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Yet another interesting article about how we Americans tend to work too hard for no particularly good reason. Don't want to register to read it? Okay, I will enable you in your laziness because I love you.
The paragraph which caught my eye was this one:
"Calvin made work not just cool but obligatory. He believed certain people were predestined to go to heaven and others to be damned, and the only way to tell the Elect was to see who was working hard and had money, wealth itself being a sign of divine grace. He not only turned Catholic teaching about the perils of riches on its head, he contended that losers should blame themselves, not the system."
'Work' is just another word for life
Labor has evolved, but we're no better for it
By William Dietrich
THE SEATTLE TIMES
Sunday, September 5, 2004
SEATTLE -- The ancient Greeks knew all about work. Their word for it was "ponos," which meant not just toil but suffering. And pain. Work was for slaves. The role of free men, according to the thinkers, was to avoid work as much as possible so they'd have time for war, philosophy and art.
Them were the days.
Nowadays, everybody works. We're supposed to (Protestant work ethic), most of us have to (money) and in theory we want to (personal fulfillment, or meaning).
But wait. Financial author Phil Laut has defined work as "doing what you don't want to do."
There is a difference, of course, between hard work (scrubbing pots and pans, for example) and head work (writing stories such as this one). And we all know there's a big difference between daily dreariness and occasional discontent, and between working poor and working rich.
Rich is better.
And anyone who has been unemployed knows the only thing worse than working is not working at all.
So does the word "work" adequately cover the gamut from ditch-digging and hash-slinging to theoretical physics and kayak instruction? Hasn't it just become another word for life? In America, isn't what you do who you are?
Moreover, does pay for ponos have any sensible correlation anymore when people with "play" in their job descriptions, such as actors and athletes, sometimes earn way more than the everyday "pluggers" who plug along actually making tangible things?
And if we're so democratic and ready to export our values to the Middle East, how come the disparity between rich and poor in America is widening as fast as our waistlines?
Why do Americans, on average, work more than any nation in the world: 137 hours more than the Japanese -- the equivalent of 3 1/2 vacation weeks, or a staggering 12 1/2 vacation weeks more than the Germans? Yet many don't have savings for a decent retirement, and millions have no health insurance.
Why do the people with the "best" jobs often complain the most about stress? Why do the ones with the most job security, such as civil servants and tenured professors -- folks you couldn't dislodge with a stick of dynamite -- worry aloud the most about being fired?
I'm not entirely sure. But in the meantime, take comfort in the words of humorist Dave Barry: "If you set your goals high, and you never, ever give up, I guarantee that one day, you will find yourself working for a huge, impersonal corporation run by morons."
Revolution of work
For several thousand years, work was really work, and everybody who was anybody sneered at it. A huge population of slaves, serfs and peasants used their muscles in grimy toil to support a tiny aristocracy of warriors, lords and priests who devoted their lives to art, religion, small mercies to the poor and killing each other.
This system was not particularly efficient. The game for a slave, who has no opportunity for pay or advancement, might be to do as little as possible. The same could be said of the minimum-wage "working poor" of today.
It was technology that began providing opportunities for a new middle class of entrepreneurs, and the Protestant Reformation that changed Western attitudes toward work. The leading philosopher was a French clergymember named John Calvin, one of those dead European guys you've scarcely heard of whose thinking nonetheless rules your life.
Calvin made work not just cool but obligatory. He believed certain people were predestined to go to heaven and others to be damned, and the only way to tell the Elect was to see who was working hard and had money, wealth itself being a sign of divine grace. He not only turned Catholic teaching about the perils of riches on its head, he contended that losers should blame themselves, not the system.
Calvinism helped turn us into a nation of workaholics and, as a byproduct, a superpower. Ben Franklin encoded the Protestant work ethic in his homilies, 19th-century textbooks drummed home the evils of idleness, Horatio Alger penned best sellers about boys working from the bottom to the top, and industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford started a drumbeat of self-improvement sermons that go on today.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution emptied farmlands for the factory. Then robots began emptying the factory for today's postindustrial whatever. The new wild card in this stacked deck is the rise of well-educated but cheap foreign labor that has sucked 2 million manufacturing jobs and 400,000 service jobs overseas the past two decades, even while America has in turn gained the best-and-brightest immigrants.
