Work to Death or Starve to Death
PART 2: How workaholism created an unequal economy and exacerbated a plague.
“We want to create a very great incentive to work,” Donald Trump thundered in a stumblebum news conference last July, remarkably tone-deaf considering the harrowing circumstances. At that point, the coronavirus death total stood at roughly 69 9/11s. Regardless, the concern of how to best get people back to work remained a recursive and stubborn negotiating point for COVID Rescue 2.0. Trump’s reiteration of Getting the Economy Going echoed his unhinged remarks months before, where he agitated for a wholesale “reopening” only several weeks into his scattershot pandemic mismanagement. The treacherous theatricality of all this was evident in an obviously overmatched and confounded president wheeling off yards of oafish spin, gleaming like a caramel apple and fluttering pale eyelids as he suggested Americans fight COVID-19 by injecting disinfectant (and somehow sunlight) “into the lungs.”
Two decades of relentless grinding political failure and steepening precarity always held the potential to veer into some uniquely dark avenues of possibility. It was horrifyingly nauseating, if not predictable, to witness the entire GOP apparatchik openly argue that a commensurate federal response to this crystallized threat is less reasonable than, say, a fulsome embrace of mass death for the sake of reviving the bottom lines and stock prices of various flailing markets. Urging workers to consider a kamikaze response to an indifferent pandemic doesn’t seem as tactical as it does instinctual.
Donald Trump may not be the author of capitalism’s most grisly impulses, but he is a brute articulation of them. As sociologist Max Weber proposed around the turn of the last century, capitalism enraptured its most dedicated disciples because it exported moral energy and earnestness to self-abnegation in the workplace. Its very spirit, Weber argues, lies in a Calvinist Protestantism that guilts us into justifying our furtive pleasures through constant toil. As the professional class and corporate bureaucracy came to dominate American life, careerism evolved into a pseudo-theology that promised transcendence, fulfillment, purpose, and identity.
Strangely enough, if you live in America in the 21st century, you’re bombarded with pretensions and anxieties around the importance of hard work and Finding Your Dream Job. For much of this nation’s history, the idea of work-as-virtue was embodied by the yeoman farmer, a smallholder who owned his own land, reaped the benefits of his own labor, and understood hard work, in Benjamin Franklin’s formulation, as “the way to wealth.” Now, when people speak of “wealth producers,” it is automatically assumed one is referring to capitalists, not workers. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was a crucial forefather of this ideological framework, asserting in The Gospel of Wealth that his fortune was bestowed upon him through steely resolve and divine intervention. Rich people had a responsibility, he argued, not to give money that has a “pauperizing tendency upon its recipients,” but to fortify institutions or ideas that encourage the plebs to cultivate “better” habits.
Over the last century, the public relations boom has reified this sour and clammy perspective, deploying press releases and op-eds that consistently sanctify the value corporations deliver to society: the services they provide, the lives they enrich, the glorious number of jobs they create, their moral and ethical righteousness, their appropriate perch atop our societal apogee. From there, the rich would fund institutions and credentialed factotums to recast their dull, atavistic greed as meritocracy or prosperity gospel. Politicians and pundits then spin all this corny dross into public policy and popular opinion.
For decades in America, federal lawmakers have been consecrating Rise. Grind. Strive. from the marble daises of Congress and enshrined it into law. Most developed nations guarantee maternity leave and child care, while American public spending on these services ranks near the bottom of global rankings. The majority of insured Americans access healthcare through their employers. Americans have fewer paid holidays than workers in comparable nations. In 1996, Bill Clinton, in grabbing the neoliberal baton from Ronald Reagan, signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, replacing America’s welfare system with employment-contingent benefits. As automation and offshoring loom over our labor force, these programs remain vague and qualified and means-tested.
The highest-educated, highest-earning white men — the demographic that happens to dominate the C-suite — became the secular equivalent of preachers, valorizing toil glamor as a sacred duty. Tech elites like Elon Musk speak with such grandiose flair about human creativity, once tweeting “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” before he stood to reap stock compensation upward of $50 billion if his company, Tesla, met certain performance levels. Those in a similar corporate stratosphere reduced their leisure time more than any other group over the last three decades. Office desks have transformed into the altars where we worship our jobs, perhaps for the same reasons why Christians attend Sunday mass: to self-actualize.
