The United States has a bizarre relationship with work. We like to think of ourselves as the roll-up-our sleeves, get-it-done type of people who know that happiness only comes from hard labor and the fruit it bears. We champion the so-called "protestant work ethic" that is allegedly baked into our country's DNA. But in reality, the protestants who founded our country just forced kidnapping victims from Africa to work for free, while they themselves got drunk on corn liquor and rode around town dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Screw those guys. It is that specific relationship - the one between rich layabouts and their abused workers - that I think more accurately defines America. The protestant work ethic is just a myth sold to people who need to find some sort of nobility in their miserable lives, in which they are crushed under the wheel of endless labor and told to be grateful for the privilege.
A friend of mine recently brought up the idea that maybe part of our problem with mass shootings (Trash Skunk's take on that here) stems from the fact that Americans are worked to death, and we shun social safety nets for people who can't keep up. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is the phrase we're all familiar with. But what happens when people can't, and they run out of options? Suicides, homicides, and drug addiction - all of which are epidemics in our country.
So walk with me down this dusty path, friend, and don't be afraid to uncork Pappy's corn liquor while we get to talkin'. I want to tell you about the American relationship with work, why it's wrong, and what we might be able to do about it.
Workin' For The Man
I want to be clear right at the top that I'm not against the idea of work. This article is not my attempt at advocating laziness, and I think working obviously has its rewards: work produces goods, and goods can be sold for money. The pride of a job well done makes people feel satisfied, and gives them something to engage with every day that adds up to something bigger than themselves. It's the reason I work on this website - I put in effort and have something to show for it.
No, my problem isn't with work. My problem is with toil. Standing behind a cash register at a pharmacy for $7.50 an hour, day after day, is not an experience anyone would call fulfilling, although it is certainly work. The cashier is less like a prideful carpenter making a chair and more like a beaten mule walking in circles to power a mill. This employee is not a creative and valued member of a team, they are a resented cog in a cash-generating machine.
I say they are resented because the owners of the business resent having to pay even a cent for someone to ring up their customers. We know this is true because the job of a clerk is being increasingly automated. Machines check people out from stores as often as not, and this has removed the pesky cost of having to pay an actual human being. It's a company owner's dream come true.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Being a cashier is a nightmare job, I've done it and I know. It pays nothing, it is monotonous, it is degrading, and there is little offered in the way of career advancement. In the world of retail, the best you can hope for is promotion to a managerial position, where you only sometimes have to work the cash register, like when an employee calls in sick because they've meditated on the absurdity of life and have decided they are going to kill themselves.
But even as a manager, you don't own the company. Your income is fixed, and whether you work 15-hour days or show up late and drunk on this corn liquor we're enjoying, your paycheck will have the same numbers on it. So, unless you own your business (and, depending on how you count it, only between 10-16% of Americans do), you have no pride of ownership, and no sense of responsibility beyond whatever your narrow role is. Whatever happens to this business (short of bankruptcy) doesn't affect your income. So who cares?
I use retail as an accessible example, but most of us are living some version of this life. Whether it's being a cog in a store or in corporate mid-management, we are expected to have this incredible work ethic for something we have no stake in, do not own, will not profit from beyond a fixed amount, and ultimately don't really care about. And to salt the wound of this professional ennui, we Americans work harder and get less for it than any other industrialized nation.
Examine these statistics:
According to the International Labour Organization, Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers. (499 hours is twenty days. That's how much more time we spend at work than the French. No wonder they always look so bored, smoking cigarettes and sighing into their cabernet. No one in America has time for that shit.)
There is no federal law requiring paid sick days in the United States.
Maternity leave is only 12 weeks. Other industrialized countries have six months to a year, sometimes more.
Our paid holiday and vacation system is dead last among wealthy, first-world nations. Just look at the following graph from the Center for Economic Policy Reform:
And we wonder why people shoot up the workplace.
Who Benefits from Hard Work?
In my career as a TV producer I have interviewed scores of homicide detectives about their cases, and many of them have a favorite latin saying: cui bono? It means "who benefits", as in "if you want to find a killer, figure out who benefited from the victim's death". Brilliant.
