This essay actually began in the spring of 1990, when I lived in Manchester, NH. A few small stories had come out in the Manchester Union Leader about child labor violations in the state, and I decided to track them down and incorporate them into a larger piece about child labor violations nationwide. I did my research and interviews, wrote my piece, and watched as it got summarily rejected by publications I thought would be delighted to use it, such as The Nation and The Progressive. (In fact, the only publication that picked up on it was the Union Leader.) I could only think that they thought the topic minor and irrelevant, like children themselves.
Then, for Zeitgeist reasons I can't quite explain or pin down, a comparative flood of stories started coming about at the beginning of 1990 about child labor law violations. The Boston Globe did a multi-part series on child labor practices through the United States, and the U.S. Department of Labor had a celebrated crackdown on sweatshops and restaurants and a dozen other establishments. Since 1993, however, when an article by Brian Dumaine in the April 5 Fortune detailed the confusing state of child labor law enforcement, the topic seems to have disappeared; even the U.S. Department of Labor's Monthly Labor Review, which presents a yearly roundup of state labor legislation, found little activity in 1994 on the child labor law front. Perhaps the topic is muted because the critical changes in the shape and volatility of the job market during the 1990s, and the recent ascendancy of the Republicans, have muted any discussions about labor issues and the growing inequalities in wealth. And certainly, after the celebrated raids, not much was done structurally in the U.S. Department of Labor to ensure that the raids won't have to be done again. The number of inspectors did not increase appreciably over the intervening half decade, child labor violations are lumped into all the investigations done for all labor violations rather than separated out for specific action, and no one has proposed to raise fines against employers to painful levels. Thus, the powers-that-be have endorsed a policy of benign tolerance of the situation (benign, that is, for employers), with just enough action done to prevent excessive criticism yet not restrict employers' access to child labor.
On an international level, however, people have done some exploring and exposing of the appalling conditions of child labor in many countries, conditions approaching, and even exceeding, slavery (if that's possible). For instance, in the Summer 1995 issue of WIN News, more than 20 million Indian children, almost all uneducated and poverty-stricken, work in the carpet, glass, diamond polishing, and matchbox industries. Bob Herbert, in a piece run in the July 21, 1995, New York Times, called "Children of the Dark Ages," details the plight of maquiladora workers, many of them teenagers. He concludes that "all that is joyful in life is being wrung from the youngsters who are fed into the wretched, soulless system of the maquiladora assembly plants. Is a Gap shirt worth it?"
Some people and organizations are making efforts to combat these conditions. Abigail McCarthy, in the September 22, 1995, Commonweal, points out that the grassroots efforts in the 1970s and 1980s that reduced water pollution in rivers and lakes could be trained on the problem of international child labor by forcing retailers to stop importing goods made by children. An editorial in the June 3, 1995, Economist cites a number of Western manufacturers who have withdrawn their business from countries that use child labor. In the June 29, 1995, edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Shada Islam details how foes of child labor are pressing the European Union to drop Pakistan from its Generalized System of Preferences because some 6 million children in Pakistan labor in the carpet, shoe, power-loom, and sports-goods industries, producing a significant amount of the country's $1.8 billion in EU exports. Barbara Crosette, in the May 25, 1995, New York Times, outlines the United Nation Children's Fund's plan to avoid buying goods made by children.
But while some improvements will happen, not much will change, if history guides us: the children are too important to the capitalist order to be liberated from their drudgery, and people who advocate for their release will either have their voices marginalized or be killed to silence them, like Iqbal Masih, the 12-year old Pakistani boy who won the Reebok Youth in Action Award for his speaking out about the abysmal conditions child laborers face. He had worked as a carpet weaver from the ages of 4 to 10 and knew first-hand the sordid details. For his honesty, Masih had received death threats from people in the carpet industry angered by his comments, and on Sunday, April 16, 1995, a single gunman shoot and killed Iqbal and two of his friends as they rode their bikes through their village. Masih's death, and the maiming and death of many others whose names we will not hear, demonstrates that the economic regime makes its priorities quite clear, and children in all countries will escape their economic bondage only when the bosses no longer need their services, and not before.