You don't just compete with your deskmate anymore, you compete with 6.3 billion global neighbors who would love to take your job. Already, 245,000 people in India are employed to answer, in accented English, our dingbat questions about computer glitches and telephone calling plans.
That's why business, which has been enjoying a labor surplus for 30 years, isn't sweating baby-boomer retirements. It'll just hire overseas.
Each generation has tried to make sense of tumultuous change. The "Greatest Generation" of the Depression and World War II achieved, from 1947 to 1973, the longest-lasting boom in the nation's history, the greatest and most equitable growth of income, and a simple attitude about jobs: They were precious. If you got one, you held onto it. Work's "meaning" was being able to buy a house and car. And work was hard.
For baby boomers, a job seemed a given, and the question was which job to reform the world. Work was not just about money but meaning.
But an economy flattened by Vietnam and the Cold War soon produced cynicism and reversal. There was a surplus of labor not just from the boomer bulge but from the entry of women into the workforce. The last year in which personal income significantly rose for ordinary workers was 1973. Ever since, earnings for the rank and file (adjusted for inflation) have been essentially flat.
For Generations X and Y, there is more opportunity as the Information Age has forged a growing "creative class," but there is none of the security and predictability their grandparents knew: not of job (their company is likely to be bought out or become obsolete), not of workplace (it may move), not of retirement. Work isn't logical anymore, and so this generation's interest is in labor as a means to a lifestyle. Their loyalty is not to an employer but to the city where they want to live.
Productivity, income
From 1947 to 1973, real income, adjusted for inflation, rose about 75 percent, and went up almost equally for the poor, middle class and rich. Since then, the growth of wealth has continued, but real hourly wages have declined and middle-class income is virtually static (rising at best half a percent a year, adjusted for inflation). Only pay for the upper classes has soared.
The stall in pay for most people is odd, because worker productivity -- or the amount of goods and services we each produce, on average -- has risen 61 percent since 1980. Benefit should have followed, right? If we make more, don't we get more?
Nope. Instead, average CEO pay in the same period rose 480 percent, corporate profits rose 145 percent, and income for the top 1 percent of American earners climbed 157 percent, all adjusted for inflation. America now has 2.2 million millionaires, and CEO pay that was 44 times that of an average worker in 1980 has rocketed to 301 times in 2004.
Adding to the confusion is a yo-yoing tax system. The top rate for the progressive income tax went from 7 percent in 1913 to 90 percent under Eisenhower, fell to 70 percent under Kennedy, 28 percent under Reagan, back up to 31 percent under the elder Bush, 39.6 percent under Clinton, and a projected decline back to 33 percent under George W. Bush Meanwhile, the maximum Social Security tax for employer and employee combined has risen from $60 in 1949 to $9,424 -- for a system some pundits claim remains insolvent.
To put all this another way: For a quarter-century you've worked like a donkey to boost productivity, and almost all the benefits have gone to your boss and his investors.
Why have we let this happen? Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels asked just this question and concluded that, basically, we're dumb: 20 percent of those he polled were unaware of this trend entirely, 40 percent hadn't thought much about it, and the rest either benefited or didn't believe anything could be done.
We keep voting for politicians, financed by the upper crust, who have protected this growing inequality. And we do so at our peril. "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics," the philosopher Plutarch said.
Another reason we tolerate this inequity is because it was masked by the entry of women into the workforce. While individual pay has stagnated, many households went from one to two incomes. Well and good, but this also meant that female employment went from liberating choice to daunting obligation overnight, as two-income families bid up the price of housing. This is the biggest American social revolution since the Civil War, and work has found little solution in the conflict between career and motherhood.
Catch-22
So here's the game plan of the modern workplace. One tactic is to take work and life asthey are, go through the stages of denial-bargaining-acceptance, and deal with it. This is the theme of the daily comic strip "Pluggers," defined as "the 80 percent of humanity who unceremoniously keep plugging along, balancing work, play and family life. Even if they're struggling, they are optimistic."
Another is to respond to inequity by doing as little as possible, like the coffee-cup-carrying Wally in the comic strip "Dilbert." To paraphrase the old joke about communism, his bosses pretend to pay him, and he pretends to work.
