who is underperforming?” with “what needs attention?” Design your check ins around what is blocked, what is moving, and what support is needed, rather than documentation of effort. Model not knowing. Model asking for help. Model being a person before you model being a performer. The fastest way to reduce the Performance Tax on your team is to stop collecting it.
If you are a contributor, begin the quiet work of redirecting your energy from the performance to the contribution. Use AI to automate the meta work, not to generate more of it. When you write a status update, make it about what needs attention rather than what you did this week. When you sit in a meeting, ask one real question instead of performing one safe one. When someone asks how you are, give a slightly more honest answer than the reflex. These are small acts. They are also the beginning of a different relationship to work, one that does not require you to perform your existence for approval. (Learn more in my what’s next for AI advice post for women.)
The Performance Tax is structural. But structures are made of repeated actions. Each time someone refuses to perform and instead contributes, the structure shifts. The 1886 marchers did not win the eight hour day in a single season. They won it by insisting, over years, that the conditions of work were choices, not laws of nature, and that workers deserved a say in how those choices were made.
This Labor Day
The 1886 marchers looked at what was and insisted that what could be was something different. Something better. They didn’t have productivity data or wellness research. They had a belief, radical for its time and obvious now, that a person’s life belongs to them.
We are at a similar inflection point. AI is reshaping work at a speed that makes the Industrial Revolution look leisurely. Our ways of living and working will undergo dramatic change. But these changes are not completely external. We can have an impact and help shape how we transform.
The leading economist in 1930 thought we would be working 15 hours or less per week by now. The futurists of 1950 assumed the trajectory of shared prosperity they witnessed would continue indefinitely. They were wrong, not about technology, but about power. They assumed the gains were permanent. They weren’t. They were the result of organized workers demanding a different bargain, and when the organizing stopped, the gains eroded.
This Labor Day, the most radical thing you can do is name the Performance Tax in your own workplace. Call it what it is. Ask your team what percentage of their week goes to performing productivity rather than producing it. Ask yourself the same question. Refuse to let “that’s just how it is” stand in for an honest accounting of what this work actually costs.
None of us want to engage in hollow work. We need to be willing to talk about it to change it to substantive work that matters.
Mandy Steinhardt is a women’s career coach, strategic futurist, and keynote speaker who helps women and forward-looking organizations make sense of change, translate emerging trends into opportunity, and build careers, strategies, and futures that are both resilient and deeply aligned.
