Good Work

The 2018 Mackinac Bridge Walk in Michigan

Labor Day (Labour Day in Canada) is a strange holiday. For many North Americans it marks the end of summer vacation and the beginning of a new school year. Perhaps it’s a day to hang out with neighbors, relatives, and friends. Or it’s a chance to enjoy or avoid mass events like the annual Labor Day Mackinac Bridge Walk in Michigan and the three-day Canadian International Air Show that splits Toronto’s sky. Rarely, however, does it include robust celebrations of labo(u)r and the people who do it. Unlike the founders of this national holiday in the 1890s, we seem ambivalent about honoring workers.

Why Work?

Maybe this reflects our confusion about work itself. To work is not the same as having a job. Not everyone who works is paid to do so. Parents, for example, don’t earn a salary for taking care of their children. Yet most would regard their childcaring as important work. So too, visual artists can spend hours on end doing wonderful work without being employed to do it. Then there are the many retirees like me who no longer have jobs but still pursue what people once paid us to do—research, writing, and teaching, in my case. On the flip side, I’ve heard of well-paid jobs that require little work. Perhaps you have too!

The “Man and Machinery” mural by Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Diego Rivera,  CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

So, what is work, and why do we do it? As I suggest in my book Shattering Silos (pp. 74-76), to work is to help shape something or someone, using suitable methods, skills, and materials, in order to meet specific needs in a satisfactory way. Usually, we do this together with other people: in principle, to labor is to co-labor, to collaborate. When done well—when we excel at what we do and use the right resources to meet genuine needs—work can be intensely satisfying, regardless of whether someone pays us to do it.

Unfortunately, we North Americans live in societies that undermine satisfying work. It’s not just that, as the recent hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond” complains, “I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay”—that, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof points out, many blue-collar workers, if they can find jobs, earn a pittance compared with their rich overlords. That’s bad enough. But what’s really bad is that the capitalist economy is fundamentally anti-work.

Anti-Work Economy

How’s this possible, you might ask? How can the economy that fueled an industrial revolution, created the working class, and continues to raise living standards around the world, be anti-work? Capitalism undermines satisfying work in three ways: commodification, competition, and consumerism. In these ways it alienates workers from their work, from their fellow workers, and from the results of their labor, as the young Karl Marx observed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

Commodification is the key to such alienation. In the first volume of Capital, published in 1867, Marx shows that capitalism must turn the ability to work—what he calls labor power (Arbeitskraft)—into a commodity. By selling their labor power as a commodity in return for wages, laborers gain a “livelihood” (although just barely, for “unskilled” workers). But they lose control of the kind of work they do and the conditions under which they do it. These are controlled instead by the business owners, corporations, and investors who profit financially from the work laborers do.

Hence, as my previous blog on democracy claims, capitalism is intrinsically undemocratic. To the profit-makers in control, it does not matter whether the work is inherently rewarding and whether workers find satisfaction in doing it, so long as it generates a sizable return on investment. By commodifying labor power for the sake of private profit, capitalism tends to reduce work to nothing more than a job, to something you do just to survive, regardless of how fulfilling or meaningful it is.

That’s where competition enters, subverting the collaborative character of work. To survive, workers need jobs. But usually there aren’t enough jobs for everyone. And even under conditions of “full employment,” there aren’t enough well-paying jobs. Moreover, some jobs that pay well are much more desirable than others. So, workers unavoidably compete with each other for jobs, for better pay, and for more satisfying work. The capitalist labor market turns every worker—and every student—into a competitor. When jobs are on the line, solidarity among workers, which labor unions rightly foster, quickly breaks down.

Alienated from their own work and from fellow workers, laborers find it hard to take pride in the products they make or the services they provide. Instead, they seek compensation in the commodities their wages can buy: consumption, not production, becomes the point of working. It no longer matters whether what workers make or provide is itself worthwhile, so long as their jobs pay enough to satisfy their desires, many of them invented or stoked by ubiquitous marketing.

This feeds the juggernaut of consumer capitalism, where wants outweigh needs, and expenditures on personal consumption account for approximately two thirds of a country’s Gross Domestic Product. And now, in the digital phase of capitalism, people increasingly turn themselves, not just their labor power, into consumable commodities: they become their own “personal brands.”

For Jobs and Freedom

Sixty years ago, the civil rights movement held a huge demonstration in Washington, DC. It’s best remembered for “I Have A Dream,” a soul-stirring speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King about racial justice. But the rally wasn’t only about securing voting rights and overcoming discrimination. It was about achieving a robust freedom to flourish, a freedom that includes the right to do good work in properly paid jobs: “meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages” is how the organizers put it in their ten-point list of demands.

Crowd at Lincoln Memorial during 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, DC. National Archives at College Park, via Wikimedia Commons

That’s why they called it the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And that’s why I’d include the freedom to do good work within what columnist Jamelle Bouie says is the real lesson of the 1963 March on Washington.

We’re still a long way from realizing Dr. King’s dream of a post-racist society. Nor are we much closer to meeting the 1963 demonstrators’ demand for what Bouie calls “a social democracy of equals, grounded in the long Black American struggle” for freedom. To get there, we’ll need an economy that fosters and supports good work. I don’t think this is impossible to achieve. But it will take the best collaborative efforts of several generations.

On Labor Day 2023, that’s a prospect worth celebrating. For inspiration, listen to the University of Michigan Symphony Band play Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. And then, for good measure, watch them perform Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. Happy Labor Day!

Initial trumpet notes from Fanfare for the Common Man, at Aaron Copland's Memorial Garden, Tanglewood Music Center. Photo by Francis Helminski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons