My Job, My Self

Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual

Al Gini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135288594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In My Job My Self, Gini plumbs a wide range of statistics, interviews with workers, surveys from employers and employees, and his own experiences and memories, to explore why we work, how our work affects us, and what we will become as a nation of workers. My Job, My Self speaks to every employed person who has yet to understand the costs and challenges of a lifetime of labor.

1

You Are What You Do

Career and identity are inextricably bound up, indeed they are almost equivalent.

—Douglas LaBier

IN THE LAST SCENE OF ARTHUR MILLER’S DEATH of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s family and friends are standing at his graveside, saying their goodbyes, and reflecting on the character and legacy of the deceased. Willy, they suggest, was a dreamer, a schemer, a talker and teller of tall tales, a con man constantly searching for the big score. But for all of his big talk and even bigger dreams, both his mouth and his ideas were too large for his talents and abilities. Willy, they say, was a failure. But even worse, he was the kind of failure who could never admit it, either to himself or to others. And so right up to the end, Willy went on dreaming and scheming and hoping for that one big sale to come along and set him up for life.

Only one of those gathered at Willy’s grave defends him. “Nobody … blame this man,” he says. “You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. … A salesman has got to dream. … It comes with the territory.”¹ It was Willy’s job to smile, talk a lot, glad-hand one and all, says his defender. His job was to sell himself, sell his dream and his ideas, sell his product. It was his job that made him what he was.

The saying “it comes with the territory,” from Miller’s play, is now part of the lexicon. It conveys an acceptance of all the parts of a job and of doing whatever you must in order to get the job done. Perhaps Willy Loman was a failure and a fool because he didn’t recognize that he had neither the temperament nor the talent for his chosen profession, but being a salesman shaped him; it drew out the best and the worst in him and made him what he was. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, first we choose and shape our work, and then it shapes us—forever.

Whether we have a good job or a bad one, whether we love it or hate it, succeed in it or fail, work is at the center of our lives and influences who we are and all that we do. Where we live, how well we live, whom we see socially, what and where we consume and purchase, how we educate our children—all of these are determined by the way in which we earn a living.

But work is not just about earning a livelihood. It is not just about getting paid, about gainful employment. Nor is it only about the use of ones mind and body to accomplish a specific task or project. Work is also one of the most significant contributing factors to one’s inner life and development. Beyond mere survival, we create ourselves in our work. In his classic article “Work and the Self,” Everett C. Hughes argued that work is fundamental to the development of personality. Because work preoccupies our lives and is the central focus of our time and energies, it not only provides us with an income, it literally names us, identifies us, to both ourselves and others. Hughes was convinced that even when we are dissatisfied with or dislike the work that we do, choice of occupation irrevocably “labels” us, and that we cannot understand a person unless we understand his or her work and how he or she deals with it.²

In the long run work can prove a boon or a burden, creative or crippling, a means to personal happiness or a prescription for despair. But no matter where we might wind up on this spectrum, where we work, how we work, what we do at work, and the general climate and culture of the workplace indelibly mark us for life. Work is the means by which we form our character and complete ourselves as persons. We literally create ourselves in our work. To restate the old Italian proverb tu sei quello che mangi (you are what you eat), in regard to work: tu sei quello che fai (you are the work you do). Work is a necessary and defining activity in the development of the adult personality.

According to theologian Gregory Baum, “Labor is the axis of human self-making.”³ We both establish and recognize ourselves in our work. Work allows us to find out what we can do and cannot do, how we are seen by others and how we see ourselves. In work we discover our boundaries and limits as well as our capacities for success. Work is the yardstick by which we measure ourselves against others. It is the means by which we establish our rank, role, and function within a community. Work not only conditions our lives; it is the necessary condition for life. Men have always known this, and have accepted it as part of their lot. As one forty-five-year-old machinist put it, “Being a man means being willing to put all your waking hours into working to support your family. If you ask for [too much] time off, or if you turn down overtime, it means you’re lazy or you’re a wimp.”⁴ As more and more women have entered the workplace, they too have been forced to confront this fundamental truth of adult existence: Not having a job means you’re a person without salary, stuff, or status.

