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The “work ethic” is a dirty trick we play on ourselves
Rationalizing away the pointlessness and indignity of low-waged work.
In Nebraska — and elsewhere — the forced-labor camps that some prisoners are sent to have been rebranded. They’re called “Work-Ethic Camps” now, and prisoners do 30–40h/week of hard labor for $1.21/day, interspersed with “intro to business” courses.
As Jamiek McCallum writes in Aeon: “If there was a formula for obliterating the work ethic, giving people undesirable jobs with long hours and barely paying them sounds exactly like it.”
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-work-ethic-became-a-substitute-for-good-jobs
McCallum is reiterating the thesis of his 2020 book, “Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream,” which presents discourse about work-ethic as “a severe anxiety about a fundamental precept of the American civil religion.”
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jamie-k-mccallum/worked-over/9781541618343/
Americans fret that a failing work-ethic is symbolic of national decline. Which is weird: hours for all workers rose by 13% between 1975 and 2016, and millennials are more likely than their elders to say “hard work is important to getting ahead.”
The white-collar workers who locked down for the pandemic increased their hours worked:
https://hbr.org/2020/07/microsoft-analyzed-data-on-its-newly-remote-workforce
The precarious “essential” workers who risked their lives and stayed on the job contended with irregular schedules and low pay.
We have a “work ethic” problem — but it’s not too little work ethic — it’s too much.
McCallum: “overwork, unstable schedules, and a lack of adequate hours define the paradoxical time signature of the work life today.”
But, McCallum argues, the work ethic doesn’t create the bad working conditions. Rather, we dream up the work ethic to resolve the cognitive dissonance of unsustainable, brutal working conditions.
