The USA's Work Obsession

[Tabula Rasa]

Today I took the day off to take care of my body and to protect myself from what is potentially a ubiquitous virus. Around the world, work is coming to a screeching halt and with good reason. Yet here in the US, there are workers deemed "essential" and I'm one of them. But herein lies the problem.

 

The US is suffering because of its puritanical outlook on life that says "if a man doth not work, he shall not eat." Couple that with the fundamentalist Christian idea that because of the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, man is cursed to toil by the sweat of his brow. This is what subconsciously drives people in the US to be okay with no paid time off while other developed countries are okay with leisure.

 

But here in the US? Idle hands is the devil's workshop. Leisure is a sin.

 

Thoughts?

[Howard]

I see Canada a bit like the USA's cousin. I, myself, felt useless the first few days of isolation as I did not work and did not go to therapy. On one hand, you are correct; christian values have something to do with it. I like the idea of contributing to society while at the same time winning my bread. On the other hand, I am also afraid of proverty, having lived it as a child. I recall a few times having broth and a slice of bread for lunch. I don't want to relive that.

[Guest]

I know it’s simply rude to ask because i’m religious as well.. But why do US take religion so serious?! Like really? The corona virus has already killed over a thousands of people, everyone’s in quarantine and we’re all aware of this virus. So should religion be the reason to why they still work?

[Lord Jade Cross]

I think there are two answers for this. The first is that the economic system has been so pedestalized to the point where it's like handling nuclear reactions, one false move and kaboon, everything goes straight to hell.

 

The other is that the same principle has been obligated to be part of the every day civilian life. If you don't work all the time, you are left without a roof over your head or food on your table. 

 

 

 

[Tabula Rasa]

22 minutes ago, Cocothecoconut said:

I know it’s simply rude to ask because i’m religious as well.. But why do US take religion so serious?! Like really? The corona virus has already killed over a thousands of people, everyone’s in quarantine and we’re all aware of this virus. So should religion be the reason to why they still work?

 

I don't know why religion is still such a stronghold here. I can't speak for others, but there is guilt and shame around choosing leisure over work, and that's connected to religion. It seems Americans don't know how to just stop for the sake of stopping.

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Tabula Rasa said:

 

I don't know why religion is still such a stronghold here. I can't speak for others, but there is guilt and shame around choosing leisure over work, and that's connected to religion. It seems Americans don't know how to just stop for the sake of stopping.

Isn't that mainly a problem in the so-called "bible belt"?

 

If people tried to work every waking hour, humanity would have been extinguished before it had a chance to develop. Remember The Shining; all work and no play...

[CajunAce]

For a lot of people, they must work all the time to get enough money to pay for standard living..

[Skycaptain]

Considering how big the leisure industry is in the USA I don't think that's quite correct. It's more that we're now at a time where children are earning less than their parents did, and the nation is taking a while to adjust to this 

[CajunAce]

43 minutes ago, Skycaptain said:

Considering how big the leisure industry is in the USA I don't think that's quite correct. It's more that we're now at a time where children are earning less than their parents did, and the nation is taking a while to adjust to this 

True, but not everyone has access to those leisures. Those in the lower economic circles are often stuck there. So they have to keep a heavy work schedule.

 

Both the American society and economic structure seems to support people working to death to keep the "machine" (economy,suppression, amerivan dream, etc.) Running forever

 

[Scottthespy]

The problem with the U.S. of A. is how barebones capitalistic it is. Capitalism, as an economic system, carries a great strength within it. It provides a single non perishable good that can be traded for all other goods, 'money'. Work is traded for money, money is traded for everything you need to survive. In a world where society needs to incentivize boring, back breaking, and undesirable jobs to make sure all the resources that society needs are secured, what better way is there than saying 'do the work or starve'? By forcing people to work for basic survival, we ensure that all of the shitty but necessary jobs are taken care of and thus society as a whole doesn't collapse due to drastic shortages of something vital.

 

This strength becomes a terrible weakness when a situation that causes (or requires) a lack of work comes along. Say for example, a worldwide pandemic that requires people to not be in contact with other people. There's no system in place to account for this, to make sure people can stay home and still obtain the resources they need, because capitalism is geared around making people have to do work. Canada is fairing slightly better, having systems like Employment Insurance that can be easily revamped on the fly to help deal this crisis and dole out survival wages to workers being laid off from 'non essential' jobs by companies who are closing to help prevent spread. But it was only possible because of systems already in place to process a need for funds without a job.

[Gatto]

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/did-fun-work-tokumitsu

 

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/why-work-livingston

 

How can the left and the right be devoted to the same universal remedy—“Get a job!”—for what ails us? (In this case, the sickness started with the breakdown of the labor market along with all others in the slow-motion economic collapse that began in October 1987, not in 2000 with the dot.com bust, nor in 2007 with the Great Recession.) This consensus seems both impossible and inevitable. Impossible because nobody agrees on who the “job creators” are, government deficits or private investors; inevitable because everyone, left to right, somehow agrees that work is essential to human dignity and individual achievement.