A third way is to go into management, and when you think about it, the burgeoning bureaucracy that has developed since the 1980s makes perfect sense. If real income is static, then the only way to get ahead is by promotion. If machines are eliminating manufacturing jobs, one way to absorb surplus labor is to add bosses.
Any middle manager worth her salt will contrive to hire yet another middle manager, thus accomplishing two things: shifting her work onto her clone, and, by supervising the new submanager, justifying yet another pay raise. Management is the most efficient self-replicating program since DNA.
Top management doesn't mind this, because middle managers are like the boys who painted Tom Sawyer's fence: They work overtime for free. One hallmark of modern "brain work" is that, while allowing casual clothes and more flexible schedules, it is also never, ever, really over.
Statistically, Americans are the most productive, richest and collectively unhappiest of the top six industrial nations, researchers contend. In an Internet essay titled "Technology and the Work Ethic," author James Leth argued that the central dilemma for a corporate employee is this: "To have a good life, you must earn a good salary. To earn a good salary, you can't have a life."
There are alternatives. Authors such as Joe Dominguez, Vicki Robin and Cecille Andrews have penned books pointing out that acceptance of a lower standard of living can mean more freedom and less stress with no real decline in the quality of life.
And studies of primitive bush people in the harsh Kalahari Desert show they need only spend a few hours a day at "work" to survive.
But it never seems simple. What about health benefits? Retirement? College tuition for the kids? Weddings that allegedly average $23,000 a pop? The health-club membership, the Hawaiian sun break, the Starbucks latte?
And for many of us, work isn't just about money. It gives us purpose. It's our social network. It provides structure. It instills pride.
So, do you ever get to rest? Maybe not. Remember 1999, at the height of the boom, when everyone dreamed about retiring early? Didn't make sense, did it? Now the Social Security retirement age is scheduled to recede, 401(k)s are moldering, pension plans are being gutted, workers are being fired before they can claim them, and we may be headed back to a time like 1950, when almost half those over 65 still worked.
Oh, well. "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," said Andrew Carnegie.
And just be glad you don't have the angst of the newly rich who hire the services of California's Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, set up to help them make sense of their guiltily affluent lives.
"Money used to be called the root of all evil," says institute director Stephen Golbart. "Now it's the root of stress and confusion."
Pity.
The paragraph which caught my eye was this one:
"Calvin made work not just cool but obligatory. He believed certain people were predestined to go to heaven and others to be damned, and the only way to tell the Elect was to see who was working hard and had money, wealth itself being a sign of divine grace. He not only turned Catholic teaching about the perils of riches on its head, he contended that losers should blame themselves, not the system."
'Work' is just another word for life
Labor has evolved, but we're no better for it
By William Dietrich
THE SEATTLE TIMES
Sunday, September 5, 2004
SEATTLE -- The ancient Greeks knew all about work. Their word for it was "ponos," which meant not just toil but suffering. And pain. Work was for slaves. The role of free men, according to the thinkers, was to avoid work as much as possible so they'd have time for war, philosophy and art.
Them were the days.
Nowadays, everybody works. We're supposed to (Protestant work ethic), most of us have to (money) and in theory we want to (personal fulfillment, or meaning).
But wait. Financial author Phil Laut has defined work as "doing what you don't want to do."
There is a difference, of course, between hard work (scrubbing pots and pans, for example) and head work (writing stories such as this one). And we all know there's a big difference between daily dreariness and occasional discontent, and between working poor and working rich.
Rich is better.
And anyone who has been unemployed knows the only thing worse than working is not working at all.
So does the word "work" adequately cover the gamut from ditch-digging and hash-slinging to theoretical physics and kayak instruction? Hasn't it just become another word for life? In America, isn't what you do who you are?
Moreover, does pay for ponos have any sensible correlation anymore when people with "play" in their job descriptions, such as actors and athletes, sometimes earn way more than the everyday "pluggers" who plug along actually making tangible things?
And if we're so democratic and ready to export our values to the Middle East, how come the disparity between rich and poor in America is widening as fast as our waistlines?
Why do Americans, on average, work more than any nation in the world: 137 hours more than the Japanese -- the equivalent of 3 1/2 vacation weeks, or a staggering 12 1/2 vacation weeks more than the Germans? Yet many don't have savings for a decent retirement, and millions have no health insurance.
