The Value of Working

The Value of Working 

During the 19^th century industrialization of America, the idea of work's inherent virtue may have seemed temporarily implausible to generations who laboured in the mines and mills and sweatshops. The century's huge machinery of production punished and stunned those who ran it.

And yet for generations of immigrants, work was ultimately availing: the numb toil of an illiterate grandfather got the father a foothold and a high school education, and the son wound up in college or even law school. A woman who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist. Co.[1] fire in lower Manhattan had a niece who made it to the halcyon Bronx,

And another generation on, the family went to Westchester County. So for millions of Americans, as they laboured through the complexities of generations, work worked, and the immigrant work ethic came at last to merge with the Protestant work ethic. The motive of work was all. To work for mere survival is desperate. To work for a better life for one's children and grandchildren lends the labour a fierce dignity. That dignity, an unconquerably hopeful energy and aspiration – driving, persisting like a life force – is the American quality that many find missing now.

The work ethic is not dead, but it is weaker now. The psychology of work is much changed in America. The acute, painful memory of the Great Depression used to enforce a disciplined and occasionally docile approach to work – in much the way that older citizens in the Soviet Union do not complain about scarce food and overpopulated apartments, because they remember how much more horrible everything was during the war. But the generation of the Depression is retiring and dying off, and today’s younger workers, though sometimes laid off and kicked around by recessions and inflation, still do not keep in dark storage that residual apocalyptic memory of Hoovervilles and the Dust Bowl and banks capsizing.

Today elaborate financial cushions – unemployment insurance, union benefits, welfare payments, food stamps and so on – have made it less catastrophic to be out of a job for a while. Work is still a profoundly respectable thing in America. Most Americans suffer a sense of loss, of diminution, even of worthlessness if they are thrown out on the street. But the blow seldom carries the life-and-death implications it once had, the sense of personal ruin. Besides, the wild and notorious behaviour of the economy takes a certain amount of personal shame out of joblessness; if Ford closes down a plant in New Jersey and throws 3,700 workers into the unemployment lines, the guilt falls less on individuals than on Japanese imports or American car design or an extortionate OPEC.

Because today's workers are better educated than those in the past, their expectations are higher. Many younger Americans have rearranged their ideas about what they want to get out of life. While their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers concentrated hard upon plow and drill press and pressure gauge and tort, some younger workers now ask previously unimaginable questions about the point of knocking themselves out. For the first time in the history of the world, masses of people in industrially advanced countries no longer have to focus their minds upon work as the central concern of their existence.

In the formulation of Psychologist Abraham Maslow, work functions in a hierarchy of needs: first, work provides food and shelter, basic human maintenance. After that, it can address the need for security and then for friendship and "belongingness." Next, the demands of the ego arise, the need for respect. Finally, men and women assert a larger desire for "self-actualization." That seems a harmless and even worthy enterprise but sometimes degenerates into self-infatuation, a vaporously selfish discontent that dead-ends in isolation, the empty face that gazes back from the mirror.

Of course in patchwork, pluralistic America, different classes and ethnic groups are perched at different stages in the work hierarchy. The immigrants – legal and illegal – who still flock densely to America are fighting for the foothold that the jogging tribes of self-actualizers achieved three generations ago. The zealously ambitious Koreans who run New York City's best vegetable markets, or boat people trying to open a restaurant, or Chicanos who struggle to start a small business in the barrio are still years away from est and the Sierra Club . Working women, to the extent that they are new at it, now form a powerful source of ambition and energy. Feminism – and financial need – have made them, in effect, a sophisticated-immigrant wave upon the economy.

Having to work to stay alive, to build a future, gives one's exertions a tough moral simplicity. The point of work in that case is so obvious that it need not be discussed. But apart from the sheer necessity of sustaining life, is there some inherent worth in work? Carlyle believed that "all work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble." Was he right?

Hooverville was the name of any shantytown of unemployed, dispossessed people during the early years of the Great Depression. The name came from President Herbert Hoover because it was during his administration that they existed. The Dust Bowl was a region including Oklahoma and parts of neighbouring states that was afflicted by severe drought and high winds.

Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries, the international price- and quota-setting cartel.

Barrio, Spanish for “neighbourhood” and here used to refer to a Hispanic area. East, Latin for is, refers to a self-realisation program and group founded by Werner Erhard. The Sierra Club is an organisation for enjoying and protecting the wilderness of America.

