Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One

I sometimes literally hear my father’s voice when he isn’t there. Not in a jolly metaphorical way, either, but in a terrifying, often humiliating way. I first noticed this when I worked at a medical components factory during my hiatus between college and graduate school. If I slowed down, slacked off, or simply paused to chat with my co-workers, I heard my father shouting angrily, demanding to know why I wasn’t working until I bled.

Because of this terrifying voice which chased me throughout the workday, I moved faster, took shorter breaks, and got more done than people who had worked there far longer than me. Supervisors took notice, too. They often praised my work ethic, telling me that they wished they had an entire shift full of laborers as “dedicated” as me. Because they weren’t passengers in my head, as I was, they took my terror as committed professionalism.

Management often mistakes being “busy” with productivity. I noticed this often while working in construction: management would schedule marathon hours, especially in the final crunch. But management only deluded themselves. Fatigue, boredom, and resentment created new problems, while workers spent most of every morning ripping out the mistakes they made the previous evening, when they were tired. Team supervisors micromanaged workers’ every decision, because site superintendents micromanaged the supervisors. Everyone was tired all the time.

Literally every blue-collar job I’ve worked has faced some version of this. If food service workers find themselves caught up with tables, they’re given cleaning tasks to do, or refilling table caddies. I’ve worked in two car parts factories, where we were ordered to sweep and clean if the machines even briefly went down. Every moment is policed, every action judged, and companies demand constant maximum productivity; unscheduled pauses are justifications for reprimands, often stern.

Meanwhile, I’ve worked only two white-collar jobs, as a freshman composition teacher and a marketing copywriter. In both positions, I’ve been astounded by how much scheduled work time gets consumed by non-work activities. Chatting, dithering, side projects, day drinking, and even napping are anecdotally common. While hourly wage earners have their hours aggressively monitored for unsanctioned yawns, resulting in paranoid, often manic work, managers have so much discretion that they want for things to do.

My father spent most of his military career as a rank-and-file enlisted man. If you’ve ever spent time on a military installation, you know how aggressively the enlisted men’s time is regulated. Every barracks, parade ground, warship, and hangar is the epitome of cleanliness, with every plank sanded, hinge oiled, bolt painted, and floor scrubbed. Especially for unmarried recruits living on-post, twelve-hour workdays of constant, regulated motion are common, and labor outputs are closely quantified.

Simultaneously, a peer whose father was a career officer told me that officers cultivate the attitude of men of leisure. (We met in school off-post, because even officers’ and enlisted men’s children are discouraged from mingling.) Not that officers don’t work, because they too have pervasive regulations and readiness standards. Rather, they achieve their dictated goals at measured, deliberate speeds. Humans with autonomy, not checklists and rubrics, measure officers’ outputs. Rules are discretionary, not absolute.

This pattern applies broadly. Matt Taibbi wrote (before becoming a culture war spokesmodel) that every SNAP benefit applicant gets treated like incipient fraud, while almost nobody was held responsible for the 2008 financial collapse. Since then, we’ve seen how the only people indicted for the January 6^th, 2021, Capitol insurrection, were the foot soldiers at the door, and they got pardoned. Those who incited the crime not only got ignored, but they also got reelected.

America cultivates a socioeconomic narrative in which the poor, the laborer, the voter—the enlisted men of civilian society—hear their inadequacies repeated endlessly. Nor is this accidental. The wealthy and powerful—our officers—want us to suffer the constant loop of condemnation for even momentary weakness, like I heard, and sometimes still hear, my father. The psychological harm which this repetition causes individuals doesn’t matter, because to our “officers,” the outcome is “work ethic.”

But it also enables unbridgeable gaps in American social structure. This is why laborers seldom become management, classroom teachers rarely become administrators, and most citizens have little chance of getting elected to higher office. We numpties cannot lead because we’ve been conditioned to rehearse our inadequacies, real or imagined, constantly. Only those without that conditioning have the arrogance necessary to become presidents, billionaires, and other captains of society. “Work ethic” is the opposite of advancement.