I applaud all these efforts; I wish they could be stronger, even more Draconian -- say, the death penalty for owners and shareholders of industries which kill off child workers in the pursuit of profit. Short of that I support any effort adults can make to take children away from the tender mercies of the market. Any steps take in this direction signals a step toward civic and moral growth; anything less differs not a whit from pagan sacrifice.
Does this mean that, in the United States, I would bar children from having jobs until they were eighteen years of age? Before I answered that I would counter with another question: Why should children be part of a worker pool available to employers? Why should employers have access to the most vulnerable people in our society to generate profit for themselves and shareholders? Put this way, I don't think any person can say with a moral straight face that children should be treated as a source of cheap labor, which is another way of saying that, yes, I don't think children should go to work until they're eighteen years old and legally and chronologically required to make decisions for themselves.
But, some might ask, wouldn't I be depriving these children of the ennobling virtues of work? Wouldn't I be taking away from them opportunities to learn invaluable lessons about thrift and self-discipline? The evidence, at least for the kinds of "work" we associate with child labor, which involve mostly drudgery and dead-end kinds of activities, doesn't support the belief that labor builds character. Studies have shown that school performance suffers after 15-20 hours of work per week (which is a lot for a 17-year old kid, if you think about it) and that large amounts of free income abet substance abuse problems (very few children save their money or have to pay room and board at home). And if this kind of work teaches anything, as shown by the level of abuse of child labor laws, it teaches children not to confront injustices, to suffer indignities they don't deserve, and to submit quietly to the dictates of the marketplace. I, for one, am not comfortable with these kinds of lessons.
Solutions? Make school a better place to be and give kids more of it, have more diverse work-study or school-to-work programs, teach kids that there's more to life than working to feed a car, severely punish any business that uses children illegally, make it so that kids can't work more than 10 hours a week. Solutions aren't hard to think of, but in some ways they're solutions to non-problems, or at least superficial problems. The deeper questions that need answering here concern the nature of work in our capitalist regime and how it shapes individual expectations of the good life.
Jane Smiley, the author of A Thousand Acres and Moo, confronts these questions in her typically trenchant way in a essay called "Idle Hands," excerpted in the June 1995 Harper's "Readings" section. She begins by saying that after living in the upper Midwest for twenty-one years, "the pressure to put your children to work [doing chores] is unrelenting." She goes on to say that so far she has resisted the edict, and her daughters "have led a life of tropical idleness, much to their benefit." She fears for her son, however, because his father, raised in Iowa and put to work at an early age, may have this "early training...kick in" despite his best intentions to resist it.
She surmises that the reason adults push chores on children "have to do with developing good work habits or, in the absence of good work habits, at least habits of working. No such thing as a free lunch, any job worth doing is worth doing right, work before play, all of that." (I would add, Nothing good ever comes easy, you can't always do what you want, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel.) But, she goes on, teaching this kind of work ethic says something about the nature of the kind of work that needs to be done: the world is full of jobs no one wants to do and the purpose of work is to get through them as quickly as possible so that people can get on to doing things they actually enjoy. "Chores" fall exactly into this category, and what they teach the child "is the lesson of alienated labor: not to love the work but to get it over with; not to feel pride in one's contribution but to feel resentment at the waste of one's time."
As a child, she explains, her parents did not expect her to lift a finger, and she escaped the severe tutoring of chores. However, she did work hard at one thing: taking care of horses. And she did this because, rather than having the work imposed on her, she instead chose the work (and it chose her) because of her own need to engage with these animals. "I can't say," she points out, "that cleaning out her bucket when she manured in it was an actual joy, but I knew she wasn't going to do it herself. I saw the purpose of my labor, and I wasn't alienated from it."