It is seigneurial cant to romanticise work that is truly detestable and destructive to workers. But misery and drudgery are always comparative. Despite the sometimes nostalgic haze around their images, the pre-industrial peasant and the 19^th century American farmer did brutish work far harder than the assembly line. The untouchable who sweeps excrement in the streets of Bombay would react with blank incomprehension to the malaise of some $17-an-hour workers on a Chrysler assembly line. The Indian, after all, has passed from “alienation” into a degradation that is almost mystical. In Nicaragua, the average 19-year-old peasant has worked longer and harder than most Americans of middle age. Americans prone to restlessness about the spiritual disappointments of work should consult unemployed young men and women in their own ghettos: they know with painful clarity the importance of the personal dignity that a job brings.

Americans often fall into fallacies of misplaced sympathy. Psychologist Maslow, for example, once wrote that he found it difficult “to conceive of feeling proud of myself, self-loving and self-respecting, if I were working, for example, in some chewing-gum factory…” Well, two weeks ago, Warner-Lambert announced that it would close down its gum-manufacturing American Chicle factory in Long Island City, N.Y.: the workers who had spent years there making Dentyne and Chiclets were distraught. “It is a beautiful place to work”, one feeder-catcher-packer of chewing gum said sadly. “It is just like home”. There is a peculiar elitist arrogance in those who discourse on the brutalisations of work simply because they cannot imagine themselves performing the job. Certainly workers often feel abstracted out, reduced sometimes to dreary robotic functions. But almost everyone commands endlessly subtle systems of adaptation; people can make the work their own and even cherish it against all academic expectations. Such adaptations are often more important than the famous but theoretical alienation from the process and product of labour.

Work is still the complicated and crucial core of most lives, the occupation melded inseparably to the identity; Freud said that the successful psyche is one capable of love and of work. Work is the most thorough and profound organising principle in American life. If mobility has weakened old blood ties, our co-workers often form our new family, our tribe, our social world; we become almost citizens of our companies, living under the protection of salaries, pensions and health insurance. Sociologist Robert Schrank believes that people like jobs mainly because they need other people; they need to gossip with them, hang out with them, to schmooze. Says Schrank: “The workplace performs the function of community”.

Unless it is dishonest or destructive – the labour of a pimp or a hit man, say – all work is intrinsically honourable in ways that are rarely understood as they once were. Only the fortunate toil in ways that express them directly. There is a Renaissance splendor in Leonardo’s effusion: “The works that the eye orders the hands to make are infinite”. But most of us labour closer to the ground. Even there, all work expresses the labourer in a deeper sense: all life must be worked at, protected, planted, replanted, fashioned, cooked for, coaxed, diapered, formed, sustained. Work is the way that we tend the world, the way that people connect. It is the most vigorous, vivid sign of life – in individuals and in civilisations.

Questions for Discussion

1.    What value did work have for immigrants to America?

2.    The author observes that the psychology of work has changed in America. How does he illustrate this observation?

3.    “Work functions in a hierarchy of needs”. What does psychologist Abraham Maslow mean by this thesis? How does it apply to the American work scene, according to the author?

4.    What does the author means by the first sentence of paragraph 10?

5.    What does the author seem to believe about the "brutalisation" of work? What does he mean by a “systems of adaptation” to work?

6.    Quoting Carlyle, Morrow asks if “there is some inherent worth in work”. How does he answer the question?

7.    “Work is the most thorough and profound organising principle in American life”. What does the author means by this remark? What reasons does the author give for saying that “Work is still a profoundly respectable thing in America?”

Exploring Ideas

1.    What to you is a “work ethic”? Is it a part of the culture of your country?

2.    How do you react to the last sentence of paragraph 6? Do you agree or disagree?

3.    Do you believe that there is a dignity in work?

4.    Do you consider work noble? If so, how do you define noble? If not, how would you characterise work?

5.    The author states that “all work is intrinsically honourable in ways that are rarely understood as they once were”. What does that statement mean to you? Do you agree or disagree? What are some of the ways that work is honourable?

6.    What does work mean to you personally? What would you like your life work to be? What would you expect from such work in the way of satisfaction and rewards?

7.    Lance Morrow concludes his essay by saying “Work is the way that we tend the world, the way that people connect. It is the most vigorous, vivid sign of life in individuals and in civilisations”. How do you react to the statement? To what extent is Morrow speaking from the point of view of his American work ethic? Write a short composition in which you agree or disagree with the statement.

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[1] l The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was a sweatshop employing European immigrants, mostly women, at very low wages. In a 1911 fire there 145 people were killed.