Assuredly other factors enter into the equation of self-identity; for example, genetic inheritance, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious training, and family background. But even with all of these, work remains an irreducible given, the most common experience of adult life. The lessons we learn at work help formulate who we become and what we value as individuals and as a society. Whatever the conditions of our labor, work shapes us and, unfortunately, often malforms us. But, for good or ill, work makes us human because we make something of ourselves through work, and in so doing we recognize ourselves and others in the task of working.⁵ And yet, as E. F. Schumacher has indicated, despite the centrality of work in human life, the question—“What does the work do to the worker?” is seldom asked.⁶ Workers and scholars alike regularly debate the benefits as well as the drawbacks of particular jobs in specific industries, but only rarely do they address the overall impact of work on the psyche and character of the worker.

The core of Karl Marx’s writings is his critique of capitalism as an economic system and his attack on bourgeois society as an unjust social structure. For Marx, capitalism engenders the consolidation of capital, the concentration of power, the continuous manipulation of the market and merchandizing, the perpetuation of poverty, and the reification of society into the disproportional dominance of the “haves” over the “have-nots.” A significant part of Marx’s critique that is sometimes overlooked is his analysis of the specific effects of work on the character and identity of the individual worker, as is Marx’s conviction that work is the primary means by which we become persons. Marx argued that the factory system alienated or disassociated workers from their work and consequently stripped work of personal meaning and purpose. He maintained that mechanized “conditions of production” (industrialization) denied workers responsibility and creativity. According to his analysis, capital investment, machinery, the industrial process, and the product became more important than people. The owners and managers of industry looked on workers not as subjects, but as objects, or as just another material factor in the production process. For Marx, when workers are regarded as objects and treated accordingly, they begin to think of themselves as objects. They lose, or perhaps never gain, the sense that they are meant to be subjects.⁷

In his earliest writings, “The German Ideology,” Marx defined the individual as a worker:

As individuals express their life, so they are. What [individuals] … are … coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.⁸

For Marx, how people work and what they produce at work necessarily affect how and what they think, as well as their personal sense of self, freedom, and independence.⁹ Both the process and the product of our labor help us to know who and what we are. The process of work both forms and informs us; we acquire self-definition and self-recognition through labor. In Marx’s view, we need work in order to finish and refine our natures, and in work we create our individual identities as well as our collective history.

A somewhat unexpected but nevertheless important counterpart to Marx’s overall thesis on work is Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical “La-borem Exercens” (On human work). According to John Paul, although work may be part of humanity’s banishment and punishment, it is also part of a person’s definition and directive in the world. According to the encyclical, the human world is not a simple given or a fixed thing. It is, rather, a “fact” continuously being produced by human labor. Work, the encyclical claims, is a good thing in the sense that it is useful and something to enjoy. It is good because it expresses and expands our dignity. Through work, one not only transforms nature, adapting it to his or her own needs, but one also achieves fulfillment as a human being and in a sense becomes “more a human being.” Work is literally the “mark of man,” the footprints of humanity on the sands of time.¹⁰

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wrote that the communal life of human beings has a twofold foundation: “the compulsion to work … and the power of love. …”¹¹ For Freud, Eros (love) and Ananke (necessity) are the true parents of civilization. Eros bonds us together and makes us unwilling to forgo our objects of sexual pleasure and happiness, while ananke compels us to toil at tasks that help us to maintain and guarantee self and community. According to Freud, both love and work cooperate in the achievement of “better control over the external world and … a further extension of the number of people included in the community.”¹² At the very least, work gives one “a secure place in the human community.”¹³

Work also helps establish the regularity of life, its basic cycles of day, week, month, and year. Without work, days and time patterns become confused.¹⁴ Further, work organizes, routinizes, and structures our lives. It provides a safe outlet for our competitive strivings and often helps to keep us sane. More than this, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger stated, “You are your projects.”¹⁵ Using philosophical terms, Heidegger implies that through projects (work) and their continuation into the future, a person establishes and acknowledges his or her “being” in the world. Heidegger suggests that you are what you do. Identity is largely a function of determined action or productive achievement. We are known by others and we know and define ourselves primarily by the projects we devise, by the products we create, and by the occupations we hold. A person who cannot point to an achievement does not and cannot feel like a full person. Subjective experience is simply too diffuse for self-identity. “I feel” is not as definitive as “I did.” Nothing else in our lives can give us the sense of objective identity that work can.¹⁶