In The Atlantic, Derek Thomson calls this sentiment “workism,” and describes it as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”
“Meaningful work” is an expression that had hardly appeared in the English language before the early-1970s. It became a common managerial strategy to encourage subordinates to discover purpose in their labor. “With dollar-compensation no longer the overwhelmingly most important factor in job motivation,” the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange wrote, “management must develop a better understanding of the more elusive, less tangible factors that add up to ‘job satisfaction.’” The 1970s marked the dawn of the Great Decoupling. As GDP rose, real wages began to decline for the rank-and-file, as did the percentage of Americans who belong to unions. To compensate, many Americans worked longer hours and took on extra jobs, especially in the service sector—which currently accounts for 80% of U.S. employment.
Before the early-20th century, work and wealth had a specific destination: a richer, fuller human life. The blossoming of advertising and consumerism set people on a course of working more in order to buy more. Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life popped up everywhere in the following decades, along with unpaid internships, union-busting, and campaigns to slash taxes on capital gains. Now, a similar sentiment can be seen in Nike ad campaigns, in phrases like “Do what you love” stitched into throw pillows, in neon signs demanding we “Hustle Harder.”
Yet, the more work we do, the harder we strive, the more productive we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs have become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency and steadfastness haven’t bucked wage stagnation. If anything, our undying commitment to work has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. In 1965, CEO compensation was twenty times that of the average worker; by 2015, it was more than two hundred times. That year, Nigel Travis, CEO of Dunkin’ Brands, earned $5.4 million in compensation and called a proposed $15/hour minimum wage “absolutely outrageous.”
One strange feature of this pandemic is it has brought greater explicitness, if not exactly clarity, to the conduct of our deranged public life and chasmic disparities. The ones who deliriously, delusionally beat the drums of hustlemania haven’t interacted with a disease that rampaged through low-income communities like an invisible, toxic plague. Cataclysmic job bleeding kept 4.5 million American women out of work. They already shoulder the extra burdens of child care and domesticity, but this time spent out of the workforce will cost them, on average, nearly $600,000 in lifetime income. By April 2020, 41% of Black businesses had permanently shuttered compared to 17% of white-owned businesses. And of the 3.1 million Americans still unable to afford health insurance in states where Medicaid has not been expanded, more than half are people of color. The stock market soared last June as jobless claims climbed up to 42 million. By the end of 2020, the S&P 500 surged to record-highs when the virus—at that point—killed 340,000 and left millions more starving and homeless.
Those on the front lines of supermarkets, hospitals, warehouses, and other essential employees were drafted into this haphazard conflict to Keep the Economy Going, trapped in a macabre dash to see if their lungs will degenerate before their employers slash their salaries. The remaining “inessential employees” were asked to choose between their personal safety and their jobs after their line of work was effectively deemed meaningless to broader societal functionings. Workers were saluted with pandering commercials touting their heroic valor. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans were punted off their health insurance, live on the brink of a potential eviction crisis, and struggle to afford groceries.
The federal government’s response to this catastrophic pandemic reflects the minor-key depravities and general cynicism and self-dealing of the American economy, if only because the same finance loons and legacy swells largely influence both. There were also ways in which Trump’s pandemic response reflected both his unique determination to leverage any venal and idiotic criminality and traditional reactionary values—bullying and stiffing the vulnerable are core to both Trump and his party. In dealing with the economy’s Chernobyl moment, the Republican version of a long-standing business-positive policy consensus stepped forward as a frank and unapologetic Tammany Hall-style graft. When Congress passed the $2.3-trillion CARES Act, the nation’s industrial giants received whopping no-strings-attached funds on demand and seemingly on principle. The impunities of the free market were retained for newly minted un-employees.
All of this was being worked out from one moment to the next, with Americans scrambling to figure out how to live in a country so manifestly abandoned. For much of the pandemic, workers braved denuded state bureaucracies and waited on hold to see what pittance they might get, which was a few hundred bucks tacked on to weekly unemployment checks and a chorus of wild and blank antipathy. Meanwhile overseas, the Denmark government responded to the pandemic by offering to pay workers 90% of their salaries to stay home, and the German government made it easier to claim unemployment benefits and for parents to receive childcare funds. In France, workers have “the right of withdrawal,” the right to walk off their job if they feel their health and safety is at risk — without sacrificing pay or facing punishment.