In contrast, her husband, who worked hard as a child (his father had him mixing cement at the age of five) is an excellent worker, "out-Iowa-ing the Iowans." Yet the urge to give up the work habits to do what he actually enjoys nags at him constantly: "he's torn between doing a good job and longing not to be doing it at all." To her husband, not working makes him feel guilty; working makes him desire to be somewhere else enjoying what he loves, such as the golf course. Another variation on the theme of alienated labor.
Smiley concludes that "good work is not the work we assign children but the work they want to do, whether it's reading in bed...or cleaning their rooms or practicing the flute or making roasted potatoes with rosemary and Parmesan for the family dinner." The situation she describes in her family reflects the larger conception of work in this society: most often, unless one circles in the higher latitudes of the regime, capitalist discipline requires people to exchange their lives for chores, for work that offers little inner satisfaction and can't be amended to fit personal tastes or desires, so that somebody somewhere can profit off the alienation. In other words, the vaunted and revered "work ethic."
Now, I know what Ms. Smiley's "work ethic" is like. I've worked at one wage job or another since the age of fourteen, when I cut lawns, folded sheets, cleaned rooms, hauled garbage, and a did plague of other maintenance tasks for a dollar an hour at a local resort. From there I graduated to the usual grease-related restaurant jobs, such as Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. (To this day I cannot eat any KFC products, knowing, as I do, the inside skinny on the Colonel's special recipe.) I also did yard work, construction, farm chores, and factory work.
One of the definitive "work ethic" experiences happened one summer between semesters in college. Through the father of a high school chum I got a job working in a paper factory in Holyoke, MA. The company didn't make paper, it cut it, into endless congeries of notebooks and pads and ruled graph paper and fine stationery. Every morning at 6 AM a tired, sometimes hung-over group of us would gather in front of a 19th-century crenellated mass of brick. We'd file into the airless womb (the windows having been shut overnight for security), shuck our lunches into the refrigerator into the employees' locker-room, and straggle to our stations. By 6:10 the building vibrated with the hammer of knives and cutters and dolleys with pallets piled high.
I started, as befits a college boy among the working class, at the bottom, hunting down garbage and hauling loads of eight foot-high columns of cut paper to the knife men, who would knock them down into 8½x11s or 6x9s. The columns came from these long, bowling-alley length machines that took huge rolls of paper and sliced them into rectangular sheets as the rolls unwound. At one end a technician would attach the role, calibrate the machine, and set it humming. At the other end another worker would watch the pile of sheets rise until, by some signal I never caught, he'd throw in cardboard inserts that would become, at the knife, the front and back covers of the product. When completed, I hauled.
The chief technician of this phase of the operation was George, a rummy and rheumy soul who drank perilous amounts of liquor during the day to keep his hands steady. Everybody knew he drank, including the bosses, but his system had become so attuned to the frequencies of grain alcohol that, with it, he was sober, and without it, he lost control. As long as he maintained a certain fluid level in his system, like the oil in an oil pan, he worked precisely and demonically, keeping the rest of us hopping all day.
The man at the knife to whom I brought the wobbling stump of paper went by Frank, though he'd grown up with the Italian version, Francisco. A short man, shorter than I, he reminded me of nothing else but a ferret or some other slim, twitchy rodent. The knife he worked consisted of a huge hydraulic press and a five-foot long blade that could whisper through cellulose or bone with equal, elegant disregard. I would help him wrestle the first bundle off the pile and onto the gleaming steel apron of his machine, and then I watched him calibrate the machine, depending upon the product he had to cut. Like a surgeon he set the stops of the machine's ruler so that when he trimmed the edges he would have, exactly, the right multiples of 82 and 11, and when he slid the pile around to cut it, like a fromaggier cutting a wheel of cheddar, his hands worked with a precise choreography, timing his movements with the lift of the safety and the stamp of his foot on the release pedal that made the blade drop and take its silken bite. A moment too late, and his fingers rather than the trim would be sliding toward the waste basket. Frank was a venomous sort of guy, full of bile and complaint, but, boy, could he work his knife, his wiry body sliding and docking slabs of paper that weighed almost as much as he did. When he had a break, he sucked down a cigarette by the window that had the most sun.