Cui bono can be applied to the American workforce. Who benefits from these long hours, low pay, lack of insurance coverage, and unpaid sick, holiday, and vacation days? Certainly not the worker, that's for sure. It's the owners - the board members and primary shareholders. They benefit from not having to pay people fair wages, getting their employees to work longer for less, and not paying a dime for vacation or sick days. And these people don't actually show up and do any work themselves, mind you, they just sit back and collect the profit. Sounds like a bono to me.
So why do we put up with this? Well, the fact of the matter is that hard work must always have a carrot on the end of the stick, or people won't do it. In America we motivate people to show up for work in two ways: we propagate the idea that they will get rich if they work hard enough (and nothing in life can be more important than material wealth) and secondly, we ensure that if they fail to do so, they will become homeless and die in a gutter.
This is why we are forced take on life-long debts to go to college, have a house, or own a car. These debts are the guns at our back forcing us to march to work every day. It is incredible that we've created a society where these life necessities are inaccessible unless you surrender your financial independence to a bank. Think about how many times you've been told "if you want a good job, you have to go to college". Now think about what college costs in America. Now realize the raw form of this statement is really "if you want to get a good job, you must agree to take out an exorbitant, predatory loan that will financially handicap you for decades."
Look at this table below, outlining the average cost per year for college education in America:
Credit for graphic to: https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-us
So if an 18-year-old American wants to attend a four-year private university (what we're told is a "good school"), they will be taking on an average debt of $48,500 a year. After four years this student will have borrowed $194,000 just for the privilege of a college education - and that's before the interest kicks in and grotesquely inflates that figure. This is what we do to the bright young minds of our country - chain them to nearly a quarter-million dollars in debt before they even have a chance to obtain an entry-level job making $30,000 - $50,000 a year.
It is a profoundly devious trap, and one our parents generation didn't have to deal with. The real financialization of college tuition began in the 1970s, and has gotten worse every decade since. This is not "the way it's supposed to be", this a relatively modern phenomenon. As a result of this, my generation finds itself in the position of modern sharecroppers: we essentially rent our degree for the privilege of using it to find work. When we get the work, our wages are garnished and returned to the bank we are renting our degree from. It's a trap - you can't have access to a good job unless you agree to pay the bank part of your wages for the rest of your working life.
What the hell?
The bottom line is that my generation is motivated less by a carrot on a stick and more by the cruel sting of a riding crop: we owe money, we have bills, and if we fail to pay them, there is no social safety net to help us through it. Our parents had bills, yes, but their generation was not preyed upon by the financial industry in the way that has become commonplace for us. They could expect to go to college and not be paying for it into their 50s. But that little tweak to the system happened on their watch, and the victims are their children.
So we work. We put up with a metric ton of bullshit and show up anyways, hoping that if we bang our heads against the wall hard enough, maybe someone will notice and our pay will increase. The goal here isn't happiness or pride from a job well done - it's hoping that we can increase our income to give us a little breathing room against all of the shit we have to pay for.
I don't mean to be such a downer. People obviously work in other countries, too. And people in Canada or the U.K. have mortgages just like we do. My point is only that they aren't quite as cut-throat with one another as Americans are. Those countries offer generous maternity leave, nationalized healthcare, paid sick days, and more. They aren't perfect, or even the best examples of work/life balance in the Western world - but they are still kicking our ass in this department.
Master and Slave Morality in the American Workplace
The American myth of hard work reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "master and slave morality". In loose, Trash Skunk terms, Nietzsche said that Christianity is an example of slave morality, meaning that it is meant to pacify the underdog, the exploited, and the abused. It honors the weak and vilifies the strong. Its promise to the weak is that if they endure the hardship of this life, things will be better in heaven. Suck it up now, you'll get yours later.
I, too, like to have fun.
The Bible slyly suggests that "it is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for him to enter the kingdom of heaven". Thus powerful rich people who enjoy the good times on Earth will not be getting into heaven, but you - the poor sod who plows their fields and does their laundry - will.
This situation is ideal for the Master, who can use this ridiculous religion to exploit his slaves - it feeds right into what he needs! He gets to sell them the idea that their pitiful position is somehow noble and desirable. And in a genius twist, the slaves even get to believe that the Master will pay for his dominance by being denied entry to the pearly gates.
But the Master is more clever than the slave, because he knows the whole thing is bullshit. No one is going to heaven or hell, which is why he has no problem dominating everyone, living it up now and making these people do his work for him. Yet even though he knows the truth, it is vital to the Master's enterprise that the slaves go on believing the myth that their position is somehow going to be worth it in the long run.