In the U.S., stupendously perverse politicos careened wild-eyed and slavering from one crisis to another, evincing a professional indifference as their standard posture. The cure can’t be worse than the disease was brandished as agitprop fodder in presidential press conferences and aped by Fox “News” hosts blithely demanding human sacrifices. “It is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter,” Indiana Rep. Trey Hollingsworth said last April. “It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big-boy and big-girl pants and say, ‘This is the lesser of these two evils.’” As they spent months either ignoring, counterpunching, minimizing, and furiously misapprehending a pandemic, political and business leaders woke up to the chaos their venality and casual sociopathy built for them, and manipulated it to create a false binary for Americans: work to death or starve to death.
The free market appears to be voluntary because employment isn’t compelled by explicit state force. Instead, the coercive and repressive nature of work is obscured by the threat of poverty. If a demeaning job is the only bulwark against starvation or homelessness or losing health insurance, then American capitalism is every bit as coercive as the fearmongery “socialist” systems that have haunted the national imagination since 19-something-something. For employment to be truly voluntary, there would have to be an option of surviving without work, a generous welfare system with a UBI that functions as permanent federal unemployment insurance.
The problem with endless frenetic hustle is not just that its pretense is a form of institutional self-delusion, but that it mutates into a thanatotic thrill that— especially during a pandemic or sputtering economy—perverts priorities and warps internal logic. As discourse about raising the minimum wage has popped up in recent months, almost predictably, “essential workers” were demoted to “unskilled workers.” Even the idea of “unskilled labor” seems like a way to depress wages; it’s not as if a CEO could be plucked from a boardroom and plopped somewhere on the supply chain and be expected to perform flawlessly.
Pencil-necked National Review-types have spent the last few sluggish, peevy months typing out a genre of articles consisting of feigned panic over how higher wages for “unskilled workers” are increasing the price of burrito bowls by $1 or whatever. In suspiciously perfect harmony, they echo the familiar glum and paranoid Chamber of Commerce pablum about the nanny state tarnishing the trademark American lunch pale grit. These sordid thinkpieces never really rise to the point of becoming interesting, but they’re useful in their unwittingly frank exposure of what was previously latent in pro-business talking points. Typical managerial complaints have disguised contempt as concern, but they now articulate a savage tautology in its own right: Temporary survival checks from the government disincentivize work, so the only way to prod people back to their jobs is to deprive them of this.
In response to a potential national labor shortage, GOP governors have tried to coerce jobless Americans in at least 22 states—including Arizona, Ohio, and Texas—back to work by reducing their unemployment benefits to pre-pandemic allowances, which in some places falls below poverty-level wages. Over the past year, Congress added $300 to every out-of-work American’s typical weekly unemployment check and extended the number of weeks they are eligible for aid, but federal lawmakers never required states to offer any of these programs. A few weeks prior, in response to Republican criticisms of unemployment insurance, President Biden ordered the Labor Department to ensure jobless Americans cannot draw enhanced federal benefits if they decline a “suitable job offer.” There’s a rich vein of learned helplessness running through the Democratic tendency to settle for kludgy half-measures, resulting in a hangdog party that has accepted their opponents’ rancid priors as reality and its own job as fundamentally janitorial.
There is a long-held sentiment in American culture that is steeped in and blithely reverent of free-market truisms. It asserts businesses should operate with untrammeled freedom—i.e. expend employees’ well-being in a bloodless pursuit of profit. It suggests workers have no right to complain about how they’re treated since companies are doling out the paychecks. If subordinates are displeased with their job, they can quit and field offers from an organization that promises to treat them with more respect.
This curdled and mostly unexamined pro-business belief exists to rationalize cheesy venality. It persists in an extremely abstracted and spectacularly tone-deaf vacuum, one where job hunting in an oversaturated labor pool is somehow similar to being a star athlete in free agency. It is the spectacle of this ultra-smug Heroic Job Creator triumphing utterly over the collective time and labor of the American workforce that plays an outsized role in generating value for its businesses, at least in comparison to the portion of wealth and economic control it receives in return.
In recent months, as it became apparent to restaurant and business owners that their meager compensation couldn’t compete with sustenance unemployment checks, they began vocalizing their complaints about a sudden and steep decline in work ethic. Service employees are underpaid in precisely the ways that the relentless downward pressure of market forces intended. Naturally, they took to social media to circulate photos of greeting signs with some variation of “we’re short-staffed because no one wants to work anymore” scribbled on with the addendum that these establishments pay roughly $2.15 an hour before tips. Every day in America unfolds in the shadow of this sour and soggy rationale—that this labor shortage is an indictment of “government interference” instead of scummy business practices, or a broken economy writ large.