A long, banquet-sized table on wheels stood at the ready; he loaded his cut pieces onto it. When he'd filled it up, I moved it to the next station, where Louise would put the notebooks into a machine that punched holes along the edge and fed wire through them to form the spiral binding. Then the completed articles would get sent to Ludmilla, a Polish survivor of World War II, who spent the six years of the war in a detainee camp providing the glorious Reich with her free labor. She and her assistant would box the products up. Ludmilla knew, by experience, just how many boxes a particular-sized order would take and which boxes, of the dozens she had, would fill up most compactly. I'd then steer them to the loading dock to feed the trucks that scuttled in and out all day long.
Other things went on besides my hauling notebooks and steno pads to Frank. Josie and Marie worked next to Louise. Their responsibility, and I never saw this change for the two years the company employed me, centered on wrapping up packages of light-blue-covered examination books in heavy stock, deeper-blue paper, making neat folds clinched with precisely cut pieces of tape. Josie was deaf, and Marie would sign to her whenever anything needed to be done; during breaks, they'd talk animatedly, and it always amazed me that they had anything left to say to each other, yoked as they'd been all these years.
Mary, from Country Cork and still ladling out her accent even after 17 years at this particular factory, ran a machine that produced 3x5 memo pads. Pads of paper that needed gluing rather than spiral binders went to another section; there, workers would spread cheesecloth over human-length stacks, then smear a thick glue over the mess, trimming away the excess when it dried and moving them out to Ludmilla. Upstairs, two prim, bow-tied gentlemen named William and Richard worked on the fine stationery, taking in the special requests for graph paper or ledger paper with a red rule or blueprint paper, drawing up the specs for each order, and then sending instructions down to George or one of the other mechanics, who would set up the machines for the cutting and the inking.
On the few occasions I had to go up there, the atmosphere of work changed completely. Upstairs had more open space; they had scattered piles of finished products leisurely across the expanse of factory floor, and one wended rather than walked through the inventory. The thick flooring muted the constant yammering hunger of the machines downstairs; motes danced in sunlight here, and the bow-tied formality of William and Richard, who had a sense of themselves as aristocrats in this place, spoke quietly and deliberately. Upstairs offered a deep breath and a moment of refreshment; I tried to get up there as often as possible.
My first summer there limped along, the money going into my account for college, the days dichotomized into work and sleep. The second summer, Mr. Huntley, the shop foreman, decided to put me on a knife. (He was the only one we addressed with a "Mister"; even William and Richard couldn't claim that privilege.) The company had taken a government contract for 550,000 6"x9" grey cardboard-covered steno pads, and Mr. Huntley assigned me the task of making the government happy. While I knew in my brain what half a million meant, I had never handled a half-million of anything. That summer solved that specific lack of experience. For eight hours a day, five days a week (eventually this changed to ten-hour days in order to get the order done), I cut steno pads and sent them to Louise for spiral binding. At the end of each day I would tally how many I had done until eventually I gave it up, knowing that the counting wouldn't speed up the process and that the number 550,000 would appear when it was prepared to do so and not a single unit before.
On the ten-hour days I would ride my bike through the lightening dark of early dawn, getting to the factory with George, who, oddly enough, Mr. Huntley trusted to open the place. We'd both walk into the stuffy, unvented building, opening windows, he sucking down a beer, me my Coke. Then for an hour before anyone else arrived I would start cutting steno pads, and I would stay for an hour afterwards as well, cutting steno pads, then bike the few miles back home for shower, dinner, and a dead-man's sleep.
I could easily condemn this experience as simple pure drudgery and write a tale both of triumph (I survived) and indictment (an inhumane and soul-deadening capitalist system). It most certainly was drudgery, but as with any human activity, even the most degrading, upon reflection, other meanings precipitate out of it, the philosophical equivalent of going upstairs where William and Richard tend the fine stationery to get a perspective on the grinding machines below.
