Thinking About Simone Weil

Intro

In early 1930s France, a philosopher named Simone Weil was thinking and writing about the conditions of factory workers. Having taken a year off from teaching philosophy, she spent that time working at two different factories [1]. She was trying to avoid the trap of pronouncing upon something without ever having done it in any real way - a fate that continues to plague many, from academics to senior leadership teams in contemporary times. That’s one of the reasons I find Weil’s work so interesting - it reads as though written in response to the push for AI use and unending automation in today’s workplaces. Each time I read more of her work, I can’t believe she remains so ‘niche’. But then I remember… she’s a woman. And the public consciousness related to ‘workers’ and ‘revolution’ is occupied by Marx... so tough luck, lady.

Well. I think we have room for more. Besides, who are we to argue with Camus ?

The Docile Worker

Be it slaves or serfs, front lines or factory lines, there exists a need for compliance to make sure that sufficient work gets done in good time. When Federick Taylor was wandering around the shop floor in the 1880s, stopwatch in hand, he was shaping an organisation of labour to render humans more machine-like; i.e., logical, predictable, measurable, standardised, scalable, etc. You know, ways to make inefficient human bodies more efficient. The prioritisation of mechanised movements is a familiar theme that we still haven’t managed to escape in contemporary work design. With the increasing use of AI tools at work, we can see a steady “replacement of active decision-making with statistics-driven passive decision-making” [2] as employers demand doing more with less. This approach to productivity before people is something that has also stood the test of time, and will continue to do so.

You will encounter arguments, mostly from tech industry leads, that AI answers are a new and exciting way to relieve us of our drudgery so that we may engage in our creative, artistic, and intellectual pursuits. I don’t wish to be the bearer of bad news, but this hasn’t happened at any other point in work history as promised. In the same way that Scientific Management was supposedly good for factory workers (as it would leave them less exhausted, you see), or that any number of household appliances was going to hand women their freedom, or that Blackberrys would give us time we wouldn't know what to do with! Well, you’ll forgive me if I reserve the champagne in the face of the current AI promises.

As Simone Weil noted in her journal and essays during her time working in the factories, the idea of freedom, revolt, or even adequate rest quickly dissapated once you actually worked there. Rather than being the perfect place for collective pursuit of emancipation, she found instead that tasks left workers feeling isolated and individualized. This was much more likely to result in them turning on each other than anything else [3]. I see reflections of the same misguided assumptions in the current discourse on automation. The promise is always that it will relieve drudgery, but the reality is that being more machine-like leads to exhaustion. It remains ridiculous to expect a workers’ revolution when isolation and individualisation are still key features of many jobs and industries today. Instead of new technologies allowing everyone to work less and enjoy all this newfound time by being creative, employees consistently suffer from boundary-less work that negatively impacts their informal interaction and cohesion with colleagues. In some studies, increased use of tech to support teams resulted in more dehumanized exchanges and had a deleterious effect on individual well-being and on the social fabric of the organisation [4]. If you need more specific examples, pull up the last email that began with ‘as per’ and had a time stamp somewhere around 23:37.

This works out well for Senior Management. Tired humans are docile humans. It’s hard to push back when your time and energy are zapped with tasks that are some blend of meaningless, disconnected, and endless.

The Disconnected Worker

In Organisational Studies, much ink has been spilled on something called Self-determination theory (SDT). Without getting too far into the weeds, the theory suggests that humans possess autonomous motivation and that it is nurtured by way of satisfying three basic (and universal) psychological needs: competence (mastery); autonomy (volition); relatedness (connected) [5, 6]. What that looks like in a work environment usually involves quite a bit of humanness. What I mean by that is, the kinds of things that rely upon people doing things well together that involve activities like learning, mentoring, problem-solving, and so on. It also shows up in spaces where there is an obvious and overt understanding of purpose for the tasks one is consistently engaged in, and the ultimate outcome of the company.

How about a personal example? I used to work as an English language teacher many moons ago. I knew exactly how my tasks were connected to the organisation’s outcomes. Even tasks that were sometimes repetitive like grading assignments or planning a lesson on using the passive tone appropriately didn’t cause me to lose sight of the thread. I could draw a line between my grading of homework to a successful visa application for a student to begin graduate studies in another country because I watched it happen in the same space. I didn't sit alone in a cubicle, only grading assignments. My job was not made efficient. It was deeply human.