 

The great irony here is that both sides are heirs to the Left-Hegelian intellectual tradition, which, under Karl Marx’s auspices, designated the compulsion to work as the trans-historical element of human nature. “Hegel takes the standpoint of modern political economy,” as the young Marx put it in 1844. “He grasps labor as the essence of Man.” Marx knew full well that Hegel himself had named Luther the founding father of modernity because Protestantism sanctified work as the wellspring of grace. In this sense, the Protestant ethic still regulates most debates about the future of work.

 

We’re not all card-carrying Marxists now, but we’re properly fellow travelers because “full employment” appears to many, left and right, a self-justifying project. Certainly the left remains the captive of the Marxist tradition, which still peddles two ideas that now threaten to distract us from the realities of our time. These are that human nature resides in its capacity to create value through work and, consequently, that the proletariat (the “universal class”) is the appointed engine of social change and progress through class struggle.

Critics of Marxism have always ridiculed it because Marxists sound, by and large, like religious sectarians who act on faith rather than reason. But these detractors have missed the point, for that intellectual tradition is more narrowly and thoroughly Protestant than merely Christian—surely Hegel’s designation of Luther as his philosophical antecedent and Marx’s impromptu genealogy would suggest as much. Before the Reformation, almost no one believed that socially necessary labor was an ennobling activity. After the Reformation, almost everyone did.

 

In this sense, the Protestant ethic was never just a matter of church schism and doctrine. “But at least one thing was unquestionably new,” as Max Weber explained, “the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume.”

 

Now we have reached the point in the development of the human species where this fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs—work itself, necessary labor, a calling, a vocation, call it what you will—has become a fetter on the moral activity of individuals. It actually prevents such activity. Let me explain.

[RoseGoesToYale]

Yep, it's called the Protestant Ethic. (check out Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) The Puritans and Calvinists brought it over here, and the idea soon became secular. The idea is that one's righteousness or goodness is determined by how much work you do. If you can work, you should, and as much as humanly possible.

 

As for those who have no choice but to work near constantly to survive, that's not even the ethic at work... I liken it to modern day slavery. When you have no control over your working conditions or hours and your employers knows you can't quit without becoming destitute or dying, your employer owns you, and that fits the definition of slavery.

 

Consider throughout history that slaves often were illiterate or lacked proper education, either due to lack of access or being denied education outright. Most service jobs that pay low wages don't hire anyone with a college degree... they hire high school grads or dropouts. Our education is so poorly funded, especially to certain demographics like black and latino families living in poorer neighborhoods, it's guaranteed that those demographics will be used as labor for wage jobs. The education system actually specifically trains them for that kind of work. Higher reasoning and critical thinking aren't taught in poorer schools.

 

Right now we're stuck in the middle of the "credential crisis", or the devaluation of bachelors degrees due to the increased number of students attaining them, causing higher salary jobs to require more and more credentials to gain access to entry-level positions. Used to be you could get a decently-paying wage job with just a high school diploma and a nice entry-level office job (with training) with a bachelor's degree. Along the way, employers and capitalists realized they could, obviously, get more profit by paying workers less. Training went all but completely out the door. Not to mention the standardized testing craze kicked into higher gear in the late 90s. Educational materials shifted to test prep instead of career prep because teacher salaries (and jobs) have been increasingly tied to how students do on the tests. (Surprise twist... the companies that make the tests say you can only study for the tests with their purchasable materials... schools have to spend a lot of money on that stuff) Students are being trained to pass tests, and pass the ultimate standardized test, the SAT, in order to get into college, which now is the only way to achieve an equivalent level of education to what high school diplomas were in the middle of the previous century.

 

So now we've got people who have to go into steep debt simply to obtain the same level of education their parents or grandparents got for free from federal/state K-12 systems. Corporations know it, and they're happier than pigs in shit because it means they get to own their salaried employees, too. Salaried employees have to stay where they are, no matter how abysmal the working conditions, because they have to pay off student to survive. It gives employers the perfect excuse to roll back labor right, let employees get treated like trash, make them work long or unusual hours, invade their home life by requiring people to do office work over wifi even off the clock, refuse to provide any or enough benefits.

 

Why keep working in a system like this? Why haven't all the workers rebelled yet? Because just as Puritan theism posited that hard work would lead you to the salvation of God, capitalism posits that hard work will lead you to the salvation of The American Dream. "Things might be bad now, but someday I'll make it!" And there are those little nice things that when you buy them, it delivers enough of a dopamine hit to make you think you're on the right track because you can afford it, and you keep buying into the system... game consoles... designer clothing and nails... unicorn lattes... that's the carrot dangling in front of everyone's noses.