Nietszche wasn't speaking about this in the literal sense of masters and slaves on a plantation, he was merely using those terms to examine power structures in society, i.e. the Catholic Church or the aristocracy, and how they use a perverse and manufactured system of false virtues to control people.
Which is why this concept applies to the modern-day American work ethic. Like the Nietszchean slave, we're being sold the idea that hard work is noble by wealthy people who live off passive income streams, people whose lifestyles resemble something closer to a permanent vacation than a disciplined life of labor.
Yet from their lips we hear"keep working hard for me, and one day, you too can live like I do."
What a load. The wealthy business owner knows, just like the Master does, that you will never be his equal through your hard work on his behalf. But he's not about to clue you in on that tidbit. Thus we are encouraged to believe that the key to success is more hard, grueling work.
The same trick applies to self-help gurus, who charge thousands of dollars for desperate people to attend their seminars, where they tell their enraptured audience to "get up early, work hard, do sit-ups, and you too can be wealthy and successful like me." But this person's job is to drift into hotel ballrooms and woo people with shallow advice about bedtime - he's not working hard at all, and this is a scam.
The Broken Promise of the Machine Age
Wasn't the initial promise of machine labor that it would allow humans more time for leisure? To pull us out of the fields and allow us to create art, be with family, and write articles for TrashSkunk.com? This was what the industrial revolution was supposed to give us - but does anyone honestly feel like machines have delivered on the promise of more free time?
Of course not. Having a smart phone and a computer just means work follows you into your home. You can be pestered day or night by the needs of your job. If anything, machines have made life more work-centric than they were before. So what the hell happened here?
I can answer this: most of us don't benefit from machine labor because most of us don't own the businesses to begin with. More often than not, we are the employees being replaced by machines. When a computer takes a cashier's job, it doesn't mean the cashier gets to go read a book in the park all day - he has to find a new degrading line of work, because the efficiency of the machine only benefits his former boss, who owns the company and is lowering his overhead by ditching the human element.
We see this happening in many sectors: Uber wants to replace their drivers with automated cars within a decade. The American trucking industry is expected to be fully automated in a similar timeline, disenfranchising millions of professional drivers. Amazon automates its warehouses, and the few humans who do work in them suffer long hours and are being obstructed in their efforts to unionize as I write this sentence. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is personally worth $181 billion, making him the richest man in history.
Clearly machine labor is benefiting somebody. It's just not you.
Returning to an earlier analogy, business owners like this are the modern equivalent of the drunken plantation master who spends all day boozing and playing cards while slaves work his land. Jeff Bezos gets to shop for yachts while Amazon employees put in exhausting days and watch their efforts to unionize get crushed. I don't doubt that Bezos worked his ass off to build Amazon... but he's closing the door to success and happiness behind him and throwing the bolt. Amazon's employees should be riding to work on flying carpets and making luxurious salaries with full benefits. Instead they are in danger of dropping dead from exhaustion while automatons nip at the heels of their job security. Can anyone defend this?
Contrary to its promise, the machine age has only found ways to worsen our situation. Instead of giving us a break, machines are taking our jobs and forcing us to scramble to find new ways to make more money, all while wages stagnate, cost of living goes up, and doors to new careers shut all around us.
One thing is clear: we cannot look to technology to free us from our abusive system.
The Poison of Objectivism
With all of these walls closing in on us and stressing us out, you'd think Americans would try to stick together and come up with a solution. But no - we treat each other terribly - people who can't keep up are "lazy" or "losers" who deserve no pity.
Why are Americans so hard on one another when it comes to work? Why does everyone have to be the hardest working person in the room? Shouldn't the more desirable position be "the guy who spends the most time in his hammock"? And why do we hate the idea of socialized healthcare, education, homeless shelters, drug rehabs, etc., anything that can alleviate some of this work and finance-related stress that is killing everyone?
I think it's because we are so desperate and greedy that the idea of "paying for someone else's problems" is anathema to us. But in reality this is counter-intuitive, because helping society helps, well, society - and that's all of us, my friend. We all do better when we stick up for each other. This is a lesson, I'm afraid, Americans will never learn, because we are culturally obsessed with competition and we're too diverse to see each other as the neighbors that we are.