Director Elia Kazan said that the one absolute lesson he has learned in life is that “a man is what he does,” and, consequently, that the secret to a good life is to make a living at what you want to do. As sociologist Douglas La Bier asserted, careers and identities are inextricably tied up; indeed, they are equivalent.¹⁷ People are what they do, and what people do affects every aspect of who they are. The lessons we learn in our work and at the workplace become the metaphors we apply to life and the means by which we digest the world. The meter and measure of work serves as our mapping device to explain and order the geography of life. We are “typed” by our work and, in turn, we analyze and evaluate the world and others by our acquired work “types.” Our work circumscribes what we know, how we know it, and how we select and categorize the things we choose to see, react to, or respond to. Work influences our use of language, our values and priority structures, our political awareness, and our repertoire of personal and professional learned skills and behaviors. As Samuel Butler wrote, “Every mans work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” Journalist and ethnographer Connie Fletcher, in her bestseller, What Cops Know, dramatically drives home this point:

Cops know things you and I don’t. It’s knowledge crafted out of years spent on the street, sizing up and dealing with the volatile, cunning, confused, comic, tragic, often goofy behavior of human beings from every social, economic, and mental level, and it’s knowledge won as a by-product of investigating criminal specialities such as homicide, sex crimes, property crimes, and narcotics. A cop who works traffic has peered deeper into the recesses of the human psyche than most shrinks. A cop who works homicide, or sex crimes, will tell you things Dostoyevsky only guessed at.¹⁸

Although different kinds of work affect different people differently, every person’s “self-portrait” is both directly and indirectly influenced by the work that he or she does. Some of our job-acquired characteristics and behavioral patterns are substantial and life altering, and others are minor and relatively benign in their nature and impact. Following are a few idiosyncrasies of specific “portrait types” that may not hold up to close scrutiny, but, nevertheless, have a certain anecdotal currency that we can all recognize.

Nurses and doctors have a notorious reputation for being bad patients and even worse diagnosticians of loved ones and family members. They often immediately envision the worst-case scenario for every malady. The flip side of this example would be emergency room practitioners who witness so much trauma and gore that they are often insensitive to and seemingly uncaring or underconcerned about the more common maladies and injuries of everyday life.

Many teachers and especially college professors have acquired the well-deserved reputation of being utterly unable to offer a direct answer to a direct question. William James called this phenomenon the “Ph.D. syndrome”—the need to cite and document everything ever said on the topic under discussion. Although the ability to explain, analyze, offer examples, and disprove antecedents are all necessary elements of the craft of teaching and scholarship, too much of an answer can deaden the curiosity and interest of even the brightest of students.

Accountants and librarians share a reputation for being excessively detail-oriented and having a compulsion for organization that borders on being anal retentive. For both professions, order, exactness, and accuracy are the core virtues for high job performance. Unfortunately, these characteristics, when too zealously applied, can prove counterproductive in both professional and personal spheres.

It is said of psychiatrists and psychologists that their work lives are often so abstract, so cerebral, and deal so much with abnormality that they often lose the ability to be spontaneous and nonanalytical with individuals who are not their clients. This stereotype is perhaps best captured in the old chestnut about the two professors of psychology who happen to pass each other in the hall on the way to their offices. As they pass, one says, “Good morning!” The other responds, “How are you?” And as each is entering his respective office, he is thinking, “Hmm … I wonder what he really meant by that?”

Finally, there is the profile that is sometimes associated with those who earn their living by the sweat and strain of their hands and bodies. Tradespeople, artisans, and construction laborers are workers whose jobs require specific intellectual and technical skills as well as physical ability. Strength, dexterity, and endurance are requisites of the job, and these types of workers often measure themselves and others in terms of their raw physical prowess. (This profile is, of course, commonly assumed to be one of the reasons that women are not represented proportionally in these fields.) For many of these workers their reputation on the job and their personal sense of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. You Are What You Do
• 2. Work—What Is It?
• 3. Collar Color Doesn’t Count
• 4. Good Work/Bad Work
• 5. Lack of Vision
• 6. All Work, But Very Little Ethics
• 7. Women in the Workplace
• 8. Squeezing Time
• 9. Workaholism, Stress, and Fatigue
• 10. The Work, Spend, and Debt Syndrome
• 11. Moral Leadership and Business Ethics
• 12. The End of Work: Is Rifkin Right?
• 13. The Failure of Work
• 14. The Future of Work
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index