Why Are We Expected to Love Our Jobs?

[marmar]

Why Are We Expected to Love Our Jobs?
For decades, Americans have been told they should love their jobs. But is this a healthy relationship?

ALEX GALLO-BROWN


(YES! Magazine) The first job I ever had was peddling $2.50 slices of pepperoni pizza to rowdy concertgoers and other summer festival attendees. I was 14, and it was fun: Pop songs clamored from a distant stage; free slices were endless; my hand occasionally brushed against the fingers of teenage girls. When customers tossed their quarters into the can near the register, we’d yell, “Tip in the jar!” and everybody in the booth would cheer. I loved those moments in a way that I did not fully understand. I love the memory of them still.

My boss was a brusque Italian American (on both sides, not just half, like me), originally from Queens, and a neighbor in the residential area of Seattle where I grew up. He was funny and sarcastic and tough and seemed to genuinely like me. I felt that it was a privilege to ride around with him in his rickety green truck, the two of us weaving through the inclines of Capitol Hill or South Lake Union, a cardboard box of cold cheese pizza on the dashboard between us, a wad of dollar bills stuffed into the front pocket of my tomato sauce-stained jeans.

I don’t quite remember when the relationship between us began to change. It might have been when I showed up to work one gray morning and there were hardly any customers at all. Rather than pay me my hourly wage of $7.75 to stand behind an empty counter, he told me to “bop around for a little while” and come back when there were more customers. When I received a paycheck that paid me for several hours less than the hours I had actually worked, he explained, “You weren’t working hard enough.” Another time, he quoted me one hourly wage but paid me a lesser rate. These are classic examples of wage theft, but at the time the only thing I understood was that if I wanted to keep working in the pizza booth, I had to play by his rules.

....(snip)....

This attitude toward work, I understood, placed me out of the mainstream, in part because, as Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back (Bold Type Books, 2021) demonstrates, it contradicted the cultural messaging that Americans had been fed for the past 40 years. That you should not only do but also love your job is an idea so ubiquitous as to seem incontrovertible. But its genesis, Jaffe shows us, is actually quite new, and its dissemination has been destructive for workers and the working class as a whole.

Jaffe’s history goes something like this: Capitalism of every era requires a spiritual or material ethic to justify its existence both to the people whose labor it exploits and to anyone else who might object to the inequalities that it produces. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Protestant ethic of work equated labor with Christian virtue. “One worked to be good,” Jaffe writes, “not to be happy.” As capitalism plunged into crisis, however, and more and more workers organized, the Protestant work ethic gave way to what Jaffe calls the “Fordist bargain.” While work might have been unpleasant, the better wages and benefits made the deal worth taking. You might have even been able to afford to purchase the products you’d spent all day assembling. .............(more)

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/solving-plastic/2021/05/10/why-are-we-expected-to-love-our-jobs

[Tomconroy]

1. I suspect that the majority of people don't like their jobs.

[jimfields33]

5. I agree

However, my neighbor 73 works three days at Joann’s Fabric. Doesn’t need the money. She and her husband both have pensions and social security. She just loves it. I talk to her everyday and I don’t think she’ll ever give it up until she can’t medically someday. I find it strange as I never loved a job. But whatever…

[Prof. Toru Tanaka]

2. Interesting how capitalism was woven into religion over time.

Not only are you to be exploited for your labor, you are to love and accept it and work as hard as possible (good work ethic). Othe

I will have to check my local library for this book, seems like an interesting read.

[Midnight Writer]

11. Yes, it is the same game. The ruling class teaches us that serving them is pleasurable.

To doubt that is heresy.

[Scrivener7]

3. When I worked at the job I loved, I was much happier than when I worked at jobs I didn't.

That love was a real love, mind you, that accepted the bullshit that is part of every job. But I felt I was doing something important and joyful and I was doing it well.

[no_hypocrisy]

4. It goes along with the mythology that we're supposed to love

our parents, our spouses, our children unconditionally. Just tolerating employment is sometimes sufficient for me.

[snowybirdie]

6. So many say they could never retire

Ha, best part of my life started the day I walked out of my office and never looked back. And it was a job I loved and was fulfilled by.

[Tomconroy]

7. A lot of people grab social security the first chance they get.

[Prof. Toru Tanaka]

13. I'm within a couple of years of doing that.

I won't miss the early reporting hours or the commute. I will miss friends I have made at the job. Fortunately, social media can help take care of that.

I may do a bit of part-time work to keep busy but I'm ready to collect SS at 62.

[Tomconroy]

14. I have a friend who is within a year of retiring

At 62. She has her calendar set to count down the days.

[mitch96]

8. I was fortunate that I really loved my work.. Just did not care for the people I worked with.. nt

[CrispyQ]

9. Wage theft vs real theft.

This is why they condition you to love your job, so you don't think of wage theft as real theft. It's just the system. This is a little dated, 2012, I think, give or take a couple of years.

I worked in the IT department of a national retailer & they paid us salary, gave us a company laptop & smart phone, basically an electronic leash to our job, but we were never compensated for it. The entire department was putting in 55-60 hour weeks. At the same time, we had four open requisitions for staff that never got filled in the 10 months I managed to tolerate the place. Every few months they'd bring a few interviewees in to give us hope that they were actually going to fill the open positions, but they never did. After three of those, I saw what was going on & quit.

[Thyla]

10. I don't need to love my job

I'd work damn hard at something to provide security for my family. Can't wait to cut the cooperate world out and take responsibility on for ourselves.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

12. Personally, I have never had a job that was better than not working.

I simply can't comprehend someone who retires, then is "bored" and gets another job. Dear lord, get a life! Read books. Take up knitting. Get a penpal somewhere. Travel, even if just around your own city.