Compare experiences like mine to that of the workers Weil wrote about in her Factory Journal who had no idea what their tasks contributed to. Maybe you’re even thinking of your own examples as you read this. When work is broken down into repetitive tasks designed to be carried out efficiently and mindlessly by the worker, the final outcome or purpose often disappears from view. The argument currently is that AI will save us from this fate of disconnection and discontentment. I remain unconvinced. I suspect what will continue to happen is more akin to the experience of employees who find themselves tasked with a version of checking AI’s homework. One example of this is how many more translators are now having to check AI output for accuracy, and having to do so under shorter deadlines [7]. What was once a job with autonomy and competence has begun to morph into the drudgery we were promised freedom from.

The Invisible Worker

Because Weil was focused on the plight of workers in general, her writing didn’t particularly take gender into account like contemporaries such as Beauvoir. Aside from recognising how management treated the women differently in the factory, her focus was not on gender dynamics nor did she write much on the invisible labour that happens when the factory workers go home [8]. For this, I’ll take a few lines from a different French woman working in a factory. Published in 1980, Dorothée Letessier wrote Le Voyage à Paimpol in France in a simple, straightforward style that reflected her experience as a working-class woman, mother, wife, and friend. Our narrator and character Maryvonne tells us of her exhaustion from working in the factory and from the second shift waiting at home - another round of drudgery that not only repeats forever, but also goes entirely unnoticed. She writes about feelings of isolation and disconnect while completing her repetitive task on the factory line, and pushing her anger down deep and out of the way. She feels like she can’t breathe and so needs to get away from a life in which there is no time to rest, to think, or to be herself - or figure out what that could be. In search of emancipation, she hops on a train headed for Paimpol, but inevitably must return to work a few days later. While time away from labour, paid and unpaid, is nice; it is also a luxury she cannot afford. Time remains the reserve of those with money to buy it.

The luxury of time and the amount required to think/imagine/create brings me back to Weil. She found the demand to be constantly productive at the factory meant there was no time for thought on the job. The resulting exhaustion lasted long after the shift had ended, too. She found herself struggling to reflect and write, and felt the lasting impact of fatigue spread into her downtime [3]. It is worth noting she did not return to a home in which she had to prepare dinner, clean the kitchen (again!), help with homework, update everyone’s schedules, make a costume for Halloween, etc. Nor did this consideration feature in her examination of oppression. However, the contemporary feel to her writing remains useful despite a decent gender analysis.

Thinking is a human requirement

The mechanisation of labour does not, in fact, lead to increased time for engaging in what’s required to be energised, creative, or intellectually stimulated as promised by the latest Tech guru with a bad haircut. Rather, doing our level best to act like machines has the opposite effect. Ridding ourselves of our humanness by attempting to defy the Body and be more machine-like is a terrible idea. Even in science and maths, great discoveries were often made in moments when during some activity unrelated to the work. It is being in a Body that can love, cry in response to music, get excited, sense synchronicity, grieve, and experience awe that makes possible things like creativity, new ideas, and figuring out a problem. In the same way that Taylorism did not make workers more time-rich, neither will most AI tools for many jobs. To be more machine-like is to be less human, and unsurprisingly we do not do well being less human. The way to increase freedom from drudgery is not via the dehumanisation of mechanisation, but by designing our work in ways that embrace embodiment and recognise its need for time to think.

Works Cited

[1] American Weil Society

[2] Beerends, S., Gertz, N. & Aydin, C. AI and the machinization of humans: an escape from the burdens of existence. AI Ethics 6, 301 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-026-01126-y

[3] Rozelle-Stone, A. R. (2024). Simone Weil. A very short introduction (Vol. 80, Issue 2, pp. 249–252). https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192846969.001.0001

[4] Leo Bancou, Amélie Gabriagues, Scandinavian Journal of Management, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2026.101463

[5] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “What” and “Why” of goal pursuits: human needs and the Self-Determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1104_01

[6] Gagné, M., Olafsen, A. H., Carpini, J. A., & Frølund, C. W. (2026). Self-determination theory in the workplace: the evolution, present, and beyond. Journal of Business Research, 210, 116146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2026.116146

[7] O’Connor, S. (2026). We are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work. Allen Lane.

[8] Bourgault, S. (2014). Beyond the Saint and the Red Virgin: Simone Weil as Feminist Theorist of Care. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 35(2), 1-27. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fro.2014.a552623.