 

If real destitution took hold in the US, i.e. those happy drug-like products disappeared, the majority couldn't afford any luxuries at all, and people no longer had a purpose in life except to work, there'd be unrest. Unlike any this country has ever seen. Real unrest, collective unrest. If enough people learn The American Dream is a hoax, that they're working towards nothing, that it's the corporations causing their suffering, the constitution, bureaucracy and red tape, voting, all will lose their legitimacy. The system could feasibly be toppled.

 

I don't see it happening for a really long time, things would have to get really bad. But with this coronavirus, who knows?

[CajunAce]

Ugh. I find this all interesting, but also pretty depressing. I was lucky to be born in an upper middle class family where we could enjoy vacations and such. And neither of my parents finished college. They worked hard and were smart about their money.

 

But today is a different time...

[Howard]

4 hours ago, Cocothecoconut said:

I know it’s simply rude to ask because i’m religious as well.. But why do US take religion so serious?! Like really? The corona virus has already killed over a thousands of people, everyone’s in quarantine and we’re all aware of this virus. So should religion be the reason to why they still work?

The last time I went to church, just before the measures, we were told by the priest that obediance to governemnt is more important than piety. I must admit though, if the priest needs to preach that, christian's views are bit askewed.

[Gatto]

10 hours ago, Cocothecoconut said:

I know it’s simply rude to ask because i’m religious as well.. But why do US take religion so serious?! Like really? The corona virus has already killed over a thousands of people, everyone’s in quarantine and we’re all aware of this virus. So should religion be the reason to why they still work?

 

[Gatto]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/26/coronavirus-us-economy-health-lives-trump

Ancient Hebrew texts are peppered with references to and prohibitions against pre-Judaic practices associated with Moloch, a Canaanite god to whom children were sacrificed for the greater good.

Now, millennia later, there are prominent voices among us who propose sacrificing the old and weak among us at the altar of another false god – the global economy.

Suddenly, the ghosts of Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham have become priests for the 21st-century Moloch, and have haunted American public conversation about coronavirus.

Republican officials, conservative economists, unqualified pundits, and even the 73-year-old president of the United States have suggested that the short-term economic pain we have just begun inflicting on ourselves to slow the spread of coronavirus might cost too much, just to save the lives of a few million of our most vulnerable neighbors.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ald-trump-coronavirus-response-richard-wolffe

Donald Trump isn’t much of a doctor or scientist. He isn’t much of a diplomat or general. His leadership skills match his business skills. There’s a reason his companies went bankrupt so many times.

But he might just be a pioneer with this idea of letting people die for the sake of the country. Only a once-in-a-century leader has the guts to say out loud what the worst among us are really thinking: everyone other than me is expendable.

Anyone older is past it, for sure. The younger ones we can easily afford to lose: they don’t actually pay for anything. The smarter ones? Totally annoying. The dumber ones: what’s even the point?

The sick are a real drain on us, financially and emotionally. The poor won’t really do much in the long run, no matter how hard we try. The wealthy just keep shoving it in your face. Foreigners aren’t like us at all. And our neighbors are frankly a bit too close for comfort.

So when you add it all up, it’s only sensible that we ask everyone else to sacrifice themselves for us. For the sake of the nation and all that’s good, please just go, so that the rest of us – not counting the undesirables – can get back to our old lives.

[Howard]

@Gatto Maybe it's because I'm taking things at the first degree, sarcasm is more difficult to detect in writing than live, but you seem to condemn sacrificing the weak at the start of your post and condone it at the end. Can you clarify your point of view, please?

[Gatto]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLF3THyMRc8

 

 

[AceMissBehaving]

I don’t think it has anything to do with religion, and everything to do with the fact that corporations can, and do, expect unreasonable levels of sacrifice from there employees, and are able to give them less than they deserve. Couple that with the fact the ability to access healthcare is largely tethered to employment, means companies have their workers at a huge disadvantage.

 

The government the currently does everything to support corporate greed.

 

Honestly when I first moved to the US I was shocked at how fucked up the work/life balance is in this country. 

[gisiebob]

7 hours ago, Howard said:

@Gatto Maybe it's because I'm taking things at the first degree, sarcasm is more difficult to detect in writing than live, but you seem to condemn sacrificing the weak at the start of your post and condone it at the end. Can you clarify your point of view, please?

it would be nice if this was noted more clearly but they are excerpts of the articles they linked to

[Jusey1]

On 3/27/2020 at 3:24 PM, RoseGoesToYale said:

-snip-

Everything you described is a big reason why I really love the Outer Worlds from last year. Good game.

[Gatto]

https://newrepublic.com/article/156929/work-home-productivity-coronavirus-pandemic

[Gatto]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/11/coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-two-in-five