Why do the people with the "best" jobs often complain the most about stress? Why do the ones with the most job security, such as civil servants and tenured professors -- folks you couldn't dislodge with a stick of dynamite -- worry aloud the most about being fired?
I'm not entirely sure. But in the meantime, take comfort in the words of humorist Dave Barry: "If you set your goals high, and you never, ever give up, I guarantee that one day, you will find yourself working for a huge, impersonal corporation run by morons."
Revolution of work
For several thousand years, work was really work, and everybody who was anybody sneered at it. A huge population of slaves, serfs and peasants used their muscles in grimy toil to support a tiny aristocracy of warriors, lords and priests who devoted their lives to art, religion, small mercies to the poor and killing each other.
This system was not particularly efficient. The game for a slave, who has no opportunity for pay or advancement, might be to do as little as possible. The same could be said of the minimum-wage "working poor" of today.
It was technology that began providing opportunities for a new middle class of entrepreneurs, and the Protestant Reformation that changed Western attitudes toward work. The leading philosopher was a French clergymember named John Calvin, one of those dead European guys you've scarcely heard of whose thinking nonetheless rules your life.
Calvin made work not just cool but obligatory. He believed certain people were predestined to go to heaven and others to be damned, and the only way to tell the Elect was to see who was working hard and had money, wealth itself being a sign of divine grace. He not only turned Catholic teaching about the perils of riches on its head, he contended that losers should blame themselves, not the system.
Calvinism helped turn us into a nation of workaholics and, as a byproduct, a superpower. Ben Franklin encoded the Protestant work ethic in his homilies, 19th-century textbooks drummed home the evils of idleness, Horatio Alger penned best sellers about boys working from the bottom to the top, and industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford started a drumbeat of self-improvement sermons that go on today.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution emptied farmlands for the factory. Then robots began emptying the factory for today's postindustrial whatever. The new wild card in this stacked deck is the rise of well-educated but cheap foreign labor that has sucked 2 million manufacturing jobs and 400,000 service jobs overseas the past two decades, even while America has in turn gained the best-and-brightest immigrants.
You don't just compete with your deskmate anymore, you compete with 6.3 billion global neighbors who would love to take your job. Already, 245,000 people in India are employed to answer, in accented English, our dingbat questions about computer glitches and telephone calling plans.
That's why business, which has been enjoying a labor surplus for 30 years, isn't sweating baby-boomer retirements. It'll just hire overseas.
Each generation has tried to make sense of tumultuous change. The "Greatest Generation" of the Depression and World War II achieved, from 1947 to 1973, the longest-lasting boom in the nation's history, the greatest and most equitable growth of income, and a simple attitude about jobs: They were precious. If you got one, you held onto it. Work's "meaning" was being able to buy a house and car. And work was hard.
For baby boomers, a job seemed a given, and the question was which job to reform the world. Work was not just about money but meaning.
But an economy flattened by Vietnam and the Cold War soon produced cynicism and reversal. There was a surplus of labor not just from the boomer bulge but from the entry of women into the workforce. The last year in which personal income significantly rose for ordinary workers was 1973. Ever since, earnings for the rank and file (adjusted for inflation) have been essentially flat.
For Generations X and Y, there is more opportunity as the Information Age has forged a growing "creative class," but there is none of the security and predictability their grandparents knew: not of job (their company is likely to be bought out or become obsolete), not of workplace (it may move), not of retirement. Work isn't logical anymore, and so this generation's interest is in labor as a means to a lifestyle. Their loyalty is not to an employer but to the city where they want to live.
Productivity, income
From 1947 to 1973, real income, adjusted for inflation, rose about 75 percent, and went up almost equally for the poor, middle class and rich. Since then, the growth of wealth has continued, but real hourly wages have declined and middle-class income is virtually static (rising at best half a percent a year, adjusted for inflation). Only pay for the upper classes has soared.
The stall in pay for most people is odd, because worker productivity -- or the amount of goods and services we each produce, on average -- has risen 61 percent since 1980. Benefit should have followed, right? If we make more, don't we get more?
Nope. Instead, average CEO pay in the same period rose 480 percent, corporate profits rose 145 percent, and income for the top 1 percent of American earners climbed 157 percent, all adjusted for inflation. America now has 2.2 million millionaires, and CEO pay that was 44 times that of an average worker in 1980 has rocketed to 301 times in 2004.