Meanwhile, some white-collar executives are reconsidering the permanent work-from-home arrangement, if not refusing the option altogether, even as swaths of workers continue to maintain productivity levels and positivity from home. The more forward-thinking companies have listened to their employees and work to create flexible hybrid schedules that cater to specific individual needs. But the more reflexively controlling businesses are wrangling their employees back into the office as if they’re herding ornery cats. Some have already instituted mandatory work-from-office Mondays and Fridays, while others have left their employees in the dark about their work-from-home policies. Certain C-suiters have opted for overt threats of prompt firings rather than faintly euphemizing them. Others have deployed some grotesquely obtuse corporate-speak for do what we want, or else—perhaps aptly personified in the closing paragraph of an op-ed in the Washington Post:
“While remote working is certainly industry- and job-dependent, and the future employment scene will probably be some type of hybrid, the CEOs I have spoken with fear erosion of collaboration, creativity and culture. So although there might be some pains and anxiety going back into the office, the biggest benefit for workers may be simple job security. Remember something every manager knows: The hardest people to let go are the ones you know.”
Confronted with the infuriating superfluidity of white-collar drivel, this passage deliberately reads like someone tortured a buzzword generator. However, it portrays the inherent autocratic tendencies of these grimacing and brittle business hierarchies. The boilerplate jargon of “family” and “team members” obfuscates the wildly different relationships employees and management have with capital. It is this zombie ontology that posits workers as disposable dullards to be controlled, existing to appease the bottomless furies and vinegary whims of America’s business tyrants, and they should be grateful for the opportunity to be paid to do so. There appears to be a palpable fear amongst the higher-ups: Any amount of budging in letting workers dictate their schedules or workplace policy could lead to existential mayhem, one that will warp the current office dynamic.
Part of this corporate sclerosis trickles from the grim patrician stodginess of myopic boomers, or it’s the product of antiquated managerial practices ripe for snuffing. Many bosses are adamant in their weird fantasy scenarios and regressive prejudices. There’s still a widespread belief that remote workers “aren’t as committed as office dwellers,” according to The Wall Street Journal, and more of them will translate into squandered“creativity and spontaneous collaboration.” As some workers dread a return to purgatorial commutes, many managers cling to the incandescently toxic lore of “presenteeism.” Business experts attribute these biases to the “mere-exposure effect,” the idea that one must be physically planted in a chair at the office to appear driven.
This favors and advances a certain type of worker, with a certain type of working style, and a certain availability and eagerness to work in an office. In-person work policies have always been deeply exclusionary, but the ones getting the shaft aren’t the brownnosers churning out thinkpieces about the benefits of returning the office. The status quo promoted extroverts. It favored people with no physical or psychological conditions that would prevent them from sitting in a chair for 40+ hours a week. It privileged people with the desire and the ability to live in proximity to their industry hubs. It devalued people (predominately women) with care responsibilities at home.
However, one would have to suspect at least some of this corraling is attached to the appalling cynicism of plutocrats clenching onto their current lot in society, lending leeway to the kind of smash-and-grab sadism that proactively or passively immiserates a swelling tranche of Americans.
This approach denied what was known and knowable about the pandemic, opting for literal human sacrifices precisely because it found more figurative sacrifices intolerably dehumanizing. Some poor stranger’s death is swapped out so various numbers can go up and up. Now, it offers a comfort of the familiar, control for control’s sake, a backward-looking mysticism that won’t budge for the slightest of concessions, for it abhors even the appearance of weakness. It’s remarkable how much of American culture is built on this belief, and how it rewrites an increasingly brutal status quo into a legible national order. This jut-jawed denial emerged as the easiest choice for the most powerful and least accountable Americans, but it’s an approach that requires nothing more than a self-serving sort of faith.
The strangest aspect of the Protestant ethic is it has metastasized into this almost fanatical zeal for an economy that went mask off and gladly threw millions overboard at its earliest convenience. Or, at the very least, many Americans believe in their own narrow, carnal self-interest enough to maneuver within a system that operates to the benefit of almost no one. Hundreds of thousands of people have died behind this faith, but it persists mostly in aphorism and epigram. “Are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson last March, suggesting senior citizens would gladly risk their lives to keep the economy humming along. “If that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” As is the case with a lot of aphorisms and epigrams, they are instructive because they make purpose and reason enemies. They are also insufficient in adapting to a drastic shift in observable and empirical reality. At this point, the Protestant ethic exists mostly as a way to best maintain a lie.
