I think simple questions about fundamental life activities are often the most profound. Asking “what work is” to anyone who works is one of those queries. My book What Works Is provides answers from thousands of workers. In many years of teaching, I have had the opportunity to talk with workers from different occupations. These workers largely earn middle class wages or salaries. The large majority are union members. Some have college degrees; most don’t. They are a collection of races, nationalities, genders, ages, and political ideologies. They are a diverse representation of America’s working class. None own any of the productive capital that controls the economy. My worker-students have only their labor to sell. With it they make a life and a world possible.
In a class exercise limiting them to six additional words, workers wrote essays (beginning with “Work is …) about work. The book is divided into five chapters each focused on a dominant theme resonant within the stacks of essays. Workers offered responses ranging from the profound to the profane – some in the same brief reflection. A reader of the book’s first draft said the manuscript was worth publishing for this essay alone: “Work is the shit that fertilizes my life.” Think about it. Who would disagree?
A reoccurring idea was the boundlessness of work’s impact on the individual and community. Good, bad, soul crushing, life affirming, it was all this and more. Work hurts, disappoints, demeans, inspires, empowers, and “is slowly killing us.” Essays dramatically reflected the duality of work’s impact: “Work is freedom yet, incarceration.” Imagine the cognitive dissonance of attaining freedom in America by surrendering to a compulsory need to exchange your labor for compensation. “Work is a verb for food.” Early 20th Century social reformers and trade unionists called it “wage slavery.” What is life in America without decent paid employment? To borrow and modify ever slightly from Thomas Hobbes’s famous 17th Century warning, life without good work would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Yes, except for people incarcerated, bonded labor is unconstitutional. But where does quality food, housing, clothing, healthcare, education, and income come from? Not from the U.S. Constitution. “Work is no work, no money, no food.”
But all this necessity comes with a high price. Time is a second theme of the essays. “Work is what consumes my life.” “Work is losing time with family.” Either too much work or too little. The nature of the moments that pass as minutes, hours, days, shifts, and years shapes the contours of a worker’s life. Time collapses in a single workday. “Work is planting a tree for your grandkids.” Worktime even dictates time to rest. There is no neutral, non-work time. It’s a bit of a luxury for anyone to think about leisure and a life of play when you’re earning less than $20 an hour. And a lot of people are. No group more prioritized a life of contemplation than the Greeks. But, Aristotle argued that to live well, a person needed enough material sustenance to actualize their higher virtues. And President Teddy Roosevelt said that we couldn’t expect people to be active citizens if they are pounded down by the drudgeries of work.
Karl Marx and countless students pointed to an additional theme – the purpose we work. Work is – or should be – an activity which enables our human powers to flourish. What works? Our bodies, intellect, and emotions. By using all the faculties of mind and body we create, problem solve, build, care, serve, educate, heal, feed, protect, form communal bonds, and prosper. On this point (and surprisingly others) even Adam Smith – the founder of capitalism - agreed with capitalism’s greatest interlocutor. Necessity compels, in the words of labor historian Robert Zieger, that all but the “Kings of Money and Lords of Finance” are exempt from work. But as the marching song of the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike workers and my students declared “we work for bread and roses too.” Victorian era English philosopher and art critic John Ruskin expressed a transformational reason why many workers did their job: “The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”
Portrait of English writer and philosopher John Ruskin | CC BY 4.0 DEED
Work, the essays reveal, is a necessity for individuals but it is also required for society. An additional theme of the book is the subject of our work. Ask yourself, for whom do you work? We work for ourselves for sure but also for others. “Work is how we connect the world.” Our labor is not done in isolation. Essays explored the independence of our lives through work. We not only work for the good of others (e.g., family, community, nation) but we absolutely depend on the labor of others to survive (imagine a day without a farmworker or package delivery driver). Work is a social act. But most often workers are invisible to consumers and one another. Opaqueness serves the interest of those who live off the profits of those who labor for a living. Workers shared a lament and in doing so signaled it was not for the boss who they labored. “Work is making somebody else rich.”
I wrote What Work Is because I wanted to explain how workers experienced work. It isn’t obvious. Essayist Bob Black mused “We are so close to the world of work, that we often can’t see what it does to us.” I wanted to show how through work a person lived out their lives. To better understand any aspect of experience advances our ability to live more dignified lives. If we know how work is experienced, we ought to reduce their employment hours, create safer workspaces, treat workers with dignity, raise job quality and organize more workers into unions. Taking work seriously and logically following where it leads should unconditionally produce a stronger social infrastructure for lifting workers and valuing their labor.
The book What Work Is is available through the University of Illinois Press.