One clear lesson out of that summer involved privilege. For three months I had to maintain the kind of mulish stamina my fellow workers had to maintain for twelve. This stamina had no nobility in it, no greater end that infused it with dignity or glory; it only ran on truculence and inertia and (maybe) the smallest pinch of pride. With admiration laced by pity, I thought of Mary sitting at her 3x5 memo pad machine for 17 years, or George pouring a lifetime of liquor and labor through his body, neither of them nurtured, both of them abraded by the one activity that had both defined and eaten up the best days of their lives. At break time or lunch time or the rare after-work beer together, I could moan along with the rest of them about how what a shitty job this was and if only I hit it big in Vegas, how I'd walk into Mr. Huntley's office the next day, crap on his desk, rip up my time card, and walk way into a life of luxury.
But while I could talk the talk and walk the walk, at least for the three months I stood chopping steno pads at my knife, I also knew, with great relief and no small measure of guilt, that the privileges afforded me by the luck of life would allow me to walk out the door in September and never have to suffer their proletarian fate unless I chose to do so. Privilege gave me choices, allowed me to slum, let me skirt those things that didn't appeal to me, let me plunge into those that did. In all the jobs I had ever had I always knew, at some basic level, that I would not flip burgers for the rest of my life; working at the paper factory turned this casual intuition into a class consciousness. As much as I might want to (and I didn't really want to), I now wouldn't be able to look at the course of my life without thinking (with some thankfulness) of how not-Mary or not-George it was. Insulting, condescending, self-flattering? In a way, yes, because I was using them to inoculate myself. But nevertheless true.
But, reality being a tricky bastard, the good graces and unseen depths of my fellow factory denizens never allowed me to harden this sense of privilege into a sense of entitlement or aristocracy. They were not stupid; they may have worked like navvies all their lives, but their minds hadn't been ground down completely to dust. They, too, knew about class differences, and while they may have resented my choices (which they were not shy about voicing), and would probably have bristled at my being thankful I didn't live like they lived, they also respected the kind of life that gave someone those choices and the person who would take advantage of them. Which means that they both respected me and thought I was spoiled, depending on the hour and day of the week.
My first summer there almost everyone called me, accurately enough, "college boy." At first I resented it because I thought they meant to insult me; as it turned out, for some of them, that's exactly what they meant to do, for envy or resentment or just plain nastiness. But for others, like Frank and Mary, "college boy" had multiple resonances. At Level 1, so to speak, they used it as a pigeon-hole, a place to place a stranger. But underneath that the phrase also proxied for a whole host of unarticulated aspirations, or, more accurately as I got to know them better, aspirations for being a kind of "educated" they knew they would never obtain but nevertheless could not stop wanting. It was an "educated," as I found out, that they believed would liberate them, and it was all the more poignant that they knew, even as they wanted it, they would never achieve it.
Occasionally, on break time, they would ask me what I studied in school. On campus one could say "I'm majoring in social relations (or Soc Rel, as it was called), or English, or History and Literature," and most everyone would understand the shorthand without a lot of annotation. But on the factory floor, the jargon wouldn't work, and I found that I really had to dig for meaning as I explained my course of study, not only to make it understandable to them but, as I realized, to make it understandable to me. Just a simple question like "Why would anyone want to study that?" forced me to explain in simple, single-syllable, abstraction-less language about aesthetics and learning for its own sake and the whiteness of the whale. They showed respect to me by even asking about my life; I tried to honor that respect by answering their questions with a vocabulary that bridged our differences in class and experience. More often than not my tongue resembled The Ashley Book of Knots, and the "college boy" came off looking pretty clueless.