Adding to the confusion is a yo-yoing tax system. The top rate for the progressive income tax went from 7 percent in 1913 to 90 percent under Eisenhower, fell to 70 percent under Kennedy, 28 percent under Reagan, back up to 31 percent under the elder Bush, 39.6 percent under Clinton, and a projected decline back to 33 percent under George W. Bush Meanwhile, the maximum Social Security tax for employer and employee combined has risen from $60 in 1949 to $9,424 -- for a system some pundits claim remains insolvent.
To put all this another way: For a quarter-century you've worked like a donkey to boost productivity, and almost all the benefits have gone to your boss and his investors.
Why have we let this happen? Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels asked just this question and concluded that, basically, we're dumb: 20 percent of those he polled were unaware of this trend entirely, 40 percent hadn't thought much about it, and the rest either benefited or didn't believe anything could be done.
We keep voting for politicians, financed by the upper crust, who have protected this growing inequality. And we do so at our peril. "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics," the philosopher Plutarch said.
Another reason we tolerate this inequity is because it was masked by the entry of women into the workforce. While individual pay has stagnated, many households went from one to two incomes. Well and good, but this also meant that female employment went from liberating choice to daunting obligation overnight, as two-income families bid up the price of housing. This is the biggest American social revolution since the Civil War, and work has found little solution in the conflict between career and motherhood.
Catch-22
So here's the game plan of the modern workplace. One tactic is to take work and life asthey are, go through the stages of denial-bargaining-acceptance, and deal with it. This is the theme of the daily comic strip "Pluggers," defined as "the 80 percent of humanity who unceremoniously keep plugging along, balancing work, play and family life. Even if they're struggling, they are optimistic."
Another is to respond to inequity by doing as little as possible, like the coffee-cup-carrying Wally in the comic strip "Dilbert." To paraphrase the old joke about communism, his bosses pretend to pay him, and he pretends to work.
A third way is to go into management, and when you think about it, the burgeoning bureaucracy that has developed since the 1980s makes perfect sense. If real income is static, then the only way to get ahead is by promotion. If machines are eliminating manufacturing jobs, one way to absorb surplus labor is to add bosses.
Any middle manager worth her salt will contrive to hire yet another middle manager, thus accomplishing two things: shifting her work onto her clone, and, by supervising the new submanager, justifying yet another pay raise. Management is the most efficient self-replicating program since DNA.
Top management doesn't mind this, because middle managers are like the boys who painted Tom Sawyer's fence: They work overtime for free. One hallmark of modern "brain work" is that, while allowing casual clothes and more flexible schedules, it is also never, ever, really over.
Statistically, Americans are the most productive, richest and collectively unhappiest of the top six industrial nations, researchers contend. In an Internet essay titled "Technology and the Work Ethic," author James Leth argued that the central dilemma for a corporate employee is this: "To have a good life, you must earn a good salary. To earn a good salary, you can't have a life."
There are alternatives. Authors such as Joe Dominguez, Vicki Robin and Cecille Andrews have penned books pointing out that acceptance of a lower standard of living can mean more freedom and less stress with no real decline in the quality of life.
And studies of primitive bush people in the harsh Kalahari Desert show they need only spend a few hours a day at "work" to survive.
But it never seems simple. What about health benefits? Retirement? College tuition for the kids? Weddings that allegedly average $23,000 a pop? The health-club membership, the Hawaiian sun break, the Starbucks latte?
And for many of us, work isn't just about money. It gives us purpose. It's our social network. It provides structure. It instills pride.
So, do you ever get to rest? Maybe not. Remember 1999, at the height of the boom, when everyone dreamed about retiring early? Didn't make sense, did it? Now the Social Security retirement age is scheduled to recede, 401(k)s are moldering, pension plans are being gutted, workers are being fired before they can claim them, and we may be headed back to a time like 1950, when almost half those over 65 still worked.
Oh, well. "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," said Andrew Carnegie.
And just be glad you don't have the angst of the newly rich who hire the services of California's Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, set up to help them make sense of their guiltily affluent lives.
"Money used to be called the root of all evil," says institute director Stephen Golbart. "Now it's the root of stress and confusion."
Pity.
