Will work for free?

In a couple of days I will most likely get the layoff letter. 

At least I got paid well enough and I got to work in academe as I had wanted to ever since I decided on graduate school in the US.  But, seriously, who would have imagined even a few years ago that tenured professorships can also suddenly crash and burn!

As much as I loved my job, how I earned my paycheck was not anywhere near the top of the list for what gives meaning to me.  Neither do gods and religions provide me with any meaning.  The people who matter to me, the places, the mountains and rivers, the dogs that were wonderful companions, and more in such a list come before my job as meaning to my life.

Of course, I wanted to make sure that my paycheck would come from an honorable occupation, and I am glad that worked out.  But it was not an answer to my existence.

Perhaps it is uniquely American, but is increasingly catching on around the world: "we’re told to love work, and to find meaning in it, as if work were a family, or a religion, or a body of knowledge."  But, why?

“Meaningful work” is an expression that had barely appeared in the English language before the early nineteen-seventies, as McCallum observes. “Once upon a time, it was assumed, to put it bluntly, that work sucked,” Sarah Jaffe writes in “Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone” (Bold Type). That started to change in the nineteen-seventies, both McCallum and Jaffe argue, when, in their telling, managers began informing workers that they should expect to discover life’s purpose in work. 

"Meaningful work" barely appeared in the language before the early 1970s. What might have happened since then compared to the work conditions prior to the 1970s?

A major economic restructuring was unfolding.  This was the time that the "steel belt" of the US was changing into a rust belt.  The American big cars that couldn't deal with the hike in oil prices were facing stiff competition from the small fuel-efficient Japanese cars.  And ...

The labor-of-love ethos grew in tandem with the feminization of work. That is, from the middle of the twentieth century, not only did women enter the paid workforce en masse, but the kind of work Americans do more closely resembled traditional “women’s work” of caring for and responding to the emotions of others. Manufacturing and mining were down, customer service was up. In addition, the low wages and minimal security of the (mostly white and female) temp labor force of the 1960s spread throughout the economy in subsequent decades. In the words of Bryce Covert, “We’re all women workers now, and we’re all suffering for it.”

Women entered the workforce in larger and larger numbers.  Employers didn't want to pay them well.  So, guess what?  The spin machinery took over and convinced them that they do what they do despite the low wages because the labor-of-love is simply priceless.  Imagine telling a bunch of men who are coal miners that they will get paid next to nothing because of the priceless labor-of-love!

In academe too this attitude is showing up big time.  Well-paying professorships are increasingly rare in higher education.  Part-time professors outnumber the permanent ones.  We give them fancier titles than calling them part-timers; one of the worst euphemisms is "visiting assistant professor."  Words are, after all, cheap.  The take-home money is little.

So, if the labor-of-love workers from part-time professors to nursing assistants are not getting paid well at the same time as an explosive growth in the economy, well, who is getting the money?

You don't have to track all the way from the 1970s to answer that question.  All you need to think about is what happened over the past year.  Remember how much the essential workers were lauded?  Even assisted-care facilities that hire nursing assistants at barely above minimum wages put up signs that "heroes work here."  Yes?  So, you think all those essential workers get paid a lot?  Teachers struggling to do their work over video got huge salary raises?  Nope.  It is, after all, labor-of-love that needs no compensation. 

So, where did the money go over this past year?

Between roughly mid-March and Dec. 22, the United States gained 56 new billionaires, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, bringing the total to 659. The wealth held by that small cadre of Americans has jumped by more than $1 trillion in the months since the pandemic began.

I suppose their labor-of-love really pays!