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Apparently This Needs Repeating: Work Isn’t a Burden or a Penalty
So the New York Times asked me to write a “Room for Debate” piece based on this prompt: “Can companies excel without making workers miserable?”
It is a theme that had never occurred to me. As I point out in my mini-essay, companies are very profitable and workers overall aren’t miserable. So is this speculative or something? Or does it reflect a certain worldview about what brings humans deep satisfaction?
As my boss Arthur Brooks has written, “In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success. It is deeply satisfying to apply our skills and create value in our lives and in the lives of others. No wonder Americans who feel successful in the workplace are twice as likely to say that they’re happy overall. This means economic opportunity is critical. That’s what enables us to find the job that suits our skills and advance through hard work. Opportunity is the gateway to a key source of human happiness.”
Fellow RFD essayist Guy Kawasaki argued something similar: “The bottom line is that if you want to be happy at your job, find one that is psychologically rewarding with adequate compensation — in short, one that enables, encourages and even requires good work. But good work is hard. And when you want to have fun, go to Disneyland.”
So it’s important to have an economy that creates jobs, gives people necessary work skills, makes sure work pays, and requires work for welfare. Others disagree and propose a guaranteed basic income with no conditions. Here is an interesting counter by Andrew McAfee, coauthor with Erik Brynjolfsson of The Second Machine Age, a book whose predictions about technological change and automation have been cited by guaranteed income proponents:
Published in EconomicsWe love that Voltaire quote. Between “boredom, vice and need,” the need is the easiest to take care of. We’re creating a future of abundance and bounty – we’re not worried about there not being enough to go around. What we are worried about are Voltaire’s other two evils: boredom and vice. Jobs are an essential thing for a person in the community. A lot of our recommendations are around how we can keep work in the economy – even as technology continues to do amazing things.
We have a set of pretty straightforward short-term recommendations about economic growth. For the long-term, we point out that the oldest lesson of economics is to tax the stuff you want to see less of. We are taxing labor via income and payroll taxes. So our long-term recommendations are about rethinking and subsidizing labor. Whether you look at the work of conservative or liberal sociologists, you find the same thing. When jobs disappear from a community, crime and incarceration rates go way up. You see many more children raised in one-person families and higher rates of divorce. All these bad outcomes indicate how right Voltaire was. …
If we grow the economy faster, we’ll add more jobs every month. So we talk about immigration, infrastructure, entrepreneurship and education. These are all things we can and should be doing differently right now. If this technological acceleration continues – and we think it will – we’ve got to think about some bigger policy changes and interventions for the long-term. First and foremost, let’s subsidize work instead of taxing it. The negative income tax, which is very close to the earned income tax credit we have right now, rewards you more than a dollar for every dollar that you earn via work. We think that’s a great idea.
Work is a burden. Let’s not be silly. It is a necessary one.
I was just thinking I must be in the wrong line of work.
Yes, but how necessary is it really? If you all are willing to be subjected to high taxation, I’m willing to quit work and hang out at my house on your dime. I understand the government is all in for this scheme.
“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
-Bastiat
Getting to the top in business—as Amazon has—isn’t done with massages and flex time. It’s done when people work smarter and much harder than their competition. Henry Ford adopted the 40 hour work week not because he was soft-hearted but because he was hard-headed: to maximize factory line productivity, 8 hours a day/5 days a week was the most efficient way to get work out of ordinary people who want to have lives outside of work. But the people whose lives are work (a) will easily be at the office 80 hours a week or more and (b) will want to work with other workaholics. That’s the culture that Amazon has made for itself, and it’s misery for ordinary people who just want to put in 40 hours and go home.
If you want to be the best, you have to put in massive amounts of work. Most ordinary people—I’m one of them—don’t want to do that. But if we want to work at a world class company like Amazon, we should expect to. Fortunately, there are saner options out there.
Work is a blessing, granted by God, to keep hyperactive attention deficite disordered mankind from self distructing out of sheer inventive boredom. Sometimes, it’s also very hard. Sometimes it’s very rewarding. Mostly, it’s just what we have to do today.
You say this as a joke, but have you considered that it may not be? Consider the totality of history. Not even 200 years ago most people labored longer and harder than we do today to simply meet their basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing. These basic needs today can be essentially provided for people without even imposing higher taxes than we do today. Everyone today can be given an early 19th century life style on the cheap. This is because our economy is so productive. 10% of our economy today is more wealth than all of our economy in 1815.