America has also been thoroughly indoctrinated into a strange individualist mindset that tells us we owe other humans nothing, and in fact other people are just takers who want a free ride on our dime. The perfect example of this toxic attitude is in the work of part-time author and full-time witch impersonator, Ayn Rand.
Bite the apple, dearie...
Rand's two novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged lay out her objectivist philosophy, a worldview that should appeal only to adolescents, but has nevertheless captivated millions of Americans, including some of our most prominent political leaders.
One of Ayn Rand's big ideas is that societies are built by great men of enterprise, beacons of light whose talent and hard work drag the rest of us into the future behind them. But everyone else, in her view, is a moocher, a taker, living off the fruits given to them by these few great men. The plot of Atlas Shrugged is essentially her asking "what if these great men got sick of everyone mooching off of them and decided to go on strike?". (Atlas, of course, is the titan from Greek Mythology who holds the entire world on his shoulders. In Rand's thin metaphor, someone like William Randolph Hearst endures a similar burden, even as he sleeps with movie stars in his seaside castle.)
In Atlas Shrugged, we are led to believe that society falls apart when the great men stop coming to work, and the takers can no longer mooch from them. But this is exactly the attitude that is poisonous to society - it views everyone who isn't a rich business owner as a worthless parasite unworthy of pity or help. It is anti-human, and places us all in conflict with one another as we race to get rich and "become a somebody".
I reject the premise of Atlas Shrugged outright: if Elon Musk stopped showing up to work, I don't think anyone would care. Someone else would just step up and keep his companies going, because Musk isn't in possession of some forbidden knowledge that allows him to run Tesla. Some guy named Gary with a business degree would do just fine.
Ayn Rand has it backwards: healthy societies are not the products of great men and women - great men and women are the products of healthy societies.
We should stop looking at other people like lazy enemies who are trying to steal from us, and start trying to build a place that everyone can enjoy without having to work themselves to death. If we can do this, we'll have more great men and women laying around by default.
The Fix
We need to fix this awful attitude we have - that the harder we work the better our lives will become, because it's bullshit and it's making us all sick. Sick of mind, sick of body, sick of everything. People kill themselves when they can't pay their bills. People get hooked on drugs because they are trying to cope with the soul-crushing reality of how many hours you have to put in to survive in this country. And, sadly, some people are so deranged by our inescapable situation that they harm others instead. Through school shootings and workplace massacres, one person's hopelessness becomes damaging for everyone.
I can't solve the whole problem, but I think one fix is this: socialize some of the things that are crushing us, the burdens we can't all carry. Make community college free so that people don't have to enter the work force with a life-long debt to the real moochers in society, the financial predators who produce no actual goods but instead make money from legal forms of usury.
We need to make healthcare low-cost or free, socialize Pre-K childcare, etc. for the same reasons. These are things that bankrupt citizens of our country but not of others. And why? Cui bono? It only benefits the wealthy industrialists who need to have the pressure on you to show up and work for low wages with no sick leave or vacation days.
Do we really love these people that much?
The goal here should be to ease up on everyone and find ways to get our jobs done with less stress. If someone says they work an 80 hour week, this should not be cause to praise their amazing work ethic - we should pity them for not having a life. And then help them get one.
Look, I don't think there is anything wrong with hard work in the proper context. Of course we need to have jobs and places to be and things to produce. But we should be working on things that make us happy, things that add to our mental health instead of destroying it. And if we need to show up to a corporate job and work for someone else, fine - but let's do it because it pays well and we are satisfied, not because the wages are low and we have no choice. Work should be something we spend part of our life doing, not the whole point of it.
The American self-image of "rugged individualism" is a selfish, childish, fallacious concept that forces us all to work so much harder than we have to in order to appear self-sufficient. This is making us worse people, and it is making us unhappy. Let's cut it out. We are all collectivists the minute a pandemic hits or an asteroid is headed for earth. Stop pretending you can handle everything by yourself and abandoning the people who can't.
I have a slim hope this attitude may take hold one day. If my generation can take a lesson from the savage financial beatings we've endured over the last few decades, we may decide that the broken philosophies of our parents are best left in the "dustbin of history", to borrow a phrase.
Then again, this is America. People here can't wear a cloth mask to stop a deadly virus from killing them because they think it violates their freedom. Something as easy taking care of one another is probably beyond our grasp.
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