I recall one conversation with Frank, Kevin (another knife man who worked the machine on the other side of me), Mary, and Louise. For some reason, we congregated around my knife at break time, a ritual whose beginnings no one recalled but which we kept doing anyways. The air felt like stew; the day promised nothing but humidity. I don't remember now the conversational by-ways, but for some reason we got on to the subject of dying and what it all meant. Frank was volubly for heaven; Mary, Catholic that she was but less voluble, agreed. Louise had her doubts: she didn't like the picture of worms in the cold ground but couldn't wrap her mind around eternal bliss. Kevin snapped out that "ya die and that's it and no one should get in a twist about it." So here we had, in a humid clutch on a July day in a paper mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts, two Aquinians, an agnostic, and a materialist. They looked at me, the scholar.
This was the moment Albert Camus arrived in Holyoke, a little known fact about his life. I started talking about "this guy named Camus" who had written a book I read about a guy in a Greek myth, Sisyphus. In less than three minutes I verbally erected for them the entire philosophical skeleton of existentialism but did it so that it connected with what they'd been talking about: Frank and Mary's desire for an after-life certainty and the effects of that desire on their sense of life's meaning and morality; Louise's doubt, wanting to straddle the fence and keep her options open; Kevin's no-nonsense certainty as a way to settle his own doubts and get on with living. The 15 minutes flew by, and we all drifted back to our immediate work, but for what it was worth, they had gotten a taste of what the "college boy" got a taste of all the time, and in a way it validated that they had minds that could have done what the "college boy" did, if the dice had gone another way. As Mary said once, in her ear-easy Cork accent, "My head hurts sometimes when I talk with you, but I like it."
So the "college boy," once he proved he could cut notebooks with the best of them, that is, once he'd taken the trouble to learn their ways, was given the respect of being listened to by his workmates. In turn, the "college boy" got a reality check so that he didn't drift too far out on the philosophical winds without a tether, and his fellows got a chance to flex their cortexes in a way that tending tons of pounding metal eight hours a day didn't require. Still the class differences, still the different destinies, but also the leaven of mutual respect and the exchange of more than the lip synch of small talk.
* * * * *
From the time I left college till the age of 35 I worked in the traditional professional way as a teacher and administrator, putting in my day, paying my union dues, deducting for retirement, like millions of other people. But while I may have been a "professional" (which meant I couldn't make time-and-a-half for all the Saturdays and late nights I worked), and the work may have been interesting and occasionally inspiring, I still earned my bread through the paycheck in hierarchical organizations that required me to follow a schedule and bide a party line. As Marx would have put it, I was still a "wage slave," albeit one whose suffering hovered in the "not very much" end of the continuum.
At the age of 35, though, I had a manumission, thanks to a job that, in its dreariness, booted me out my complacency. I took a position as a director of continuing education for a two-year business college, responsible for running the evening classes. At first the thought of directing a program excited me: I could recruit faculty, set curriculum, advise instructors -- in short, make an impact on something larger than just a single classroom. Unfortunately, my handlers conceived of the job very differently, something they didn't quite reveal during the interview process. They saw the job of director as a glorified enrollment counselor. They expected me to be on the phone (and to hire several other telemarketers to staff the phones) to recruit students for the bulk of my noon to 8 PM schedule. Not much room for collegial discussions or program development; "Upping The Tuition" could have been this school's official motto.
I had a one-year contract, at the end of which they did not offer me a second contract since my numbers, while not bad and slightly higher than the year before, had not reached their expectations. Deemed incompetent by the system that I had spent all my professional life working for, I decided (35 being one of those ages ripe for decisions like this) to do what I'd always wanted to do: make some part of my living as a writer. So I took on the vigors and rigors of freelance writing, which is the work I do today.
Because I had never worked except for a paycheck, I kept a journal about this "experiment" to document the sea change as I moved from pay stub to invoice. As I wrote my entries outlining the difference between the wage work I'd done in the past and the mixed blessings of hustling jobs and making my own hours, the phrase "work ethic" popped up into view quite often. As a freelancer, under no one's gun but my own, I had to cultivate a real work ethic, one that would sit me at my desk for hours at a time, make me follow-up on my calls, and arrive at the interviews fifteen minutes early. The only overseer I had, other than the one we all suffer under in having to make enough money to eat, was my own conscientiousness.