If population levels stabilize as they seem to be doing, yet production levels keep increasing thanks to automation and technology. It may be conceivable that our economy will soon be able to easily afford a 1915 maybe even a 2015 level of comfort for everyone.
What holds us back is of course our insatiable desires for more consumption, and measurement of our wealth in relative terms.
Work is essential to true success in life.
My governor, Mark Dayton, is a perfect example. The guy’s never worked a day in his life and he’s a complete failure – politically and personally.
Dog experts say of border collies that you better give them work to do, otherwise they’ll choose work on their own–and you’ll probably not like what they choose. I think there’s a certain amount of border collie in people and those taking issue with this post are not defining work broadly enough.
I’ve been miserable while I was working, but never as miserable as when I was out of work.
Theologically speaking, God gave man work before the curse of sin. We weren’t made for infinite leisure. Even the 4-hour work week gurus don’t spend their extra time watching TV. They still labor and create, simply self-directed.
Depends on the work.
Be honest. You work for the government do you not?
You guys are free to take over my work. I wouldn’t want you to be unhappy.
I went through my workaholic phase in my late 20s (while I was working for a state government). I got over it and never went back. I am glad I went through it, because it positioned me for everything that came after.
This is an important distinction.
Even the most dissolute welfare recipients “work,” in the border-collie sense; they create problems to solve, melodramas to enact, troubles to lament. Very wealthy people (heiresses, the celebrities-for-no-reason) do the same thing.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of work to be done that isn’t remunerative, and need not be. Childrearing, for example, or home-making, or the making of art and music. My beloved son, in whom I am (occasionally) well-pleased works hard at his day-job (house painting) so that he can work really, really hard at his true passion—playing the drums in a rock band.
Lucky people love their jobs. (Maine game wardens, for example). Very lucky people perform work they love so much they would do it even if no one paid them… (the wardens’ chaplain, for example).
YES!
Of course work isn’t a burden or penalty.
Employing a worker, however, carries significant burden and potentially huge penalties. Let’s repeat that.
This line struck me:
“Can companies excel without making workers miserable?”
There is a certain percentage of people — and it is not a small percentage — that will be miserable no matter how easy you make it. I manage 60 or so well compensated people and its hard to get the majority of them to just show up regularly, work a full day, and heaven forbid, actually care about the work they do.
I used to think that work was a noble and character building pursuit. I now know that I was naive, that work is for suckers, the quicker you can get on SSI and other benefits and programs the better. It seems to be what everybody else is doing, why should I wait?
I’m still trying to figure out who’s paying for all this guaranteed income.
That is easy, the rich. Who else? They are the ones with the money.
As a girl I know that is on SSI told me. She deserves her “paycheck”, she paid into the system for 5 years so she has it coming.
I love when writers and scholars talk about the value of hard work. Really, who would know better?
Not a fan of more mucking with the income tax. Another layer of incentive or disincentive will just further muddy an already dirty pool of water.
You really want to incentivize work? Eliminate the income tax and move to a sales tax. Keeping what you earn is a sure incentive to work more.
Exactly. I love listening to talking heads lamenting the loss of all those “great factory jobs”. Ever work in a factory?
My husband runs a factory. All four of our children and not a few nieces and nephews have done time there.
Two of my sons are now in the Marine Corps, one works in event production and daughter is a stay at home mom.
Every Christmas, if I’m lucky, I have what I call a “How Green Was My Valley” moment. Where they all sit around and brag about whatever their particular job was in the factory and try to one-up each other on its importance and/or awfulness.
All the kids I know who worked there didn’t like the work, but I think they found it deeply satisfying. It is spoken of often when they talk to their younger cousins: “In MY day …”
Only exception is a niece, soon-to-be-sophomore at UC Santa Cruz who spent her summer working in the shipping dept. I just spent 5 days in Yosemite with her and heard complaints about the difficulty of understanding her (mostly Spanish speaking) co-workers, the misery of the work, horrible conditions, blah blah blah.
So she returns to school dedicated to her education. In feminist studies. I fear she just finished the most meaningful work she’ll ever do.
Ever worked cleaning out a sewer? or digging a ditch? Factory job is not so bad as some options.
What? My history teachers assured me that being a factory worker in the early 20th century was the worst working conditions any human being has ever endured. Far worse than subsistence agriculture, where an entire year’s worth of work could be washed away by a bad storm, and the family basically starved.