A number of qualities distinguished this ethic from the previous regimen of imposed schedules and required presence. Outwardly, they didn't differ that much: I often worked long hours (often longer than if I'd had an eight-hour stint at some office job), I still had bosses (even though I now called them "clients"), schedules still dictated how my day would flow. But, first and foremost, no matter how many hours I worked or how stupid the particular project, my time felt (even if, in another sense, it wasn't) my own. I had chosen to follow this path, with all its briars and gnarls. That element of choice, in turn, made all the difference in how I felt about the necessity of making a living. In fact, I didn't, as before, distinguish between making a living and actually living; I now felt that the two coincided. Because I had a greater choice in how I shaped my life, what I did to feed it pretty well matched what I did to live it. In a third turn, then, I really believed that for the first time in my work life I earned my keep. I didn't simply pick up a paycheck at the end of the week, which is not earning but just an exchange of sweat for crumbs. Because of the quality of my work, because I always hit deadline and gave my clients not only what they asked for but always a tad more that showed respect for their requirements, I knew that the check came into my hands because I deserved the money for the value I created. Like Smiley having to clean out the manured bucket, my jobs didn't always bring joy and sweet satisfaction; but any dissatisfaction or triumph was mine, and I didn't have to sacrifice it to shareholder profit, office politics, the decisions of faceless chieftains, or the indignities of Dress Down Fridays.
In the course of my "experiment," then, I found two work ethics, one social, one part of our nature. And they do not necessarily map the same territory.
The term "work ethic" originally had a religious source, coming out of the Protestants' belief that one could acquire Mammon for the greater glory of God. When the religious aspect died out, people used the free market to justify laying up treasure, and accumulating wealth became supposedly the best protection democracy had. That democracy has been wealth's first victim is patently clear, but the ideology of the work ethic smoothes over this truth in order to keep the masses making some people richer than they need to be while convincing the workers that such behavior promotes their own good. The smoothing-over works this way: the work ethic, even though it is really a social discipline, is portrayed as a matter of individual conscientiousness, which means that if you bridle against it or can't follow its dictates, then the failure is yours, not the system's. Since people dislike feeling like failures, dislike being singled out for defamatory notice, they'll keep pretty close to the expected path.
But such propaganda wouldn't keep people getting up in the morning if something else didn't resonate in people, something that really wants to work, to "make good," an work ethic that comes out of an individual person's inner desire to express his or her creativity, an internal drive to accomplish something worthwhile. The alienation many workers feel in their jobs occurs because the social work ethic and the individual work ethic do not match each other. The social work ethic can only be effective if it makes people conform to the exploitative nature of the system. This directly contravenes the individual work ethic. Where the social work ethic demands control, the individual work ethic demands liberty. But the individual work ethic simply doesn't have the power to displace the social work ethic, and workers must make whatever treaties they can (like becoming a freelance writer) to make their work lives tolerable.
Is the work ethic in decline? This question has risen repeatedly over the last decade or so as economic insecurities, the apparent successes of Japan and Germany (now seen as less solid than first thought), the imploding American job market, and the American citizen's propensity to consume rather than save has challenged the propaganda's power to keep the workers in line. Given a situation like this, and adding in a multitude of other non-economic factors that nevertheless aggravate the economic qualms, the work ethic is, indeed, in decline, that is, the social work ethic, the disciplinary code, with the understanding that "decline" is defined by those who stand to lose the most if the restraints unravel. If the social work ethic is weakening, its downslide is ironically caused by its successfully having convinced people to give over their best parts, their individual work ethic, to the economic system. Some of these best parts no longer want to be given over; thus, we see a "decline" in the ethic, which really means a loosening of its grip on our lives. And this, too, is good because such resistance might lead to more humanity in the system. (Notice I said "might"; "humanity" is not one of the factors the regime uses to tote up its bottom line.)
There's a bumper sticker which says "I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go." Wouldn't it be better if we could say "I grow, I grow, it's off to work I go"? Don't wait for it any time soon.
(October 1995)